China Communist Party Unveils New Leadership With Xi Jinping At Top

China‘s ruling Communist Party unveiled its new leadership line-up on Thursday to steer the world’s second-largest economy for the next five years, with Vice President Xi Jinping taking over from outgoing President Hu Jintao as party chief. Xi was also named head of the party’s Central Military Commission, state news agency Xinhua said. The other new members […]

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What Rising TV Ownership Reveals About Africa’s Future

The usual story about African development over the last few decades is, simply, that it hasn’t developed. It is a region mired in permanent poverty—destined by geography or disease burden or corruption or ethnic division to everlasting misery. That story should be placed in the fiction aisle. Quality-of-life measures have been improving for decades across […]

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Forward!

It’s time to think legacy. For the last four years, President Obama has had plenty of reasons to pull his punches: at first, he was a new and inexperienced president, relatively unversed in how to make Congress and the executive branch work, and he mostly avoided going out on limbs. Then it was time to […]

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Egypt Tries Undoing Mubarak Deals

As Egypt struggles to revive an economy battered by last year’s uprising against Hosni Mubarak, private lawsuits are attempting to overturn the sale of state assets during his rule. The court actions present the new government with a dilemma: It’s trying to attract foreign investment while addressing the demands of a population that stages protests […]

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Wild Weather Doesn’t Have to Cause a Malthusian Nightmare

Almost 1 billion people around the world don’t get enough to eat. Climate change, which is already contributing to food-price increases in poor and prosperous countries alike, promises to make it even harder to feed a growing population. The world produces enough food to provide its 7 billion people with the roughly 2,700 calories they need daily. […]

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Indian Firms Reap Bitter Harvest In Africa

Indian companies which invested in controversial deals involving hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Ethiopia have found themselves out of their depth in a fast-growing African economy that is still in the process of building critical transport and irrigation networks. Read Here – The Hindu

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China’s ‘Image’ Problem in Africa

Since the 1950s, China has effectively used the doctrine of non-interference to guide its foreign policy agenda in the developing world. In its recent economic and diplomatic engagements in Africa, the policy has come under intense scrutiny and censure as Beijing attempts to strategically navigate the contours of resource acquisition alongside south-south solidarity with its […]

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No Wars for Water

The world economic downturn and upheaval in the Arab world might grab headlines, but another big problem looms: environmental change. Along with extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels, and other natural hazards, global warming disrupts freshwater resource availability — with immense social and political implications. Earlier this year, the Office of the Director of National […]

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As India’s Growth Rates Hit The Buffers, The Poor Are Sinking Beneath A Tide Of Seeming Government indifference to their plight as politicians focus on looking after their cronies. Is it goodbye to the Asian tiger?

India’s remarkable growth figures have, however, successfully masked a far less appealing set of statistics which shows that, despite the success of India’s middle class, when you look at government delivery of basic services to the poor, India has been struggling against being hyphenated less with China than with its more desperate and impoverished neighbours […]

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Africa’s Big Boom

Africa is undergoing a period of unprecedented economic growth. According to The Economist, six of the ten fastest-growing countries in 2011 were in Africa. Average external debt on the continent has fallen from 63% of GDP in 2000 to 22.2% this year, while average inflation now stands at 8%, down from 15% in 2000. This positive trend […]

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