This will mostly be familiar material to anyone who’s been following the arguments about sustainable economics, or is familiar with the critiques of the limitations of neo-classical economics, but nonetheless there’s a useful seven-point summary (really six) at the WorldWatch Institute site. Two points to highlight are the emerging potential of the commons as a [...]
Remittances from people living in rich countries to family members in poor countries now accounts for $300 billion a year, far outstripping official aid payments as the largest source of financial flows to the countries of the South. Until now it has been poorly documented, partly because it is made up of hundreds of [...]
It would be nice to be able to say something positive about this. But in the space of less than a week, there have been three separate reports which in their own ways have each emphasised how sharp - and how stuck - the differences are between between poor and richer in the UK.
The latest State of the Future 2007 (press release and executive summary can be found here), from the United Nations-backed Millennium Project, is, frankly, depressing, despite its attempts to reassure. Consider: the richest 225 people on the planet earth earn as much as the poorest 2,5 billion. The revenues from organised crime are running at [...]
Sudan and Iraq are at number 1 and 2 in the 3rd annual “Failed States Index“, produced by the US non-profit Fund for Peace and the journal Foreign Policy. The index is built up from scores on 12 criteria (listed lower down) and the full matrix can be seen on the site so you can [...]
The latest income inequality data for the UK suggests that over the last decade inequality has been pretty much unchanged. Analysis from the Office of National Statistics says the UK’s gini coefficient, which is an internationally accepted measure for meauring inequalities in household income, climbed in 2005/06 after falling between 2001 and 2005. The reason [...]
The charity Christian Aid projects that up to a billion people could be displaced from their homes by 2050 as a result of climate change, in a report, “Human tide: the real migration crisis“, published this week. That would be around one-in-eight of the world’s population. Most will be displaced within their own countries; many [...]
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has just published a raft of research on income and ethnicity which shows that South Asian Islamic people living in the UK are likely to be hugely poorer than average, and that generally the correlation between ethnicity and poor economic outcomes in the UK are as discriminatory as we might imagine.
Pearce is a reporter and this is a reporter’s book (he visits places) rather than a work of theory, but he’s been following the subject for long enough to have a strong understanding of the issues. This is close to essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the planet. There’s a summary of [...]
