Women’s work: mothers, children and the global childcare crisis

The world is facing a hidden crisis in childcare. That crisis is leaving millions of children without the support they need, with damaging consequences for their future. It is also having severe impacts on three generations of women – on mothers, grandmothers and daughters. 

There is an urgent need to solve the global care crisis to improve the lives of both women and children and to grow economies. 

GRI’s 2015 year in risk review

The year 2015 very much seemed to be a year of transition (and not generally for the better), filled with many surprises.

The staying power of the Islamic State

Perhaps even more shocking that the initial rise and onslaught of the group now known as ISIS is their staying power: under not insignificant military pressure from the U.S., Iraq, Syria, several European/NATO states, various rebels groups and nominally Russia (which is targeting mainly non-ISIS groups) and some (minor) action from Arab nations, ISIS has not only survived but thrived.

CAN THE EUROZONE SHAKE OFF THE GLOBAL GLOOM?

The global economy has shifted from being the potential saviour of the eurozone economy to an additional source of uncertainty for it.

The outlook for the global economy is worsening quickly, raising question marks over the eurozone’s recovery. Will consumption and investment rise by enough to offset the likely weakening of eurozone exports, or will the recovery peter out? What does the deteriorating global environment mean for the ECB’s attempts to raise inflation and to ward off threats to the debt sustainability across the eurozone? The currency union is at no risk of falling back into recession in 2016, but last year might turn out to have been as good as it’s going to get.

Missing the Peace for the Trees

It has been more than a decade since warring parties signed a deal to end Liberia’s bloody conflict. Fueled by the pillaging of the country’s rich natural resources — diamonds, gold, iron, and timber — the two civil wars that raged across 14 years left more than 250,000 people dead and displaced more than 1 million others. When the final peace deal was signed in 2003, however, the resources that had sustained the war for so long were not mentioned at all. The oversight, though common, has often proved disastrous for countries trying to break free from years of violence.

The Worst Corruption Scandals of 2015

A goat and cash exchanged for shortened sentences in Ghanaian prisons. International soccer games that were bought and sold. Rolexes and vacation clubs traded for Chinese business deals.

In 2015, massive corruption scandals embroiled world leaders, high court judges, and the men who run the world’s soccer industry, among many others.

Global slowdown: The eurozone to reap what it has sown?

The slowdown in emerging markets leaves the eurozone even more reliant on exports to the US and UK to compensate for its feeble domestic economy. 

The eurozone is banking on a weak euro and strong global growth to boost exports and inflation and offset the weakness of domestic demand. How likely is this? China might yet avoid a recession, but there is no doubt that it is set for a period of much slower growth. At the same time, pretty much every emerging market is weakening, partly because of their dependence on China, and partly because of sluggish productivity growth. The US Federal Reserve’s decision not to increase official interest rates is welcome: a rise would have prompted further capital outflows from emerging markets. But there is no doubt that the global economy is labouring, and that this poses a threat to the eurozone’s anaemic recovery. 

A Net Assessment of the World

A pretentious title requires a modest beginning. The world has increasingly destabilized and it is necessary to try to state, as clearly as possible, what has happened and why. This is not because the world is uniquely disorderly; it is that disorder takes a different form each time, though it is always complex.

To put it simply, a vast swath of the Eurasian landmass (understood to be Europe and Asia together) is in political, military and economic disarray. Europe and China are struggling with the consequences of the 2008 crisis, which left not only economic but institutional challenges. Russia is undergoing a geopolitical crisis in Ukraine and an economic problem at home. The Arab world, from the Levant to Iran, from the Turkish border through the Arabian Peninsula, is embroiled in politically destabilizing warfare. The Western Hemisphere is relatively stable, as is the Asian Archipelago. But Eurasia is destabilizing in multiple dimensions.

Financing the future: How international public finance should fund a global social compact to eradicate poverty

This year the world will agree new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to shape global development policy until 2030. Achieving these goals would have transformative effects, eradicating the scourge of global poverty and expanding opportunities for many millions worldwide. Success will require political leadership backed by financial commitments.

The World’s Top Five Energy MegaStructures

Royal Dutch Shell plans on shutting down its iconic Brent oil field after it reaches the end of its life. The field has played a critical role in the United Kingdom’s energy history, having accounted for about 10 percent of the country’s total oil and gas production since the 1970’s.

