China’s meteoric rise has alarmed some observers, say Yang Fujia and Colin Campbell. Joint education projects will help ensure that it is peaceful The rise of China is a reality. The Chinese economy has grown at an astonishing 9% or so a year since the late 1970s. In 2004, China’s national income reached Rmb12.5 trillion…
Flat taxes stimulate growth and employment and, paradoxically, higher tax revenues, says Steve Forbes The flat tax is a powerful generator of economic growth. It is very simple: a single, ideally low, tax rate is applied to personal incomes after generous exemptions for adults and children alike. For businesses, the profits tax would also be…
A number of events on the horizon could combine to form the “perfect storm” for emerging markets, says Kristin Forbes, unless governments and the international financial institutions act now In October 1991 a “perfect storm” swept across the Atlantic, wreaking havoc and killing several Massachusetts fishermen (in a story later popularized by Hollywood). A perfect…
Turkey has as much to offer the European Union as the EU has to offer Turkey, says Tayyip Erdogan Turkey and the European Union need each other. This is because Turkey’s future membership of the EU is a synthesis of the challenges and opportunities facing us at a global level. Turkey has been a part…
Bioterrorism should be taken as seriously as biological attacks from rogue states or a natural epidemic, says Gerald Epstein It is difficult to prove how serious the threat from bioterrorism is. True, several nations’ bioweapons programmes demonstrated, long ago, that bacteria and viruses can kill over large areas and place many thousands of lives at…
The threat of violence undertaken with atomic weapons has never been so great, Mohamed ElBaradei tells Taimur Ahmad The worries that plague Mohamed ElBaradei have scarcely been eased by the Nobel Peace Prize that he won last October. If anything, the 63-year-old Egyptian diplomat who runs the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear…
Democracy cannot take root in countries such as Iran unless individuals enjoy freedom of expression, says Shirin Ebadi The struggle in undemocratic, especially Muslim, countries to cultivate a political culture that would allow democracy to flourish has been a long one. Iranians, for example, have tried for more than a century to install democracy. Since…
Global Agenda brings you the world’s experts. India and China India has leapt in the Global Competitiveness Report rankings. Nandan Nilekani and Manmohan Singh trumpet India’s progress. Supachai Panitchpakdi says China’s advance should be welcomed, not feared. Orit Gadiesh says Chinese companies are taking on the world. David Arkless examines their growing pains. The changing…
The decline in audiences for television news is no reason to dumb down, says the BBC’s Mark Damazer. There is still hunger for serious news, albeit delivered through more and different channels It is now 13 years since a BBC boss asked me to write a paper about the decline in audiences for television news…
The growth of consumer culture for children threatens to erode the very way we assess value, warns Daniel Thomas Cook Corporate interests have succeeded in making childhood a focus for aggressive capital investment. In recent decades, a $100-billion global children’s consumer industry – centred in North America and Europe, with a presence in Israel, Egypt,…
