In recent decades, failure to sustain economic progress has been blamed on a supposed middle-income country (MIC) trap. Such blaming obscures as much as it supposedly explains.
US President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific Framework for Prosperity (
IPEF) is the economic arm of his administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, aimed at countering China’s influence in the region.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure and service provision are both costly and risky. Worse, PPPs typically fail to ensure universal, let alone fair access to public amenities.
Governments the world over are worried about investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) rules. These allow foreign investors to sue them for billions over new laws or policies reducing their profits.
Smallholder agricultural enterprises in Africa face a lot of challenges getting loans from financial institutions like banks due to the stringent requirements they can hardly fulfil. Investor confidence is usually lacking, given the risks involved in this sector of the economy.
Diego has just enrolled to study journalism at a university in the Venezuelan capital and, with 2,000 dollars that his family members managed to gather, has bought his first car, a small 2007 Ford that can take him to class from his home in the neighboring Caribbean port city of La Guaira.
They do not have a pension nor financial support from families or relatives, but they have themselves. Now they have become collectors of plastic waste, which they turn into products as they battle for survival - earning money from the growing plastic pollution in Zimbabwe.
In addition to being a majestic river - the second longest in South America after the Amazon - the Paraná River is the waterway through which a large part of the area's primary goods are exported. Today, its economic importance has sparked an unexpected diplomatic conflict between Argentina and the countries with which it shares the basin.
At the entrance to the municipality of Paraíso, in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco, there is a traffic circle that displays three things that are emblematic of the area: crabs, pelicans and mangroves.
“We are under extreme stress about skyrocketing prices of essential edible commodities and the cost of gas and electricity. The situation is becoming worse because every day. We must pay more for wheat flour, sugar, tea, milk, oil, etc.,” Azizullah Khan, a civil servant, says.
French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) are moving with pace in the development of oil and gas projects with a potential investment portfolio estimated at more than USD 15 billion. IPS looks at the project's human rights record for the compensation of affected communities.
Experts at the Africa Food Systems Forum (AGRF) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, have called on African governments to make and review existing policies to protect the processing and agro-industrialisation of locally produced agricultural products.
Courage, sadness and impotence are expressed by Mayan indigenous activist Sara López when she talks about the Mayan Train (TM), the Mexican government's biggest infrastructure project, which will cross the town where she lives and many others in the Yucatan Peninsula.
International governance arrangements are in trouble. Condemned as ‘dysfunctional’ by some, multilateral agreements have been discarded or ignored by the powerful except when useful to protect their interests or provide legitimacy.
At this year’s G7 summit in Japan, global leaders emphasized the importance of unity as the world navigates grave threats to multilateralism. The message was clear - trusted global platforms for dialogue and solutions are extremely crucial in current times.
Due to insufficient pressure water does not make it up to Elliot Escobar's house in the Mexican municipality of Matías Romero, where he lives on the second floor, so he pipes it up with a hose from his sister's home, located on the first floor of the house shared by the two families.
Currency values and foreign exchange rates change for many reasons, largely following market perceptions, regardless of fundamentals. Market speculation has worsened volatility, instability and fragility in most economies, especially of small, open, developing countries.
One message that was repeated throughout last month’s summit on a so-called “
New Global Financing Pact” was that developing countries urgently need mass financing to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergency. And there is not enough of it in public coffers.
For years, self-employed and unemployed women in Zimbabwe formed neighbourhood "clubs" where they pooled money together for everything from buying bulk groceries to be shared at the end of the year to meeting funeral expenses.
The sanctions against Russian oligarchs who hold billions of dollars have mostly failed to have a real impact beyond freezing a few yachts and properties. So, what went wrong? Now we know.
The conflict in Sudan is impacting the economy in Egypt, and those who make their living moving goods across the borders have spent weeks hoping the situation will normalize.