Tackling global poverty is like protecting the environment: it’s something for the good times. There’s no reason why we should stop caring about poor people when times are tough, any more than we should stop caring about climate change or the destruction of the rain forests.
He compares greedy boardroom fat cats to corrupt African dictators. He thinks anti-globalisation protesters are naive and wrong. He takes sideswipes at his old Oxford University colleagues and believes British Prime Minister Tony Blair could be the best thing for the centre-left since Franklin D Roosevelt.
The rift in the West over Iraq puts the global economy at great risk. It seems probable that the big post-Iraq threat to the global economy will be deficiency of demand, and that policy-makers will be under pressure to come up with coordinated measures to underpin activity.
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/ 2 December 2002
Doesn’t your heart bleed for Jean-Pierre Garnier? The poor love has the misfortune to be CEO of one of the world’s biggest drugs companies, GlaxoSmithKline, and had a take-home package of just -million last year. Profits are down and the share price is down.
The IMF is to draw up urgent proposals for a bankruptcy system that will provide crisis-hit countries such as Argentina with the protection. The IMF has been given six months to come up with a blueprint that will provide a mechanism for coping with debt defaults.
The world is running short of fresh water. Populations are growing bigger and thirstier, with the result that fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce.
New York City in 2022. Half the 40-million people in the swarming metropolis are unemployed, the air is thick with pollution, food and water are as precious as jewels. This was the world of the future as envisaged in the sci-fi thriller, Soylent Green, in 1973.
Britain’s International Development Secretary, Clare Short, has warned the European Union that she is considering seizing back control of the country’s £700-million contribution to Europe’s international aid budget, in protest at the squandering of money on wasteful, politically driven projects.
Cometh the moment, cometh the man. Crashing share prices, global financial instability, deflation lurking in the background: this is a world made for John Maynard Keynes. For those who kept the flame flickering during the long night of laissez-faire, this is their moment.
World leaders, wrapping up a summit rocked by a new United States corporate bookkeeping scandal and dissension over President George W Bush’s Middle East policy, on Thursday turned their attention to Africa and a far-reaching programme to provide billions of dollars of assistance.