It is now common knowledge that economic, monetary, and financial threats are rising and interacting in dangerous ways with various other social, political, geopolitical, environmental, health, and technological developments. And there is little reason to believe that today’s leaders can manage these multiplying risks. Read More Here
The most formidable demographic challenge facing the world is no longer rapid population growth, but population ageing. Thoughtful preparedness—combining behavioural changes, investment in human capital and infrastructure, policy and institutional reforms, and technological innovations—can enable countries to meet the challenge and take advantage of the opportunities presented by demographic change. Read More Here
The COVID-19 crisis brought a significant increase in government and multilateral investments in public health in Africa. If leveraged appropriately, these funds could substantially boost Africa’s capacity to respond to future health emergencies, endemic diseases, and pandemics. Read More Here
Forget the poetic flap of a butterfly’s wings in Beijing causing rain in Central Park. Climate issues in Asia-Pacific are measured in superlatives. The world’s biggest population. Two of the three largest carbon dioxide-emitting countries and the largest share of emissions globally. The most exposed to extreme weather events. Some of the smallest and most vulnerable […]
According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes…In other words, an end can occur not because a disease has been vanquished but because people grow tired of panic mode and […]
Since the Wuhan lockdown began, there have been tensions between local government and the central organs of the state. There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy ‘throwing woks’. Read Here – […]
Beijing’s decision to quarantine Wuhan in central China to try to contain a deadly disease outbreak presents unprecedented challenges as it is dealing with a city about five times the size of London. The central government imposed the lockdown to stop the spread of a newly identified coronavirus that has killed 17 people in the […]
Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. […]
Globalization is helping to spread a new generation of mosquito-borne illnesses once confined to the tropics, such as dengue, perhaps a thousand years old, and chikungunya and Zika, both of which were first identified in humans only in 1952. Meanwhile, climate change is dramatically expanding the ranges in which mosquitoes and the diseases they carry can […]
Predictions of a coming Indian golden age are typically based on two trends. The first is urbanization. Between 2010 and 2050, India’s urban population will grow by as much as 500 million—the largest projected urban population growth in world history. Historically, urbanization has been linked with rising literacy, the establishment of a middle class, economic dynamism, […]
looking beyond borders 