Famime in the horn of Africa

More than two million children may die of famine and disease in the Horn of Africa this year while the world merely observes, regardless of UNICEF and private organizations’ pleas for help. One of the worst droughts in more than a decade, combined with rising food prices and armed conflict, account for extensive famine and [...]

Weak leadership, economic crises and political polarization: What the International Community can learn from Latin American Regime Crises

Introduction The volatility of the stock markets, the worry about Greece that flew over to the USA, Italy, Belgium and Spain are no coincidence, they are part of a broader trending, of economic mayhem and international uncertainty. The USA, Belgium, Italy and to a lesser extent Spain devote a disproportionate time on meandering through the [...]

Africa: chronic external dependence or systemic change?

In 1976 Africa’s share of the world’s GNP was 1.2%, but its percentage of population stood at 7.5%. With about 4% of the world’s population the US enjoyed around 25% of GNP. Life expectancy is about 40 years for Africans, while it is almost twice that for Americans and most Westerners and Japanese. Blog this! [...]

Bangladesh unveils budget with high on defense, low on farm spending

Bangladesh, the world’s poorest Muslim majority country reveals a $22-billion deficit budget, which is high on defense expenditure and low in farm spending. The overall agriculture budget decreased over 12 percent while that for defense increased almost 29 percent, which is incidentally the largest rise among all major sectors. Instead of investing in human development [...]

Creating a ‘third world’ within EU periphery

From January 2010 until mid-2011, there has been a great deal of analysis and commentary from different ideological perspectives devoted to the structural weakness of the EU owing to the debtor (periphery) nations that are dragging down the stronger northern countries of the eurozone. This is not only because of how the EU handled the [...]

China, capitalism and social justice

A few months ago, I wrote a brief piece on how China replaced Japan as the world’s number two economy, and I followed up with another piece on how China is expected to replace the US as the world’s leading economy in the next five years. A college student from China sent me an email, [...]

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