This International Women’s Day post comes from Serena Tramonti (right), with contributions from Rania Tarazi (left), both of Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) team Three years ago, weeks before the centenary of International Women’s Day,  I remember sitting in my living room in Manchester, watching on TV with hope and astonishment the brave women and men who were taking

By blog-reader standards, the Economist’s Special Reports can be pretty long (15 pages in this case), but they are sharply written and stuffed full with great stats. As long as they steer clear of economic policy, they are also not as ideology-laden as some of the magazine’s other content. So if you can spare half an hour, read this week’s report

This piece appears in today’s Ottawa Citizen The past five years has been a period of extraordinary global turbulence. The turmoil has struck as three “shocks” — the financial crisis, a breakdown in the world food system, and the Arab Spring — combined with a slow motion train wreck in the form of the seemingly inexorable onset of chaotic climate

Just before the Arab Spring kicked off in early 2011, I was happily linking to some really interesting work by Dani Rodrik (one of my development heroes) on ‘muslim tigers’, pointing out that in terms of human development, the top 10 performers since 1970 were not the usual suspects (East Asia, Nordics) but Muslim countries – Oman, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia,

Here’s what the new edition of FP2P adds to the first (in case you want to save yourselves a few quid). This was recently published by the UN University as part of its ‘WIDER Angle’ series Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose theweaknesses of any text.