Asia Times Online - News from greater China; Hong Kong and Taiwan: "On Monday the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed an accord with China that will create an open market of 2 billion people by 2010 to compete with Europe and the United States. The pact aims to drop most tariffs over the next five years in a move some analysts have said is a sign Beijing may be moving to undercut America's vast economic influence over the region. "

Migration For most of human history, migration has been constrained by physical barriers and transport difficulties rather than government action. More recently, sharply different rates of population and economic growth across the world have combined to make many workers from poorer countries eager to move to countries where more jobs are available and wages are much higher. Modern communications make the differences even more
visible, and modern transport makes migration easy and affordable. But migrants are not always welcome in rich countries.

The New York Times > Washington > Hydrogen Production Method Could Bolster Fuel Supplies: "Researchers at a government nuclear laboratory and a ceramics company in Salt Lake City say they have found a way to produce pure hydrogen with far less energy than other methods"

News for a Synergic Earth :: "Adversaries believe there is not enough for everyone and only the physically strong will survive. They believe humans are coercively dependent on others, and they best understand the language of force. In this crisis, they will kill as many as they can to insure their survival. Neutralists believe there is enough for everyone, if only you work hard enough and take care of yourself. They believe humans are financial independent and should be self-sufficient unless they are too lazy or defective. They best understand the language of money. In this crisis, they will try to buy their way out. ... And, finally a new type of human is emerging. Synergists believe there is enough for everyone, but only if we work together and act responsibly."

Competing for Souls: "China's growing material wealth has eluded the countryside, home to two-thirds of its population. But there is a bull market in sects and cults competing for souls. That has alarmed the authorities, who seem uncertain whether the spread of religion or its systematic repression does more to turn peasants against Communist rule.
The demise of Communist ideology has left a void, and it is being filled by religion. The country today has more church-going Protestants than Europe, according to several foreign estimates. Buddhism has become popular among the social elite. Beijing college students wait hours for a pew during Christmas services in the capital's 100 packed churches.
But it is the rural underclass that is most desperate for salvation. The rural economy has grown relatively slowly. Corruption and a collapse in state-sponsored medical care and social services are felt acutely. But government-sanctioned churches operate mainly in cities, where they can be closely monitored, and priests and ministers by law can preach only to those who come to them. "

US Military on the Scent of Oil - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Dominant military powers have always had to deal with countries not part of their 'empire' - whether the empire is formal or informal. This rule still applies in the 21st century despite the US claim to overwhelming 'global' power and reach. And a corollary also still applies: the 'natural' tendency of those outside the empire is to work together to split off parts of the imperium or even undermine the entire edifice of empire"

US Military on the Scent of Oil - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "The 1991 war was not the first time that 'black gold' was the catalyst of war. Adolf Hitler's need for petroleum for Germany's military machine and industry lay behind his assault on the Soviet Union, and Roosevelt's actions to cut Japan's access to oil contributed to Tokyo's decision to attack the US. Now, under the 'Bush Doctrine', oil has become the catalyst for preventive war. "

US Military on the Scent of Oil: "Second, notwithstanding current consolidations under way in Germany (13 facilities closing) and in South Korea (18 facilities closing), what remains unchallenged in the CBO report is the contention by outside observers that future US base locations in Europe, the Middle East, Southwest and Central Asia will be tied to oil sources and oil transport considerations.
Even with additional closings and consolidations to the 702 overseas 'installations' (army 381, navy 44, Marine two, air force 275) identified by the CBO, the US will continue to maintain the most extensive foreign basing structure of any country. For the Pentagon, it seems, not only is 'location everything', it's 'everywhere'. "

Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country (updated September 30, 2004) This table shows the number of US military personnel on active duty in the US and throughout the world. (United States Department of Defense)"

The forces of world order The larger question is how to engage the forces of world order appropriately to strengthen weak states and deter – globally – those factors that everywhere in the developing world impel or motivate failure.

Other political goods Other political goods typically supplied by states and expected by their citizens include medical and health care; schools and educational instruction; roads, railways, harbors and other arteries of commerce; a money and banking system; a fiscal and institutional context within which citizens can pursue entrepreneurial goals and prosper; space for the flowering of civil society; and methods of regulating the sharing of the environmental commons.

Supply of security There is a hierarchy of political goods. None is as critical as the supply of security, especially human security. The state’s prime function is to provide the political good of security – to prevent cross-border invasions and infiltrations, to eliminate domestic threats to or attacks upon the national order and social structure, to prevent crime and any related dangers to human security, and to enable citizens to resolve their differences with the state and their fellow inhabitants without recourse to arms or other forms of physical coercion.

Weak states typically harbor ethnic, religious,
linguistic, or other tensions that may at some near point be transformed into all out conflict between contending antagonisms.

The more non-state actors and the forces of terror can take opportunistic advantage of a deteriorating internal security situation to mobilize adherents, train insurgents, gain control of resources, launder funds, purchase arms, and ready themselves for assault on world order.

State failure Weak states, even seemingly strong nation-states in the developing world, fail with increasing frequency. The decade plus since the end of the cold war has witnessed a cascading plethora of state failure, mostly in Africa but also in Asia. In addition, more and more states are at risk, exhibiting acute signs of weakness and/or the likelihood of outright failure.

ECONOMY: International Lenders Rethink China Aid: "China's officially announced defence budget for 2004 is 25 billion dollars. However, the U.S. Department of Defence estimates that actual military-related spending in 2003 has been in the range of 50 to 70 billion dollars, making China the third largest defence spender in the world, after the United States and Russia.

Japan - one of China's largest country donors, is clearly uncomfortable with Beijing's defence buildup. Citing the country's rampant military spending and its rise as an economic powerhouse, earlier this month a group of Japanese lawmakers recommended a cut in aid to China. "

ECONOMY: International Lenders Rethink China Aid: "Based on its extreme poverty benchmark of living on less than one U.S. dollar a day, the World Bank estimates that China's impoverished population has fallen sharply from more than 600 million in 1981 (64 percent of the population at the time) to 132 million or 11 percent of the population in 2004.

In May 2004, the World Bank and China co-hosted a global conference on poverty reduction in Shanghai, an event that offered stunning testimony to the ways in which China has, both, developed its economy and re-introduced itself to the world over the past 24 years. "

ECONOMY: International Lenders Rethink China Aid: "China's explosive economic growth and world superpower ambitions are prompting many developed countries to rethink their aid to the country as lending agencies begin to cut back on loans and focus instead on funding economic advisors to the government. "

ID21 - communicating development research: "The conventional project based approach is a tried-and-tested, convenient and simple mechanism for the transfer of aid resources. However, development practitioners are increasingly realising that implementing a project is not an effective way to address the needs of poor people. They are founded on unequal power relationships between donor and beneficiaries and are unsustainable due to poor integration with other development initiatives. Could sustainable livelihoods approaches (SLAs) better address the needs of poor people?"

