Global Middle Class Initiative: Latest Articles

The World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun, Mexico, has highlighted a surprising new cause, promoted by a surprising new alliance. The new cause is the campaign to reduce or eliminate agricultural subsidies in the United States, Europe and Japan, to make room for agricultural exports from poor nations. The alliance between idealists of the left, third world producers and traditional conservative promoters of free trade is equally unprecedented.

But the Cancun coalition is unlikely to last. It is bound to fray… more

A little more than a year ago, after a long legislative struggle, Congress passed the most sweeping international trade legislation in 15 years. After a nearly decade-long deadlock, Congress gave the president authority to negotiate new trade agreements. And just before this summer's recess, Congress overwhelmingly passed the first fruits of that authority: new free-trade agreements with Chile and Singapore.

Unfortunately, implementation of the assistance for workers who lose their jobs because of international trade has not been as swift. If… more

According to the Washington consensus which governed thinking about global economic development during the 1980s and 1990s, the only way for poor countries to catch up with the US, the EU and Japan was to adopt policies of free trade and free investment. This prescription, however, produced rather discouraging results.

Media accounts of the savage, two-year war between Israel and the Palestinians inevitably focus on the enormous human costs exacted by the ongoing strife but there is another facet of the struggle that may do even more lasting damage: its destructive effect on the two societies' economies. The devastation to the Palestinian economy has been well documented, including a recent United Nations report. Yet the intifada's toll on Israel's economy has gone largely unnoticed. Israel has no natural resources; whatever… more

Johannesburg -- The apartheid system is gone, but many here at the World Summit on Sustainable Development seem to want to bring back a form of "separate and unequal" for South Africa and for the rest of the Third World -- in the form of environmental regulation that would stifle economic development.

Politically correct greens, of course, recoil at the thought of any kind of racism, but actions speak louder than words. So, if ecological activists from the… more