A Conceptual Overview to Understand Commodities, Linkages and Industrial Development in Africa

Sub-Sahara African commodity exporting economies have benefitted greatly from the commodities boom of the past decade. The conventional wisdom argues that resource extraction is corrosive of industrial development due to a combination of the macroeconomic consequences of resource exploitation and the assumed enclave nature of mineral and energy extraction. The paper challenges this pessimistic ‘resource curse’ argument, arguing that there are unexploited opportunities for promoting industrial development through the development of linkages from the commodities sector. In particular, these opportunities may be greater for backward than for forward linkages, particularly in the minerals and energy sectors. In making this case, this Discussion Paper draws on the experience of high-income countries which have resource-intensive economic structures, the geographical specificity of many resources and the growing interest of large resource-extracting firms in outsourcing the production of inputs which are outside of their core competences, It sets out a general model of linkages between industry and services and the commodities sector which distinguishes between win-win and win-lose outcomes. The paper concludes with a brief review of the reasons why Governments might wish to intervene to support linkages between the commodities and the industrial and service sectors

Girls Count: A Global Investment & Action Agenda

Explains how girls' welfare affects overall economic and social outcomes. Outlines steps to disaggregate health, education, and other data by age and gender; invest strategically in girls' programs; and ensure equitable benefits for girls in all sectors

Internet: The Mainstreaming of Online Life

Presents findings from a survey that examines the widespread adoption of the Internet in the past decade, and its dramatic impact on communication patterns and on the way Americans seek information

Not Found in Tibetan Society : Culture, Childbirth, and a Politics of Life on the Roof of the World

This article explores the work of culture and politics in the context of health-development interventions. Specifically, I discuss a maternal-child health project that was conceived and executed in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China, and the place of engaged medical anthropology therein. This work takes inspiration from Pigg\u27s (1997) insights about the ways health-development programs can adopt specific interpretive lenses that create categories of being and experience such as Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs). This article illustrates the ways such categories circulate to serve the needs of governmental and non-governmental organizations, and, in the process, how they run the risk of essentializing culture or eliding the complex realities in which people live. Yet this article also argues that such elision is neither a given nor one-sided. Rather, such programs are enmeshed within a realpolitik in places such as Tibet where the trope of “culture” is both problematic and deeply influential, and where demographics (including maternal and infant mortality statistics) are politicized in particular ways. The article argues that far from being “anti-political,” (Ferguson 1994) such health development efforts are domains in which a “politics of life” (Fassin 2007) inheres. Even so, such efforts can be successful, and can help to nuance and ground the ephemeral yet powerful concepts of structural violence and social suffering

“Dreams Don’t Come True in Eritrea”: Anomie and Family Disintegration due to the Structural Militarization of Society

This article analyzes contemporary Eritrea’s acute crisis within the framework of the theory of anomie. It is based on the hypothesis that militarization, forced labor, mass exodus, and family disintegration can be interpreted as the consequences of two incompatible norm and value systems: the collectivist, nationalistic, and militaristic worldview of the former liberation front and ruling party People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), and the traditional cultural system of Eritrea’s society. In 2002 the regime introduced an unlimited “development campaign,” thereby forcing large parts of the society to live as conscripts and perform unpaid labor. This has caused a mass exodus of young people and a rapid process of family disintegration. The article is based on empirical fieldwork and evaluates the ongoing developments, which have led to rapid economic decline and the destabilization of the entire fabric of society.Eritrea, militarization, forced labor, family disintegration, mass exodus, anomie

Health Care Costs and the Arc of Innovation

Health care costs continue their inexorable rise, threatening America’s long-term fiscal stability, competitiveness, and standard of living. Over the past half-century, efforts to rein in spending have uniformly failed. In this Article, we explain why, breaking with standard accounts of regulatory and market dysfunction. We point instead to the nexus of economics, mutual empathy, and social expectations that drives medical innovation and locks in low-value technologies. We show how law reflects and reinforces this nexus and how and why health-policy-makers avert their gaze. Next, we propose to circumvent these barriers instead of surmounting them. Rather than targeting today’s excessive spending, we seek to leverage available legal tools to bend the arc of innovation, away from marginally-beneficial technology and toward high-value advances. To this end, we set forth a novel, value-based approach to pricing and patent protection—one that departs sharply from current practice by rewarding innovators in proportion to the therapeutic benefits new tests and treatments yield. Using cancer therapy as an example, we explain how emerging information technology and large troves of electronic clinical data are opening the way to near-real-time assessment of efficacy. We then show how such assessment can power ongoing adjustment of pricing and patent terms. Finally, we offer a blueprint for how laws governing health care payment and intellectual property can be tailored to realize this value-focused vision. For the reasons we lay out, the transformation of incentives we urge will both slow clinical spending growth and greatly enhance the social value that this spending yields

The influence of childhood circumstances on adult health

Early childhood is acknowledged as the most crucial developmental period in a person’s life; it creates a foundation for the later years and offers a critical opportunity to establish good health and learning outcomes for a lifetime.  As part of our broader focus on chronic disease prevention policy, the Mitchell Institute is looking at the costs and benefits of action (and inaction) in early childhood and the evidence that indicates a much-needed shift in health policy. To inform this work, the Institute commissioned Dr Kim Sweeny of the Victoria Institute of Strategic Economic Studies to look at what is currently known about the relationship between socio-economic disadvantage in early childhood and poor health and education outcomes in adulthood

A Time Like No Other: Charting the Course of the Next Revolution - A Summary of the Boston Indicators Report 2004-2006

Summarizes findings from the Boston Indicators Project, a long-term research study of the city's economic, social, and technical progress across ten sectors