Foreign Affairs - Book Review - The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream - Jeremy Rifkin: "The new European dream celebrated by Rifkin 'emphasizes community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth, sustainable development over unlimited material growth, deep play over unrelenting toil, universal human rights and the rights of nature over property rights, and global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power.' .... it will be a pity if American overconfidence leads them to ignore this valiant attempt to show that the American way of organizing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not necessarily the best (even if some of Rifkin's musings on 'the third stage of human consciousness' are a bit windy). "

Aid Agency Competition Entry to the market is continuing as new agencies find new business models—or new recipient countries, in the case of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). EBRD serves private sector clients, as do its large contemporary, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and France’s Proparco and Denmark’s Investment Fund for Central and Eastern Europe (IFU). Recently two new agencies—the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFAT) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)—started operations. They are expected to expand quickly in the next two or three years. In addition, emerging economies such as China and Slovenia have moved to set up aid agencies. The prospects for continued innovation and new entry seem good. Despite this, there has been very little exit. All the agencies created since 1945 still exist.

Issue 278 - Public Policy Journal - Privatization, Infrastructure & Business Environment - The World Bank Group: "It would be hard to disagree with the objectives of the international aid industry. But how much are donors contributing to their achievement? Despite recent progress, we still know surprisingly little. We know that some donors give much more than others relative to income. We also know that donors are focusing aid less on poor countries and more on countries with strong institutions or good policies. And we know that there appears to be no tradeoff here: the countries that give the most aid also target poor countries and those with good policies. Yet we are still in the dark about which donors, or which projects, are achieving the best results. "

Official flowshave fallen relative
to rich-country income by 30 percent in the past 30 years.

Monthly Review November 2004 Samir Amin: "We know that opinion also is manufactured. Israel is incapable of resisting for more than a few days even moderate measures of a blockade such as the Western powers inflicted on Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Cuba. It would thus not be difficult to bring Israel to its senses and to create the conditions of a true peace, if it were wanted, which it is not."

Monthly Review November 2004 Samir Amin: "the United States works hard for the right to seize all the natural resources of the planet to meet its consumption requirements. The race for raw materials (oil in the first place, but other resources too�water in particular) has already been resumed in all its virulence. All the more since these resources are likely to become scarce not only by reason of the malignant waste inherent in Western consumerism, but also by the development of the new industrialization of the peripheries. "

Monthly Review November 2004 Samir Amin: "The North American economy lives parasitically, to the detriment of its partners in the world system. �The United States depends for 10 percent of its industrial consumption on goods whose import costs are not covered by the exports of its own products,� as Emmanuel Todd recalls.3 The world produces, and the United States (which has practically no national saving) consumes. "

Monthly Review November 2004 Samir Amin: "The present U.S. project, overweening, even crazy, and criminal in its implications, did not spring from the head of George W. Bush to be implemented by an extreme right junta that seized power through dubious elections. This is the project the U.S. ruling class has unceasingly nurtured since 1945, even though its implementation passed through ups and downs and could not always be pursued with the consistency and violence demonstrated since the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
The project always allocated a decisive role to its military dimension. Very quickly, the United States devised a global military strategy, dividing the planet into regions and allocating the responsibility for the control of each of them to a U.S. Military Command. The objective was not only to encircle the Soviet Union (and China), but also to secure the position of Washington as the ruler of last resort throughout the world. In other words, it extended the Monroe Doctrine to the entire planet, which effectively gave to the United States the exclusive right of managing the whole globe in accordance with what it defined as its national interests."

Monthly Review November 2004 Samir Amin To the Atlanticism promoted by Washington he envisioned a counterstrategy founded on Franco-German reconciliation and the construction of a non-American Europe carefully excluding Great Britain, which he judged rightly to be the Trojan horse of Atlanticism. Europe could then open the way to reconciliation with “Soviet Russia.” Reconciling and drawing together the three big European populations—French, German and Russian—would put a definite end to the American project of dominating the world. The internal conflict specific to the European project can thus be summarized as the choice between two alternatives: Atlantic Europe, in which Europe is an appendage of the American project, or non-Atlantic Europe (integrating Russia). This conflict is still not resolved.

People's Daily Online -- Bush, new int'l order and China's choice: "At present, the United States has become the sole hegemony. How to keep this hegemonic status under the new situation? Judging from US strategies toward Afghanistan and Iraq, America seems continuing the use of the method of occupation and troops stationing. However, it is estimated that the United States has learned sufficient lessons from the above-mentioned method. This method is not necessarily an effective strategy, as evidenced by the high price America has paid for it either because of factors of nationalism or of religion.
The United States has started to reduce its forces stationed in Europe and Northeast Asia, and switched to seek more military strongholds set up worldwide, this move indicates the possibility of US changing its method of occupation and troops stationing. When the high cost of this method, the characteristics of modern military revolution and US needs in global counter-terrorism are taken into consideration, this transformation has become inevitable. "

Gmail - [PINR] 22 November 2004: Rice Nomination Reinforces Washington's Drift Toward Isolation The possibility that Washington will act to resist the drift toward multipolarity in world politics and toward its own isolation has grown dim with the Rice nomination and the appointment of her deputy, Stephen Hadley, to the post of national security adviser. Those who believe that neo-conservative triumphalism will genera! te new interventions probably have misplaced fears. It is far more likely that -- stripped of the viability of its vision -- the dominant neo-conservative tendency will be paralyzed, hastening the erosion of U.S. power worldwide and providing many opportunities for rising powers to test their mettle .

Gmail - [PINR] 22 November 2004: Rice Nomination Reinforces Washington's Drift Toward Isolation Rice has been identified as the major exponent of the third foreign policy tendency in the first Bush administration, realism, although her present position is unclear. Realism here means the principle that international politics are determined by states using all their power resources to maximize the satisfaction of their interests. For Rice before 9/11, this meant that Washington should not be constrained by allianc! e structures or international organizations from acting unilaterally when it was in its interest to do so, which placed her closer to the neo-conservatives than to the internationalists.

