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It’s only a matter of time before Nigeria passes South Africa as the continent’s largest economy. At one level, this is an irrelevant technical exercise and I’m sure Morten Jerven will (rightly) point out that the numbers are all wrong.
Bono appeared at the TED event this week to discuss ending global poverty. He suggested that it was possible to imagine eradicating $1.25 a day poverty by around 2030. And I believe him –at least in my more optimistic moments. The U2 frontman noted one of the benefits if that happened: “you won’t have to listen to an insufferable jumped-u
The stalemate in the latest round of climate negotiations, held in Doha, Qatar, last month, makes it clear that a fresh approach is needed if the world is to avert climate catastrophe. One part of the solution should be a new global climate agency, founded, financed and led by a coalition of the big emerging market countries.
With the Spice Girls back together, temporarily we must hope, for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, David Cameron could have been forgiven for making the most of the public’s desire to celebrate the success of the Olympics. Instead he risked being the party pooper, by convening a summit in Downing Street about hunger with Vice President Michel Temer of Brazil.
Martin Kirk, former Head of UK Campaigns at Oxfam GB, has a brave and interesting paper in Ethics and International Affairs (the article is temporarily ungated) which says that NGOs are:
locked in a toxic and inaccurate paradigm, described through an increasingly outmoded core “charity” story that is unrepresentative of the reality of global development and that restricts their appeal to the public.
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist Nick Kristof joined us this week for a small roundtable discussion on his work. This time last year we helped Nick select the finalists for his 2011 Win-A-Trip contest, and we’ll be helping again on the 2012 contest—more on that below.
The wake-up call came as a bit of a shock. Ernesto Zedillo, the highly regarded former president of Mexico and director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, was discussing the record of international institutions and the powerful countries that run them. On their response to unprecedented international cooperation and coordination challenges, he was in no mood to mince words.
Early results from our global opinion survey on the selection system, criteria and candidates for the new head of the IMF are now available. If you haven’t yet taken the survey and do so now, you will get access to the results as of yesterday. Not surprisingly, there is overwhelming agreement that the selection system should be open, competitive and merit-based, without regard to nationality (more on that below).
During the 13th and 16th of November, the Latin American Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (CLAAF) held their second meeting of the year in Lima with the purpose of discussing the effect of the currency wars on the Latin American region. As a result of the meeting, we presented the 23rd CLAAF statement. The statement has been extremely well received and broadly covered by the Peruvian press.
Last week the Guardian reported that the Obama Administration has approached President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil about becoming the next President of the World Bank. Seems unlikely to me – for one thing it’s early, since Robert Zoellick’s term lasts another three years, and the Administration has many other fish it is frying right now.
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