Development Roast Giving international development a proper roasting

Carbon-offsetting (paying others not to emit carbon into the atmosphere so that you can keep emitting) recently got an absolutely hilarious equivalent: CheatNeutral (http://www.cheatneutral.com/). This brilliant initiative allows you to pay somebody else to be faithful, so that you keep going on as usual. Of course it is recommended that …

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.” Henry David Thoreau “Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.” Margaret Bonnano “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” Albert Einstein Economists, especially development economists, almost always …

Reverse psychology is frequently applied by parents: If you want your kids to do something (like washing the dishes or mowing the lawn), tell them they can’t. That is often much more effective than begging or threatening them to do it.

The recent Cumbre Andina de Naciones held in Tarija brought controversy about the particular conditions that Bolivia put forward to negotiate conditions of a free trade agreement with the European Union. One of the arguments held by the Bolivian government to distrust the agreement was that special clauses where required …

The World Tourism Organization publishes facts and figures on international tourism, including a table of the World’s Top Emerging Tourism Destinations, as measured by the growth in international tourist arrivals. The good news is that Bolivia has made it to the table! (Mexico and Brazil didn’t). The bad news is …

Governing a country is a lot like raising children. You have to make sure your subjects are kept safe and healthy and receive a useful education they can live on in the future. You also have to teach them what is right and wrong, and what are their rights and …

“100 years from now we will know that the biggest crime against humanity was vaccines.” Guylaine Lanctot, MD As previously stated in the newsletter Vaccination Controversy: What is Fact and What is Myth?, vaccination requirements in the U.S. are much more extensive than in Bolivia, so there is a much higher …

Next week I will be participating in the 20th Anniversary Event for the Joint-Japan/World Bank Graduate Scholarships (JJ/WBGS) Program that will take place in Tokyo, Japan on June 6th. Thanks to this Program I was able to undertake my Ph.D. studies at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague-The …

Most people would find the answer to that question so obvious that they wouldn’t even bother to check the data. According to UN data, the number of people counted as living outside their country of birth has almost doubled during the last 50 years–increasing to 191 million in 2005, the …

“The Aid Industry is completely out of control.” Simon Maxwell The last decade has seen a tremendous increase in remittances from migrant workers in developed countries to left-behind relatives in developing countries. So much so that global remittances are now at least the double of official development aid (1).