Balance on US Current Account 1960 - 2002 - Global Policy Forum - Social and Economic Policy: "Balance on US Current Account 1960 - 2002 "

A Radical Vision for the Future of the UN - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "Realpolitik suggests that countries never readily surrender power. So, while the overwhelming majority of UN members would undoubtedly support a change, it seems unlikely that the five permanent members would voluntarily give up their privileges, and there does not seem to be a carrot big and juicy enough to compel them to do so. That is probably more true for the US, whose persistent default on its dues to the UN budget is just one expression of a rather deeply suspicious predisposition and lack of support towards the organization even in its current form. "

A Radical Vision for the Future of the UN - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "Second, even when decisions are taken, they often account for little more than lip service. The lack of political will to commit the resources and provide the capabilities that are needed to enforce resolutions that are not vital to the main powers� interests, makes decisions inconsequential, an argument that was used, albeit hypocritically, by the US and Britain in the Iraq case. There have been numerous cases where even the deployment of peacekeeping forces has been so inadequate that it represented all but an empty show "

A Radical Vision for the Future of the UN - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "First, the veto-holding permanent members have the power to block any decisions that go against their interests or those of their allies. The examples abound: the SC has not condemned, let alone acted upon, the US invasions of Grenada and Panama, the oppression in Tibet or Chechnya, Iraq�s invasion of Iran when Saddam was regarded an ally against Islamic fundamentalism, while nothing much has been done to control Israel�s aggression in Palestine. "

A Radical Vision for the Future of the UN - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: As a matter of fact, sanctioning and guiding the use of force through the UN, as it happened during the first Gulf War and the Korean war in the 1950s, has been the exception rather than the rule. On both occasions, incidentally, that was mainly providing cover for geopolitical undertakings dominated by the US. So the paralytic antagonism of a bi-polar world during the Cold War has been replaced by a situation in which a sole superpower can do as it pleases unchallenged. The optimism of the new world order of the early 1990s, if there ever was such a thing, has long melted into air.

A Radical Vision for the Future of the UN - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "As a matter of fact, sanctioning and guiding the use of force through the UN, as it happened during the first Gulf War and the Korean war in the 1950s, has been the exception rather than the rule. On both occasions, incidentally, that was mainly providing cover for geopolitical undertakings dominated by the US. So the paralytic antagonism of a bi-polar world during the Cold War has been replaced by a situation in which a sole superpower can do as it pleases unchallenged. The optimism of the new world order of the early 1990s, if there ever was such a thing, has long melted into air. "

A Radical Vision for the Future of the UN - Global Policy Forum - UN Security CouncilThe UN, of course, as a whole has a brief that goes far beyond conflict resolution. Its various councils and commissions are dealing with refugees, development, humanitarian and disaster relief, cultural co-operation, the environment, human rights, health, education and a range of other issues. Proponents of the organization stress its indispensability in these areas, while critics point out that many of its stated objectives regarding peoples’ well being in the developing world (e.g. the Millennium Development Goals) represent little more than wishful thinking, due to inadequate resources, lack of political will, powerful (national) vested interests and the absence of mandatory implementation of decisions.

The Economist co-sponsored Copenhagen Consensus 2004. Deputy Editor Clive Crook, who took part in the experts’ meetings, said: “The starting point of Copenhagen Consensus is that the world
faces many problems, and we cannot afford to solve them all, here and now. The positive message from the experts is that there are some extraordinarily good solutions. HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, trade barriers, and malaria – these are problems that can be addressed effectively.

Copenhagen Consensus’ expert panel of economists has decided that HIV/AIDS, hunger,free trade and malaria are the world’s most urgent problems.

>IDEA< Debatabase Topic: International Community: "The international community we live in today is a global community incorporating the whole world. Previous international communities were partial and regional (e.g. the Roman Empire, the medieval Holy Roman Empire and concept of Christendom, the medieval Islamic world, the 19th century European congress system), and cooperation was sporadic and unsystematic. Today's international community is a global phenomenon, in which different political, economic, ideological, military, legal, technological and cultural strands are intertwined. The question of the survival of the international community has now become very important due to feelings of crisis in a number of areas. This is due to the development of military technology, especially the invention and proliferation of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction, the overexploitation of world's resources, ecological problems, and increasing international tension, among other issues. "

100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq (washingtonpost.com): "One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraqi war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion. "

The West's battle for oil - [Sunday Herald]: "All five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- the UK, France, China, Russia and the US -- have international oil companies that would benefit from huge windfalls in the event of regime change in Baghdad. The best chance for US firms to make billions would come if Bush installed a pro-US Iraqi opposition member as the head of a new government.
Representatives of foreign oil firms have already met with leaders of the Iraqi opposition. Ahmed Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress, said: 'American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil.'"

The West's battle for oil - [Sunday Herald]: "One of the most telling passages in the document reads: 'Iraq remains a destabilising influence to ... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets.
'This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader ... and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.
'The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.'"

Gmail - FUTUREdition Volume 7, Number 21: "The U.S. Air Force quietly has put into service a new weapon designed to jam enemy satellite communications, a significant step toward U.S. control of space. The ground-based jammer uses electromagnetic radio frequency energy to knock out transmissions on a temporary and reversible basis, without frying components, the Air Force Space Command said."

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society Environment | First things first: "Last week, a coalition of environmental and development organisations published a report stating the Kyoto protocol and even stricter policies should be our first priority. Not surprisingly, they criticised the Copenhagen Consensus as 'intellectually corrupt' with 'bizarre conclusions' reached through 'intellectual illiteracy'. Such language is often used instead of strong arguments.
If you read the coalition's report, it does not show that global warming is where we can do the most good. It simply points out that climate change can have serious, negative impacts. The real question remains: where can we do the most good for our efforts? "

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society Environment | First things first: "In a world where we cannot deal with all the problems at the same time, we need to ask: what should we do first? This was the question answered by the Copenhagen Consensus, a project that brought together 38 of the world's top economists to set up a list of the global priorities. They looked at the main challenges to humanity, and the many solutions that we already have, analysing both their benefits but also their price tag. By using cost-benefit analysis the expert panel of economists found that HIV/Aids, hunger, free trade and malaria were the world's top priorities. Equally, the experts rated urgent responses to climate change extremely low. In fact, the panel called these ventures 'bad projects', simply because they cost more than the good they do. "

People's Daily Online -- China to lose labor advantage in a decade, scholar: "China's advantage in cheap labor will disappear and its industrial structure will be forced to upgrade ten yens later when the 'baby boom' generation born in the 1950s and 60s enter their old age. "

SEMI NanoForum Highlights Opportunities, Challenges in Emerging Industry: "During a keynote speech on the first day of NanoForum, Richard Smalley,
director of the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory at Rice University in Houston, Texas, identified the shortage of fossil fuels as the most
significant problem facing human civilization. Nanotechnology has the potential to provide an energy storage capability so that alternative energy
sources can be widely adopted. 'We need new technology to solve the energy problem,' he said.
However, Smalley warned that the U.S. would experience a shortage of future scientists to find solutions to these problems. That's because fewer young people were pursuing science and technology as careers."