But with the aging field hitting retirement, the massive platform used to drill the field must be dismantled. The structure is the size of the Eiffel tower and sits 450 miles offshore in the rough waters of the North Sea.

How to Make the Sustainable Development Goals Work

The two of us met for the first time more than a decade ago, in 2003, in the small rural village of Momemo, an hour’s drive and a world away from the urban bustle of Maputo, Mozambique’s capital and largest city. We were there to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of malaria on the lives of villagers in areas particularly hard hit by the disease.

But as we sat outdoors talking with a small group of villagers, the conversation covered a range of issues about the health and well-being of women and children in the village. How early did women marry here? How many children did they have? How many children had they lost to illness? Could they work and care for children severely sick with malaria?

The Intersection of Three Crises

Within the past two weeks, a temporary deal to keep Greece in the eurozone was reached in Brussels, a cease-fire roadmap was agreed to in Minsk and Iranian negotiators advanced a potential nuclear deal in Geneva. Squadrons of diplomats have forestalled one geopolitical crisis after another. Yet it would be premature, even reckless, to assume that the fault lines defining these issues are effectively stable. Understanding how these crises are inextricably linked is the first step toward assessing when and where the next flare-up is likely to occur.

Population Decline and the Great Economic Reversal

In recent weeks, we have been focusing on Greece,Germany, Ukraine andRussia. All are still burning issues. But in every case, readers have called my attention to what they see as an underlying and even defining dimension of all these issues — if not right now, then soon. That dimension is declining population and the impact it will have on all of these countries. The argument was made that declining populations will generate crises in these and other countries, undermining their economies and national power. Sometimes we need to pause and move away from immediate crises to broader issues. Let me start with some thoughts from my book The Next 100 Years.

The Lunch Question

At an event in Beijing last November, I had the good fortune to meet the French economist Thomas Piketty, who has sold 1.5 million copies of his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century,since it was first published in 2013. Pacing up and down in front of a packed auditorium, Piketty explained that because the rate of return on capital is now higher than the growth rate of the global economy, the proportion of the world's wealth that is owned by a small elite will likely keep increasing; in other words, we should expect to see a divergence of wealth as the rich get much richer. As his book says, "capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based."

No strategic forecaster can afford to ignore this alarming prediction — or the enthusiastic response it got from the audience in Beijing. In the 20th century, the two world wars were the only force powerful enough to reverse the concentration of wealth in the elite and the mounting class conflict; in the 21st century, we seem to be falling back into a comparable world of revolution, political extremism and mass violence.

How The Economy Is Tied To Energy – Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about why cheap fuels act to create economic growth. In this post, we will look at some supporting data showing how this connection works. The data is over a very long time period–some of it going back to the Year 1 C. E.

We know that there is a close connection between energy use (and in fact oil use) and economic growth in recent years.

A new theory of energy and the economy – Part 1 – Generating economic growth

How does the economy really work? In my view, there are many erroneous theories in published literature. I have been investigating this topic and have come to the conclusion that both energy and debt play an extremely important role in an economic system. Once energy supply and other aspects of the economy start hitting diminishing returns, there is a serious chance that a debt implosion will bring the whole system down.

In this post, I will look at the first piece of this story, relating to how the economy is tied to energy, and how the leveraging impact of cheap energy creates economic growth. In order for economic growth to occur, the wages of workers need to go farther and farther in buying goods and services. Low-priced energy products are far more effective in producing this situation than high-priced energy products. Substituting high-priced energy products for low-priced energy products can be expected to lead to lower economic growth.

These Are The Only Countries Whose Populations Have Actually Declined Since 1990

Here's a startling map from Michael McDonough that speaks volumes about the global demographics situation. It shows the only countries that have seen their populations decline since 1990.

This Is What The World Exports And Imports

Here are two awesome maps from a recent Standard Chartered report on the state of global trade.

Why So Much Anarchy?

Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms -- making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated.

However, what is not in dispute is that significant portions of the earth, rather than follow the dictates of Progress and Rationalism, are simply harder and harder to govern, even as there is insufficient evidence of an emerging and widespread civil society. Civil society in significant swaths of the earth is still the province of a relatively elite few in capital cities -- the very people Western journalists feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so that the size and influence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.