The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) originated in provincial-level efforts that sought to simultaneously integrate interior and frontier provinces to the rest of China as well as neighboring countries during the 1990s.
A few months ago, I began my Duck postings with an introspective on what it’s like to have grown up in the USA and moved to Canada to start my professional career. The current context in Canada is...
For a range of reasons, I have been thinking lately about the relationship between development and security. At one level, the relationship is obvious, if somewhat banal: resources allocated for...
Roads. Who can be against them, right? They allow us to get from A-to-B. And as anyone who has been to a place where there were no roads can attest, their absence is a real impediment to the modern...
Interpreting evidence related to poverty and development is never straightforward. Neo-liberal supporters of free market economics tend to point to economic growth as evidence that global inequality is stabilising, while those "closer to the ground" often point out the limitations of economic measurements and encourage a broader understanding of the everyday signs of exploitation and inequality in countries around the world- classic Development Studies 101. Evidence of this sustained divide between those who talk about poverty and those who seek to understand global economic inequality can...
2012 interview with Kathryn Sikkink.
Everyone agrees China is a rising power. Some people think it can rise indefinitely; some people think its rise will decelerate; and some think that its rise is illusory. But it's hard to put even the People's Republic stellar growth rates into perspective without taking a longer view.The chart above shows the ratios of Chinese to other countries' GDP per capita. It's based on painstaking work by Angus Maddison to reconstruct long time series about output. There are reasons to think that Maddison's estimates before 1900 are a little speculative, but they are widely agreed to capture the...
My colleague Kate Weaver has written a nuanced take on this blog on the race for the World Bank presidency, that whoever succeeds Robert Zoellick will have an especially tricky go of it ensuring the organization's relevance at a time of fiscal austerity and changes in the global balance of power.Since Kate's post, opponents of the U.S. nominee Dr. Jim Kim, currently head of Dartmouth College and formerly head of the World Health Organization's AIDS initiative, have become more vocal. There is something unseemly about the criticism being leveled against Dr. Kim, and for the record, I'd just...
My original post suggesting that Putin’s bogus reelection might be cause to eject Russia from the BRICS got a lot of traffic and comment (both here and on my own site). It’s gotten to the point where it’s just easier to summarize my responses to a general set of critiques. It seems there are three main criticisms: 1. I exaggerated; Russia is still a great power. 2. I didn’t provide enough data and links. 3. I don’t really ‘get’ Russia, or I’m just recycling western propaganda. (In passing, I find it curious/frustrating as an author that what I think is my more creative and fresh work in the...
This is not an iPad. It is also not anethical statement.Globalization is no longer the Western world's ethical quandary.The biggest story in globalization this week has been the saga of Mike Daisey, the storyteller who posed as a journalist in a theatrical monologue about working conditions in Apple's factories in the People's Republic of China. Daisey, who has now been outed as a fabulist, lied about his visits to China and what he saw there, greatly exaggerating the misery in the places that manufacture iPhones, iPads, and the other accoutrements of the smart set.The discovery of Daisey's...
With Putin’s ‘return’ to the presidency, Russia is now officially a joke as a serious great power state. True, Putin has been ridiculous for awhile, what with those shirtless photo-ops that came across like desperate, bizarre geopolitical ‘ads’ that Russia is still a superpower. But this is different. Not even Chinese elites play the sorts of merry-go-round games at the top that Putin has engineered in the last 6 months. To their great credit, Chinese presidents and premiers serve and go. Russia is now the only one of the BRICS in which power does not rotate. Instead, Putin is starting to...
Photo credit: lhgszch on Flickr.Back in December 2009, I wrote a post for the Duck called "Wal-mart Isn't Green." Jared Diamond had written a provocative op-ed about various green business initiatives for the NY Times and Steve Walt had blogged about it too. I recently thought about that exchange because the December issue of The Atlantic included an interesting article by the Asia Society's Orville Schell called "How Walmart Is Changing China." Much of the article considers burgeoning environmental initiatives involving Walmart and China:The world’s biggest corporation and the world’s most...