Gmail - FUTUREdition Volume 7, Number 21: "In a British court, people with inherited forms of cancer have won the right to select embryos free from the genes that might trigger the disease in future generations"

Headlines for Monday, November 15, 2004: "Sachs says the coils of Africa's poverty trap include: Very high transport costs, with many Africans living in the interior of a continent with few navigable rivers; low agricultural productivity, with erratic rainfall, few rivers for irrigation, and not enough fertilizer to replace nutrients in an increasingly withered soil. Africa has also missed out on much of the 'Green Revolution', which has focused on wheat, rice and maize. Only the latter is widely grown in Africa, which is also heavily dependent on millet and tubers. A very high disease burden, especially from HIV/AIDS and malaria, climatic and biological factors that make African malaria particularly intractable, adverse geopolitics, including ruthless exploitation by colonial powers, a vast slave trade stretching back centuries undermining state formation; and, finally, a very slow diffusion of technology from abroad all have added to Africa s woes."

Gary Leupp: Imperialist France Destroys an African Air Force: "Chirac's government challenged the U.S. on Iraq, not because of some higher Gallic moral standard, nor because of cozy business ties with Saddam (such as the neocons alleged as they pronounced this old ally an 'enemy'). It opposed the invasion because it understood its goal: to secure U.S. hegemony over the entire, strategically located and oil-rich Middle East, to ensure that in what the neocons posit as the 'New American Century' no other power (including a united Europe) will be able to challenge America's 'full spectrum dominance' of the planet."

People's Daily Online -- Middle East enters a 'post-Arafat era': News analysis: "The death of Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine National Authority (PNA), affects the nerve of the Middle East and the world as a whole. What does the departure of this decades-long influential fighter imply to Palestine? After his death, how will the various political forces regroup themselves and distribute powers? And what will be the prospect of the Middle East peace process? "

The Sources of American Legitimacy - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "World public opinion now sees the United States increasingly as an outlier-invoking international law when convenient, and ignoring it when not; using international institutions when they work to its advantage, and disdaining them when they pose obstacles to U.S. designs. "

China/Iran: Beijing Looking To Tehran to Fuel Its Booming Economy - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "China's economy is booming, witnessed by its skyrocketing energy needs. Oil imports have doubled over the past five years and surged nearly 40 percent during the first eight months of 2004 alone. In an effort to secure future energy reserves, state oil trader Zhuhai Zhenrong agreed earlier this year to buy $20 billion of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Iran over the next 25 years. More recently, Beijing signed a much bigger accord with Tehran under which China will buy Iranian oil and gas and help develop the country's giant Yadavaran oil field. "

Africa: Diminishing Water Resources Could Fuel Conflict - Experts - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: Experts at a conference organized by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the African Union, and the Dutch and Ethiopian governments warned that water scarcity in Africa could lead to conflict, disease and food shortages. "Unsustainable use of water, poor management, pollution, increasing consumption and rapid population growth" cause water shortages, and the UN says that by 2025 one out of two Africans will be living in countries facing water scarcity. (Integrated Regional Information Networks)

J'accuse: War Crimes & Iraq - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council Conn Hallinan charges that the US has systematically violated international law in its fight against terrorism. The US has violated the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention Against Torture through mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration justifies its acts by pointing to the "changed nature of the post-9/11 world," a world in which international law apparently does not apply to Washington's decision-makers. (Foreign Policy in Focus)

Global Issues of the Twenty-First Century: United Nations Challenges: "Each person now being a member of a surviving group(state?), fighting/competing/cooperating with others individuals or groups for dominance/benefits/survival, and also able to threaten any function or survival of the environment, has'suddenly'become one of a species with potential planetary-scale creation or destruction. "

Global Issues of the Twenty-First Century: United Nations Challenges: "About five centuries ago, the human race - for the first time in a million-year history - began an increasingly disciplined study of itself and the whole world. In the resulting'evolutionary instant', we have already discovered enough about laws of physics to fundamentally change our conditions and capacities. We may possess the power to transform our entire planet - and ourselves - for good or ill."

Message From the Director-General: "How will our mass consumption, such as automobiles, airplanes, electric device and chemical products which we have created, influence the futurity of global environment?
Although we have been faced with various forms of highly unusual events such as earthquakes or global warming phenomena, we had never a measure of how to accurately predict what is going to happen in the future.
By means of Earth Simulator, we have come to a point where we can predict the future by recreation of Earth, basing from the present to distant past."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Only in the unlikely case that Washington manages to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq in the short term will other powers think twice about probing U.S. vulnerabilities. In South America, Brazil will attempt to secure a foothold for the Mercosur customs union and beat back Washington's efforts to extend the N.A.F.T.A. formula south. In East Asia, China will push for regional hegemony and is likely to put pressure on Taiwan and to try to draw Southeast Asian states into its sphere of influence. Beijing can also be expected to drag its feet on North Korean denuclearization and to continue to oppose sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. Russia will attempt to increase its influence over the states on its periphery that were formerly Soviet republics. Moscow will try to strengthen ties in Central Asia, the Transcaucasus and Eastern Europe (Belarus and Ukraine), and to fend off Washington's inroads into those areas. The European Union, with the Franco-German combine at its heart, will continue its moves to assimilate its Eastern European members and extend its sphere of influence to the entire Mediterranean basin through trade agreements. In each of these regions, Washington will face tests leading to the possibility of an overload of challenges and a decreased likelihood that any one of them will be handled with sufficient attention and resources."

PINR - The Waning Influence of Neo-Conservative Strategists: "Now, due to pursuing these idealistic policies, the U.S. is embroiled in a difficult conflict in Iraq, only marginally successful in its intervention in Afghanistan, and is witnessing a rise in Islamist activity around the world -- couple this with a mounting a U.S. budget deficit, and the United States is in a precarious geopolitical position."

