OECD: Time, Trade and Trade Facilitation

Time is money and a lot of money and opportunities are being lost due to painstakingly long customs procedures, waiting times at ports and long lead times. Although “time is money” is a universal idiom, few have looked into how

Read More

World Bank Group: Financial Inclusion – Banking on Low-Income Households

Financial exclusion restricts economic opportunity and constrains poverty reduction. Yet today there are an estimated 2.5 billion adult people worldwide who go about their lives without any formal financial services such as bank accounts. According to the World Bank’s Global

Read More

Jesse Lauriston Livermore: The Boy Plunger

Playing the stock market in order to make a bundle is not a pursuit deemed suitable for the faint of heart. For every story starring an investor who struck it rich, there are countless others of poor souls who lost

Read More

United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS): Sustainable Results in Challenging Environments

From building shelters in Haiti or helping to improve the school system in South Sudan, to buying medicines in Myanmar or equipment for clearing the snowy passes of Afghanistan – UNOPS provides sustainable infrastructure, project management and procurement services in

Read More

Michael Pettis: Markets Rationale and Volatility – The Case of China

Last month’s award of the Nobel Prize in Economics set off a great deal of chuckling because one of the three recipients, Eugene Fama, received the award for saying that markets are efficient at capital allocation and another, Robert Schiller,

Read More

Wang Meng: A Champ Tumbles and Falls on Her Way to the Top

We all crash into the barricades from time to time and Wang Meng, China’s most successful winter Olympian ever, did so at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. However, this young lady got up, brushed herself down and went on to finish

Read More

Harbingers of Climate Doom Gear Up Over Storm

Extreme weather events such as prolonged heat waves in Argentina, killer typhoons in the Pacific and violent storms lashing the UK are a godsend for doom-and-gloom scientists banging the climate change drum. Nicholas Stern, author of a 2006 report on

Read More

Zurich Insurance Company: Insurance in Latin America – Economic Growth Brings New Opportunities

To continue its success story, Latin America will need to address a number of socio-economic challenges. Insurance has the potential to help the nations of the region to tackle such challenges. Yet insurance potential of the region remains largely untapped.

Read More

Mario Draghi: ECB President Gearing Up for Eurozone Growth Spurt

Italian banker Mario Draghi entertains no doubts at all: Pessimist, sceptics, naysayers and assorted worrywarts severely underestimate the resolve extant – political and otherwise – to forge the euro into a resounding success. Then again, the president of the European

Read More

IFC, ECOM Training Helps Women Farmers Boost Income, Productivity

Women make up 80 percent of coffee farmers in North Sumatra of Indonesia and 50 percent in Lam Dong of Vietnam. The coffee beans that they grow can change their families’ lives. IFC’s partnership with global coffee trader ECOM Agroindustrial

Read More