Economics

It's quite hard to effectively ban something in Europe that's available legally in California. Often bans that are porous put up barriers that primarily affect the poor more than the rich.

Banning a market in which some people nevertheless want to participate may be the first step in designing the illegal black market that will emerge.

Money allows you to deal with anonymous other people, not just your kin. There are things we do in families that we would find objectionable if they were transactions.

Not only are incomes being lost — a sense of community, a sense of pride, a sense of belonging has also been lost. Those things clearly matter for human wellbeing. We’re just not very good at measuring them.

Economic growth is a means. The goal must be something else. It must be shared prosperity. It must be happier lives. It must be communities in which we all feel that we belong. It must be mutual respect. Those are ends.

GDP mostly measures how money changes hands. War boosts GDP. Oil spills boost GDP. Cancer, bushfires, drug addiction, gambling addiction, health crises — these all boost GDP. It still rises when society is suffering immensely. We can put a carbon market on top of that, but we're still operating within an economic system built on a logic of destruction.

Essentially, corruption entails a misallocation of entrepreneurial talent into activities that carries individual benefit, but has destructive or unproductive consequences for society at large. Because of its essentially predatory nature, it reduces productive investment, leads to an outflow of talent, lowering growth rates and increasing income inequalities.

The countries that will grow fastest over the next few years will be those countries that have done the most during this past commodity and growth cycle to invest their gains in infrastructure and education and where the gains have been distributed is such a manner so that the middle class have been growing most substantially.

Monetary support for development in itself will not accelerate growth in the real economy to artificial or unsustainable levels. It is how the finance is used – or misused.

The essence of the evolving global economic system is that all countries are dependent on one another in some way, and this includes finance. Emerging and developing countries are dependent on capital inflows from developed regions. But developed regions are also dependent on funds from the developing world!

Over Thousands of Years, globalisation has progressed through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural influences and dissemination of knowledge and understanding

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist & Philosopher of Development & Welfare

Concepts like democracy and human rights will always remain fairly abstract if you cannot feed your family. It is therefore important to ensure that job creation, and protecting livelihoods occurs early on in the process.

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From about 2000, Africa has come into an economic renaissance: Between 2000 and 2008, we saw a marked improvement in macro-economic stability, with inflation falling and interest rates hitting single digits even in areas like Nigeria. We have seen robust GDP growth, 17% in Angola and 5.5% in Ghana and Nigeria in 2008 for example, combined with increases in FDI, which was up 25% year on year between 2000 and 2005.

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Climate change is a J-curve, not linear. Rates of change globally are occurring at a faster pace than the global population expects, and will impact food production.

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Historically, Africa has been viewed by many countries as a 'burden,' whereas the BRIC's see it as an enormous opportunity. To put this in context, Europe has twice as much trade with Africa as does even China, so Europe must wake up to the fact that Africa is an important and relevant opportunity, not a burden.

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When you look at the numbers, over half the sub-Saharan African population is under 18 years old, versus Latin America, where over half the population is under 25 years old and Asia, where it is under 35 years old. In short, these EM populations are young, expansive and dynamic, not like the stable, more risk-averse populations of the world's developed economies.

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