PINR - The Waning Influence of Neo-Conservative Strategists: " Brought to power through the inauguration of the Bush administration, a group of individuals who pursued neo-conservative ideology managed to institute their policy directives during the window of opportunity created after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The central goal of this neo-conservative faction was, and remains, to sustain the U.S. as the unchallenged superpower in the world, capable of launching military strikes against any states or groups that threaten this status."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Since all of bin Laden's complaints are key components in U.S. interests, it will be difficult for the U.S. to compromise on any of them. The dilemma, however, is that these important U.S. interests are affecting Muslims in adverse ways. Through U.S. support of Israel, Muslims in Palestine are oppressed, in addition to Arab and Persian aspirations for regional dominance. Through the proliferation of U.S. troops in the region, Muslims see themselves weak in the face of superior U.S. technology and control. U.S. support of regional dictatorships has resulted in these leaders having the financial and political support to crack down on dissidents, often imprisoning or torturing these individuals who care to exercise democratic rights -- whether through violent or peaceful means. Finally, U.S. demand for below-market oil prices is seen by Muslims as theft of their oil resources. Indeed, thus far, the U.S. has not compromised on any of these interests which explains why al-Qaeda still considers the U.S. a threat and a target, and demonstrates why Muslims continue to hold a negative view of the United States.

This fundamental clash of interests, which is only heightened by the difference in cultures, exemplifies why the United States and Islamic revolutionaries have not been able to find common ground on issues that affect them both."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "attacks are meant to advance bin Laden's clear, focused, limited, and widely popular foreign policy goals: the end of U.S. aid to Israel and the ultimate elimination of that state; the removal of U.S. and Western forces from the Arabian Peninsula; the removal of U.S. and Western military forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Muslim lands; the end of U.S. support for the oppression of Muslims by Russia, China, and India; the end of U.S. protection for repressive, apostate Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, et cetera; and the conservation of the Muslim world's energy resources and their sale at higher prices."

Gmail - World Bank Development News Headlines for Wednesday, November 10, 2004The United States are on "a very dangerous path" because it is spending $450 billion annually on the military and just $15 billion to promote development in poor countries, Dow Jones reports the head of the UN anti-poverty effort warned Tuesday.

Foreign Policy: Devour and Conquer: "Such was the distraction that while the perpetrators of September 11 were taking flight lessons and buying box cutters, the U.S. defense establishment was consumed debating the merits of a multibillion-dollar, multi-year investment in a national shield against ballistic missiles that can only be lobbed by other nations. This in a country where 60 million people enter on more than 675,000 flights each year, where 116 million vehicles cross land borders, and more than 90,000 merchant ships carrying over 9 million cargo containers come to dock. Within this massive flow, termites are sure to lurk, and national missile defense is of no use."

Foreign Policy: The Cost of Living Dangerously: "More severe security measures are probably necessary and inevitable, even from a narrow economic perspective. Another atrocity on the scale of September 11 would wreak havoc on energy prices, stock markets, and consumer confidence, slamming the brakes on today�s global economic recovery. But just like other desirable government initiatives (such as environmental regulations or workplace safety laws), antiterrorism measures can work at far less cost when they are flexible and market-friendly. For example, just as some countries provide fast-track airport security lines to high-paying business travelers, shippers ought to be able to pay higher fees to move more quickly to the head of the customs queue. Similarly, higher fees should help accelerate visa applications. No doubt, such measures may offend some people�s sense of egalitarianism, but these policies and others like them are essential. The benefits of today�s interconnected market economies won�t survive under a vast and inflexible command-and-control security arrangement."

Foreign Policy: The Cost of Living Dangerously: "Consider, for example, the likely consequence of enhanced security at shipping ports worldwide to monitor for biological or nuclear weapons material, a precaution many experts consider inevitable. Currently, only about 2 percent of all cargo reaching U.S. shores is subject to inspection. The July 2004 report of the U.S. 9/11 Commission noted that, until better technologies become available, authorities should improve methods of �identifying and tracking the high-risk containers, operators, and facilities that require added scrutiny."

Foreign Policy: Four More Years: Whatever some hawks might like to do, the reality is that the Bush administration will face a series of constraints—military, diplomatic, political, and economic—that will curb its ability to launch new preventive wars. Moreover, say adherents of the Skeptic school, the power of the neoconservatives inside the administration will probably be diminished, not augmented, during Bush’s second term.

Labor is less mobile By some measures, capital markets were more integrated at the beginning of the century, and labor is less mobile than in the second half of the 19th century when sixty million people left Europe for new worlds.

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Globalization and Trade: "Globalism" does not imply universality. At the turn of the millenium, a quarter of the American population used the World Wide Web compared to one hundredth of one percent of the population of South Asia. Most people in the world today do not have telephones; hundreds of millions of people live as peasants in remote villages with only slight connections to world markets or the global flow of ideas. Indeed, globalization is accompanied by increasing gaps, in many respects, between the rich and the poor.

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Globalization and Trade: Islam's quite rapid diffusion from Arabia across Asia to what is now Indonesia was a clear instance of globalization;

Bioinvasion Fears of “bioinvasion” led some environmental groups to call for a reduction in global trade and travel.

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Globalization and Trade: "During the European colonial period, traders, invaders, settlers, and slaves were transported via ocean-going ships from one continent to another. These colonists brought new diseases and exotic species with them that ravaged human populations and ecosystems in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia. The modes of transportation, and the speed at which items have been transported, have increased exponentially over time. As these capabilities have developed, new communications technologies were introduced that have enabled corporations, governments, and militaries to significantly increase the transportation of goods, services, and information from continent to continent. "

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Globalization and Trade: "Species once spread across the earth very slowly, blocked by deep oceans and varying climates on land. Human beings took more than one million years to move from Africa to all the other continents. Human trade and communication over great distance dates back more than 2,000 years, when products first began to travel between China and Europe along the Silk Road. Within a few centuries the Silk Road carried Buddhism from India to China. It was the desire to trade that drove European nations to develop great sailing ships at the end of the fifteenth century, breaking the Venetian monopoly on trade with Asia and causing the European discovery of the Americas in 1492. These ships became the technology that allowed large numbers of plants, animals, people, and viruses to be transported from one continent to another."

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Energy, Transportation, Consumer Culture: "Many analysts see a change away from the culture of consumption as a more promising way of reducing environmental degradation. The consumption choices of middle- and upper-class people drive much of the world�s pollution. These choices are encouraged by mass advertising and are rarely discouraged by government policy. Furthermore, according to capitalist economic theory, a lack of growth in consumption could lead to serious economic recessions. Economists and government officials are working to develop tools that could guide a more environmentally sustainable economy."

