What few Americans knew is that the Arab World‘s love for Western-branded fast food is seemingly bottomless, to the extent that in the region’s wealthiest oil exporting countries, high-end fast food restaurants offering $US40 hamburgers and French fries can find a willing clientele. Even ubiquitous brands such as McDonald’s and Burger King can sell their […]
WHERE do the world’s poor live? The obvious answer: in poor countries. But in a recent series of articles Andy Sumner of Britain’s Institute of Development Studies showed that the obvious answer is wrong*. Four-fifths of those surviving on less than $2 a day, he found, live in middle-income countries with a gross national income […]
Over the past decade and a half, Indonesia’s democratic transition has been praised (including by me) as one of the most impressive of any developing country in the world. The distance traveled from the chaos, and potential split-up of the country, in the late 1990s, to the relative stability and high growth of today, is […]
For the last 40 years, Americans have lagged in recognizing the declining fortunes of their foreign rivals. In the 1970s they thought the Soviet Union was 10 feet tall — ascendant even though corruption and inefficiency were destroying the vital organs of a decaying communist regime. In the late 1980s, they feared that Japan was […]
Africa is no longer the “lost continent” of popular imagination. The region has been growing rapidly for over a decade, the private sector is expanding, and a new class of consumers is wielding considerable spending power. And because of its young and growing population, the sky is the limit for future growth: Between 2010 and […]
Read Here – Arab News
At one time in the recent past, leaders in developing countries and in international organizations decried the “brain drain” that led the best and brightest in what we used to call the “third world” to emigrate to the West to take advantage of superior educational and employment opportunities. The United States was the destination of […]
Did President Obama watch Egypt swing from pivotal ally to potential opponent? Versions of that question have hovered around the presidential campaign from the early Republican primary debates through Mitt Romney’s comments on his recent trip to Israel about the Islamist electoral victories in the wake of the Arab spring. Read Here – New York Times
Over the past few years, largely out of sight, governments have been clawing back freedoms on the internet, turning an invention that was designed to emancipate the individual into a tool for surveillance and control. In the next few months, this process is set to be enshrined internationally, amid plans to put cyberspace under the authority […]
looking beyond borders 