In early September the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development released the World Investment Report 2003. Not surprisingly, it found that global foreign direct investments dropped by 21 percent in 2002 to just $651 billion — the lowest level of foreign direct investments since 1997.
The decline was felt everywhere but in Central and Eastern Europe […]
The Associated Press reported back in May on technological advances in farming that would supposedly help make farming more profitable. Any and all technological advances in farming are certainly welcome, but the effect of such innovations has historically been — and will certainly continue to be — to make farming less rather than more profitable […]
In August, the World Trade Organization brokered a final deal to bring cheaper generic drugs to the developing world. Poverty in developing countries makes it difficult for individuals and governments there to afford expensive medications that fight diseases such as AIDS.
Under World Trade Organization rules, developing countries could produce generic drugs for domestic consumption, but […]
In an article published on the web site of the Cato Institute, Johan Norberg makes the case that globalization is the key to reducing poverty and that rather than limit it, as anti-globalization activists would have us do, we should accelerate it and the institutions it presupposes.
As Norberg notes, in the late 19th century Sweden […]
The BBC reported in August that Zanzibar is the latest developing country to take advantage of cellular phones to route around unreliable, expensive state-run phone systems.
According to BBC reporter Daniel Dickinson, Zanzibar cell phone company Zantel has enrolled 45,000 subscribers.
As in other countries, cellular phones may have their drawbacks, including expense, but they are often […]
Like Ronald Bailey, I occasionally receive e-mails from people urging me to read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. The short version is I’ve read it and Quinn doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Bailey has written a lengthy look at some of the problems with the book, and does a nice job of puncturing an argument specific to […]
Reason’s Ronald Bailey had an interesting summary of a series of New York Times articles about the developed world’s still obscenely-high tariffs on food imported from developing countries.
One of the more egregious examples is the case of Vietnamese cat fish. Since imports of Vietnamese catfish compete with Mississippi catfish farmers, Sen. Trent Lott pushed a […]
Again this summer, African nations held a summit where they give nice speeches about what’s wrong with the continent, but nothing will actually change.
This year, Ghanian Private Sector Development Minister Kwamena Bartels shocked the World Economic Forum’s Africa Economic Summitt by fingering a previously unknown contributor to Africa’s woes. It turns out that corruption is […]
European farmers who have been hit by drought accompany this summer’s heat wave are asking the European Union for more aid.
That’s right, the most excessively subsidized farmers in the world want even more financial help from the state. Copa-Cogeca, which represents European farmers, wrote a letter to the European Commission and the Council of Ministers […]
In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Wisconsin researchers announced they had discovered a gene that confers blight resistance on potatoes.
The late blight fungus was partly responsible for the great Irish famine of 1845 in which more than 1 million people died, and blight is still a […]