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Energy, Transportation, Consumer Culture: "Pollution created by transportation use is growing quickly for a number of interrelated reasons. The use of airplanes is rising, which creates pollution that incites increases in greenhouse gases that contribute to the intensity and frequency of unusual climate events. The international transportation of consumer goods is growing, commutes are lengthening as the world�s cities increase their urban sprawl, and automobiles are quickly becoming more common in some of the world�s most populous nations (e.g., China, India, etc.). "

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Energy, Transportation, Consumer Culture: "Reliance on fossil fuels is entrenched in current technologies in many sectors (e.g., energy, transportation, industrial production, etc.) and replacing the fuels that drive these industries with sustainable energy sources will be a complicated process that must include considerations such as: the introduction of more environmentally sustainable technological inventions, the retrofitting of fueling stations, and ethically related cultural changes that support the reduction of consumption. "

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Energy, Transportation, Consumer Culture: "In 2002 the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) issued the third edition of its biennial report, Global Environment Outlook. This GEO3 report describes four scenarios for the environment and human society over the next thirty years. The four scenarios are entitled: Markets First, Policy First, Security First, Sustainability First.
The authors of GEO3 consider the Sustainability First scenario to be the most positive outcome for developing societies hoping to move forward in an environmentally sustainable manner."

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Energy, Transportation, Consumer Culture: The contrast between the “haves” who accumulate excess consumer goods and the “have-nots” who still lack basic necessities (e.g., electricity and transportation) affects global economic and environmental interests.

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Energy, Transportation, Consumer Culture: "Most water, land, and atmospheric pollution can be traced to the production and increased consumption of various products. A large proportion of the world�s energy is devoted to middle- and upper-class consumption of expensive products (e.g., cars, televisions, meat, etc.). Advertising by the mass communications industry, for example, encourages the consumption of more products, often specialty products that require extended transportation over longer distances. Yet the details of how the manufacture of various products is linked to increases in pollution levels are practically unknown to the typical consumer. Though there are limits to many natural resources, many people believe that there is no limit to the products they should be able to purchase, as long as they can earn enough money to buy them. "

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Energy, Transportation, Consumer Culture: "Several trends are increasing the use of transportation. Lower tariffs on imported goods (agreed upon through international trade negotiations at the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conferences) are encourages increases in international trade and this is, in turn, encouraging production which in turn encourages pollution through both the production and transportation of these goods. "

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Energy, Transportation, Consumer Culture: As humans become accustomed to inexpensive mobility and consumer products transported from other countries, it becomes more difficult to limit the carbon-dioxide emissions that are changing the Earth’s climate.

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Energy, Transportation, Consumer Culture: "For these reasons, new technologies must be developed not only for energy production, but also for energy conservation and for the infrastructure that links production to consumption. For example, since the infrastructure to fuel vehicles powered by alternative fuels (e.g., hydrogen, electricity) does not yet exist on a widespread basis, a new generation of automobile fueling stations will need to be constructed."

UK's Brown Says Poverty Breeds Terrorism, Urges More Aid - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "China's rivals are suffering, but capital goods producers are winning, reports the Australian Financial Review. How has the Chinese export juggernaut affected the development of its neighbors? It's no trivial issue. The developing countries of the region, in which we have a major strategic and economic interest, depend on export-oriented growth to power their development and lift their citizens out of poverty. Indonesia is one example. It needs strong export growth to recapture the dynamic growth of the pre-crisis decades. But Indonesia's export performance has been weak, although its exchange rate has been, on average, 30 per cent below its pre-crisis level. Part of Indonesia's problem, according to the International Monetary Fund, is intense competition from Chinese exporters. "

We Want to Elect the American President - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "It seems to me that to democratize the Middle East we need to liberate ourselves from not one but three authorities: autocratic power structures throughout the region; the authorities above the law, i.e. Israel; and the most overreaching authority of all, the United States of America. None of these authorities, as far as the 'Middle East' is concerned, is genuinely democratic. "

We Want to Elect the American President - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "Therefore, the nation state is no longer the only suitable locus for democracy. For if the situation continues as is, the contradictions resulting from the application of democratic principles in sovereign states will increase, leading us to a new colonial era where calls for democracy from around the world would remain largely unanswered. This new colonial wave already has its own ideology: the clash of civilizations, militarism and Bushism. "

We Want to Elect the American President - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "We ought to take seriously the findings of a recent global opinion poll in 23 countries and consider joining the citizens of the world in electing the next American president. Making this proposition a reality should be very simple since it rests on a fundamental and democratic tenet: decisions taken by the resident of the White House affect the destiny of countries, peoples and individuals all over the world. In other words, the latter is the president of the world and it is only right for those who are at the receiving end of any authority's decisions to express their opinion and participate in its election. "

Gmail By the mid-1980s the Soviets were in Kabul, and had all but defeated the Mujahedeen. The Soviet Union appeared secure in its military occupation of Afghanistan. But then, in 1986, the first US Stinger missiles reached the hands of the Afghani resistance; and, quite suddenly, Soviet helicopter gunships and MiGs began dropping out of the skies like flaming stones. The tide swiftly turned, and by 1989 it was all over but the hand wringing and gnashing of teeth in the Kremlin. Defeated, the Soviets slunk back across the frontier. The whole world cheered the American Stingers, which had carried the day.

Une Amérique chrétienne pour sauver le monde Universités, télévisions, sites internet, journaux, livres, tracts: les évangéliques et leurs pasteurs vedettes disposent de grands moyens pour convertir l’Amérique et la planète entière

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-: "Noting the self-interested nature of governments throughout history, US dispute resolution scholar Lawrence Susskind proposes innovative ways to increase compliance with international treaties, such as the posting of bond money by national governments which is then slowly recovered by each government as long as it continues to follow the treaty."

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-Predictions about the future of conflict vary widely. Some political scientists believe that the US, with economic and military strength far exceeding any other country, will be able to instill a worldwide “Pax Americana” through the twenty-first century, similar to the “Pax Romana” period under the Roman Empire when there was little international conflict in the area controlled by the Romans. Others argue that the economic and military power of the US could be successfully challenged in this century, possibly by China, by the outrage of the world’s poorest peoples, or by the growing network of militant, terrorist-oriented fundamentalist groups located throughout the world.

FORE: Disciplines-Policy-Global Trends-: "governments spent approximately $800 billion on military expenses, about $130 per human being, and employed over twenty million soldiers."

OECD Observer: Global truths: "Chief among these is the notion that globalisation places draconian limitations on national policies. This statement bears close examination. My own view is that wrong-headed policies that lead businesses and individuals to use their resources or time in wasteful, unproductive ways will bring economic decline and less prosperity, whether or not the national economy is engaged in the global economic system. We have many historical examples of countries that tried autarky and failed."

Gmail - [PINR] Nov. 5, 2004: Growing Russian Influence in Central AsiaOn the energy front, despite moves made by the U.S. and China to exercise control over energy routes, Russia still has an edge. Most of the existing Central Asian pipelines pass through Russia. At present, Russia contributes nearly 15 percent of the oil supplied to the U.S. According to Russia’s Minister of Economic Development and Trade German Gref, Russia can start to freely compete with the Arab oil-producing countries to supplement the American market.

Press Review for Nov. 3, 2004 Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the poorest regions in the world, will slide deeper into poverty over the next decade despite a bold economic recovery plan, according to a survey released by the independent South African Institute of Race Relations' (SAIRR) on Tuesday, Reuters reports.
This annual report estimates that the region, ravaged by an HIV/AIDS pandemic, will account for half the world's poor by 2015 - up from 27 percent in 1999. "Despite the efforts of New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the African Union ... Africa will get significantly poorer during a time period that will see global povertyreduced by a third," the SAIRR said. The study predicted that the number of people living on less than a dollar a day globally would fall to 810 million from 1.17 billion by 2015. "In sub-Saharan Africa the opposite will happen. From 241 million people living on less than a dollar a day in 1990 that figure increased to 315 million in 1999 and is set to reach over 400 million by 2015," it said.
The study also found that spending on healthcare had declined by 4.8 percent in real terms in South Africa between 1996 and 2003, and that the mortality rate for children under five years of age had risen by 63.9 percent between 1998 and 2002. The SAIRR said the proportion of tuberculosis cases recorded in the country that were also HIV positive related increased from 23.4 percent in 1995 to 62 percent in 2003.
SAPA adds that apart from North Africa and the Middle East -- where the poor would increase from six million in 1999 to eight million in 2015 -- Sub Saharan Africa was the only region in the world which is getting poorer.

Gmail - Development Gateway FDI Topic Page: Newsletter No. 12China and India rival one another and are aggressively challenging the United States as the world's most favored destination for FDI, according to the latest Foreign Direct Investment Confidence Index, an annual survey of executives from the world's largest companies conducted by global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney. For the third year in a row, the United States lagged China as the second most attractive investment destination in the world, and now India is not far behind. For the first time in the Index, India displaced the United States, now in third place, to become the second most attractive FDI location among manufacturing investors.

Telegraph | News | US megachurches bring shopping mall theology to thirtysomethings: "The number of megachurches in the country has risen from 20 to 740 in 20 years and newly released figures showed that their congregations went up four per cent last year, the fastest of any kind of church in the US. But what their events lack, and what makes them controversial among America's traditionalist Christians, is a clearly defined doctrine."

Telegraph | News | US megachurches bring shopping mall theology to thirtysomethings: "This is the United States' latest religious phenomenon. As Americans like going to shopping malls for all their consumer needs in one spot, so self-styled 'megachurches' are the fastest growing form of service in the country.
They offer a one-stop spiritual supermarket. At the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest just outside Los Angeles County, the second biggest church in the country with 20,000 worshippers each weekend, there are not only four main Sunday services but 18 small ones."

Cable TV Study - Violence, sex and profanity on cable - Wired For Raunch: "Overall, sexual content averaged 3.6 instances per hour. The fall '99 broadcast rate also was 3.6. "

Cable TV Study - Violence, sex and profanity on cable - Wired For Raunch: "The overall combined per-hour rate of sexual references, use of coarse language, and instances of violence was 21.7. The combined average found in the PTC's last study of prime time on the broadcast networks, which examined fall '99 programming, was 9.8. "

Asia Times - Asia's most trusted news source: "The population of the Arab world doubled during the 20 years between 1978 and 1998, and between 1998 and 2010 will have grown by yet another third. [6] "

Asia Times - Asia's most trusted news source: "Like everything in the Greater America of globalization, you have turned religion into a consumer goods. Americans choose among 139 major brands of Christianity. Your old churches close for lack of worshippers, and you build new churches in shopping malls where religion is sold along with sausages."

WIDER Publications there is much less consensus on whether utilities—power,water, transport infrastructure—should be in private or public ownership, although the fiscal crises of developing countries have nonetheless driven many governments to privatize their state utilities. Finally, countries are now keener to attract private capital flows, in part because of the decline in official flows, however private flows remain concentrated on a relatively narrow range of countries (China in particular).
DP2004/09 Tony Addison: Development Policy: An Introduction for Students (PDF 151KB)
http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/dps/dps2004/dp2004-009.pdf

WIDER Publications Reform may be opposed because it has large social costs, or because the losers from reform often have more incentive, and find it easier to organize themselves politically, than winners from reform.

The Observer | Comment | The coming war: "Richard Clark, Bush's former anti-terrorism coordinator who took charge in the White House on 9/11 and who retains close contact with intelligence agencies around the world, tells me that 'by almost any measure... the war on terrorism is being lost'. He cites the rate of terrorist atrocities, more than doubled since 9/11, and insists that the number of terrorists has risen to around 100,000 active 'jihadists' around the world. Chillingly, he believes these zealots are likely to be supported 'philosophically, politically, and perhaps with money' by upwards of 700 million Muslims - roughly half the global population of the Islamic faithful."

People's Daily Online -- China's reliance on imported oil grows: "China imported 76 million tons of crude oil in the first eight months of this year, making up 40 percent of the total domestic demand, a six percent rise over 2003.
China's year end oil import volume is expected to hit 100 million tons in 2004, and the country's demand for petroleum may exceed 400 million tons in 2020. But only approximately 160 million to 170 million tons of that amount can be produced in a year in China. "

WIDER PublicationsKey points:
• Getting trade policy right is crucial for economic development, and the merits of using import protection and other trade policy interventions are hotly debated.
• Import protection can stimulate investment in infant industries, but it can also reduce growth by distorting economic incentives and encouraging rent-seeking.
• The failure of many countries to achieve growth through import protection has led to a new emphasis on outward-orientated development, but this too requires a well-designed strategy, particularly in creating new skills to sell in the global market-place.

WIDER Publications Nevertheless, in the early era of development (from the 1940s to the 1970s), many policymakers saw the domestic market as the main motor for growth; in other words, inward-orientated development was favoured over outward-orientated development.

WIDER Publications However, in the latter 1990s a reaction against market liberalization and privatization set in, and the intellectual pendulum began to swing back towards the state, owing to sharp increases in inequality, rising concern over liberalization’s social effects, and the mismanagement of privatization. This was bound up in the intense debate about globalization (see Nayyar 2002). Economists increasingly recognized the importance of institutions in making the market mechanism work well for development and poverty reduction.

WIDER Publications The key elements of the Washington Consensus
are: fiscal discipline, reorientation of public expenditures, tax reform, financial liberalization, competitive exchange rates, trade liberalization, openness to foreign direct investment (FDI), privatization, deregulation, and secure property rights.

WIDER Publications Much of the debate on development strategy can be reduced to differences in views about how far market mechanisms (the operation of supply and demand) yield socially-desirable outcomes and therefore the virtue or otherwise of state action (where the definition of ‘socially desirable’ is also contested).....
People who are pessimistic about the market mechanism’s ability to deliver any or all of their chosen set of socially-desirable outcomes will favour a more active state, but their conceptualization of what the state should do can show a very wide range. At one extreme is central planning (practiced by the former Soviet Union) where society’s productive factors are allocated according to a plan without reference to market prices, and where state ownership of enterprises and property prevails. At the other end of the scale of the active state, there is the ‘European model’ where continental European states provide very high levels of public goods, regulate the market in the public interest, but otherwise encourage a very vigorous private sector.

WIDER Publications Economic growth can occur in many ways; population growth adds to the stock of workers and, provided that they are productive, to output; labour productivity rises through the accumulation of capital equipment together with technical progress.

WIDER Publications But when it comes to spending public money, basic pro-poor services—especially those that serve the rural poor—are often at the bottom of the list, after services that meet the needs of more vocal, and more effectively organized, non-poor groups (especially in urban political centres). A general bias against the rural areas and in favour of the urban areas (urban bias) was evident in much of post-independence Africa. Vocal and wealthy interests may effectively control the legislatures that determine the pattern of public spending and taxation (Central America is an example). And when economic crisis strikes, governments have too often let the burden of adjustment fall on the meagre services that are of benefit to the poor.

WIDER Publications Looking at economic growth (the rate of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) often presented on a per capita basis), Sub-Saharan Africa has performed very badly for much of the period since 1980 (with the notable exceptions of Botswana and Mauritius) and many African countries today have a level of per capita GDP below that of 1980: GDP per capita is below the level of the 1960s in countries that have experienced civil war (for example, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Liberia). At the other extreme, the growth of some East Asian countries has been at rates which are historically unprecedented. Whereas it took the United Kingdom—the world’s first industrial nation—54 years to develop from a low per-capita income economy to a middle-income economy, it took Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan only 10 years to achieve middle-income status (estimates from Parente and Prescott 2000). China is presently growing at over 9 per cent a year....the Middle East and North African countries raised their standard of living using their oil wealth, but have largely failed to achieve economic diversification and provide employment for their growing and young populations, while dictatorship and war have driven countries such as Iraq back down into the low-income country group.
In summary, the developing world today presents a very mixed picture: very fast growth and poverty reduction in much of Asia; slow or negative per capita GDP growth in SSA combined with rising poverty; high volatility in Latin America’s economic performance; and widespread stagnation in North Africa and the Middle East, despite often abundant natural resources.

WIDER Publications The paper then discusses how to achieve economic growth, starting with the caveat that growth must be environmentally sustainable, and moves on to the big question of the respective roles for the market mechanism and the state in allocating society’s productive resources.

"Visual summary of disasters in the past decade (International Red Cross, World Disaster Report 2004) :
Description:This graphic provides a a visual summary of disasters in the past decade. URL:http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/imagerepository/disastersgraphic750.jpg

Red Cross Red Crescent - World Disasters Report 2004 - Chapter 1: "In the last two decades, 'resilience' has become the buzzword to describe the capacity to survive, adapt and bounce back from crisis. "

Red Cross Red Crescent - World Disasters Report 2004 - Chapter 8: "The reason less people are dying from hydro-meteorological disasters, in particular, may be partly explained by better satellite forecasting and early warning systems. Equally, systematic disaster preparedness at community level has helped reduce death tolls. The fact that more people are being affected by disasters reflects a combination of factors: rising numbers of reported disasters; rapid population increase in poorer parts of the world; and rapid, unplanned development (particularly in urban areas). "

Red Cross Red Crescent - World Disasters Report 2004 - Chapter 8: "Despite the increased number of disasters, average annual death tolls have dropped from over 75,000 per year (1994 to 1998) to 59,000 per year (1999 to 2003). However, over the same period, the numbers affected continued to climb. For the first five years of the decade, an average of 213 million people were affected. The second half of the decade saw this figure rise by over 40 per cent to an average of 303 million per year. "

Red Cross Red Crescent - World Disasters Report 2004 - Chapter 8: "Both hydro-meteorological and geophysical disasters have become more common, becoming respectively 68 per cent and 62 per cent more frequent over the decade. This reflects longer-term trends. However, weather-related disasters still outnumber geophysical disasters by nine to one over the past decade. Among natural disasters, floods are the most reported events in Africa, Asia and Europe, while windstorms are most frequent in the Americas and Oceania. "

Red Cross Red Crescent - World Disasters Report 2004 - Chapter 8: "Over the past decade, the number of 'natural' and technological disasters has risen. From 1994 to 1998, reported disasters averaged 428 per year - from 1999 to 2003, this figure shot up by two-thirds to an average 707 disasters each year. The biggest rise was in countries of low human development, which suffered an increase of 142 per cent. Transport accidents registered the biggest rise, climbing 75 per cent during the second half of the decade. However, our tables only account for accidents where at least 10 people were killed or 100 affected by a single incident."

TFF Features US Empire - future & end: "'A country's violence, Hannah Arendt said, can destroy its power. The United States is moving quickly down this path. Do American leaders imagine that the people of the world, having overthrown the territorial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are ready to bend the knee to an American overlord in the twenty-frist? Do they imagine that allies are willing to become subordinates? Have they forgotten that people hate to be dominated by force? History of packed with surprises. The leaders of the totalitarian Soviet empire miraculously had the good sense to yield up their power without unleashing the tremendous violence that was at their fingertips. Could it be the destiny of the American republic, unable to resist the allure of an imperial delusion, to flare out in a blaze of pointless mass destruction?'"

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "global trend toward multipolarity, with each major power consolidating its interests within its region of influence...For example, in a multipolar world, China would attempt to increase its power in Asia, upping its rhetoric on Taiwan, gaining more influence in the South China Sea, and supporting pro-Beijing regimes in countries like Myanmar. Geopolitical concerns would push Japan and South Korea toward remilitarization. India could make a move on Pakistan. Russian encroachment on the Caucasus and Central Asia would result. Iran would continue its pursuit of regional power and nuclear weapons -- with Russian assistance -- and North Korea could be expected to sustain its belligerency in the face of the United States and its allies. "