A family's food: portraits from around the world

1 Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide. Total weekly food costs: US $500.07.

2. USA: The Revis family of North Carolina. Total weekly food costs: US $341.98.

3. Italy: The Manzo family of Sicily. Total weekly food costs: US $260.11.

4. Mexico: The Casales family of Cuernavaca. Total weekly food costs: US $189.09.

5. Poland: The Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna. Total weekly food costs: US $151.27.

6. Egypt: The Ahmed family of Cairo. Total weekly food costs: US $68.53.

7. Ecuador. The Ayme family of Tingo. Total weekly family costs: US$31.55

8. Bhutan: The Namgay family of Valle Shingkhey. Total weekly food costs: US $5.03.

9. Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing. Total weekly food costs: US $1.23.

PS: Received this in an email today, not sure of the source.

Echoing Green update

Echoing Green has pulled together the survey results from their 2008 semifinalists. Always an interesting and inspiring list.

If only all economists thought that

I think that economists have a responsibility to write in such a way to be read by ordinary people and by political leaders.

That was Paul Collier on his great book The Bottom Billion - which Collier will be awarded the $60,000 Lionel Gelber Prize for non-fiction book writing on Tuesday. Via Francisco Noguera.

IBM launches Corporate Service Corps program

I.B.M.’s program, which it calls the Corporate Service Corps... uses the volunteer ethos to bring together employees who might otherwise never meet, even as it gives I.B.M. a high profile in countries where it does not yet have a significant presence... The company views the Service Corps as a way to learn how well employees work with strangers, in strange lands, on unfamiliar projects. And it plans to use that knowledge to customize further development programs for the participants. Clearly, the Service Corps concept sits well with the I.B.M. employees. More than 5,500 of them, from more than 50 countries, applied for the program.

See the press release and NYTimes story.

Pop!Tech Fellows Program

This year Pop!Tech -always an amazing conference- is hosting a fellows program. The nomination period is open. This year's theme is "Scarcity and Abundance."

Clean technology event

The next Sustainability Practice Network event will be on "Clean Technology: Investment Boom of Investment Bubble?"

When: March 26th, 6-8pm
Where: 11-75, 44 West 44th Street, NYU Stern, NY, NY
Panelists:
Eron Bloomgarden, Country Director, United States, EcoSecurities
Bruce M. Kahn, Second Vice-President - Wealth Mangment, Smith Barney
Anastasia O'Rourke, Project Director for the Cleantech Venture Capital Report

Consumers are suddenly buying carbon offsets in droves, and the originators of credits are scrambling to invest that money in carbon-reducing projects or technologies of all kinds. Oil companies are slowly becoming "energy" companies, with stakeholder pressure to put their money into something, anything, that is not a fossil fuel. Venture capitalists and hedge funds are pouring money into green tech start-ups, both as an opportunity to fund the "next big thing" and as an ethical-investing play to attract new clients.

Given the sudden flow of capital into green technologies, are there enough good projects to go around - or are we creating an investment bubble? Is "cleantech" the new "dot-com" for overeager investors? This panel will explore which types of investments may be faddish and risky, and which have solid prospects.

Panelists will offer their own assessments of new green solutions such as clean coal, wind, mini hydro, geothermal, and solar.

Is growth really good?

Thomas Pogge has an article in the current issue of Dissent Magazine on "Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends and Political Choices."

The analysis shows that the problem of world poverty is both amazingly small and amazingly large. It is amazingly small in economic terms: The aggregate shortfall from the World Bank’s $2/day poverty line of all those 40 percent of human beings who now live below this line is barely $300 billion annually, much less than what the United States spends on its military. This amounts to only 0.7 percent of the global product or less than 1 percent of the combined GNIs of the high-income countries. On the other hand, the problem of world poverty is amazingly large in human terms, accounting for a third of all human deaths and the majority of human deprivation, morbidity, and suffering worldwide.

Most of the massive severe poverty persisting in the world today is avoidable through more equitable institutions that would entail minuscule opportunity costs for the affluent. It is for the sake of trivial economic gains that national and global elites are keeping billions of human beings in life-threatening poverty with all its attendant evils such as hunger and communicable diseases, child labor and prostitution, trafficking, and premature death. Considering this situation from a moral standpoint, we must now assess growth—both globally and within most countries—in terms of its effect on the economic position of the poor.

Also see the IMF on understanding growth.

Environmental Capital

The WSJ's Environmental Capital - covering the intersection of business and the environment - has quickly become one of my daily reads. The comments sections gets a good amount of traffic as well.

Private health care can help Africa

In the coming decade, sub-Saharan Africa’s health care market will grow briskly, and the private sector’s share of it will increase as improved macroeconomic conditions in much of the region fuel rising demand for health care. Our research suggests that sub-Saharan Africa’s health care expenditures will more than double by 2016, to $35 billion a year. The private sector will likely garner 60 percent of this amount.

To meet the increased demand, about $25 billion to $30 billion in total incremental investment is required by 2016 to finance physical assets such as hospitals, clinics, and drug-distribution centers. Governments will certainly receive some of this investment. However, in countries receptive to private-sector activity, we expect that between 45 and 70 percent of the funds will be invested in the private sector. Regionally, this equates to between $11 billion and $20 billion over the next 10 years.

See the McKinsey Quarterly article. Also see the full IFC Report.

James Surowiecki on microfinance

Microfinance “rarely generates new jobs for others”...This matters, because businesses that can generate jobs for others are the best hope of any country trying to put a serious dent in its poverty rate. Sustained economic growth requires companies that can make big investments—building a factory, say—and that can exploit the economies of scale that make workers more productive and, ultimately, richer....

What poor countries need most, then, is not more microbusinesses. They need more small-to-medium-sized enterprises, the kind that are bigger than a fruit stand but smaller than a Fortune 1000 corporation. In high-income countries, these companies create more than sixty per cent of all jobs, but in the developing world they’re relatively rare, thanks to a lack of institutions able to provide them with the capital they need.

Exactly.

Job: Analyst at SeaChange Capital Partners

SeaChange Capital Partners, the nonprofit financing firm started by former Goldman Sachs senior executives last year, is looking for an analyst as well as a director of their Donor Network.

Would six-figure salaries attract better teachers?

"A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly higher pay for teachers is the key to improving schools.

The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide"

Full article in the NY Times.

The state of philanthropy

McKinsey has released their global survey: State of Corporate Philanthropy.

Conference: Cracking the Capital Markets III

Registration is open for the March 10-11 microfinance conference sponsored by ACCION and Credit Suisse, Cracking the Capital Markets III.

Deloitte announces "Problem Solvers" fund

Deloitte today announced the formal launch of its Problem Solvers Fund, a national grant program that aligns the organization’s charitable giving with its strategic approach of leveraging intellectual capital to strengthen the nonprofit sector.

See the press release. Via Phil Cubeta. This comes weeks after the launch of their pro-bono initiative.

Attracting skilled workers is now a crime?

The NYTimes reports:

Rich countries are poaching so many African health workers that the practice should be viewed as a crime, a team of international disease experts say in the British medical journal The Lancet...“The resulting dilapidation of health infrastructure contributes to a measurable and foreseeable public health crisis,” the article said. “The practice should therefore be viewed as an international crime.”

No. Absolutely not*. Unless you are charging governments -domestic and foreign- for failing to improve the conditions and opportunities in these skill-exporting countries and the state of nursing schools and education levels in the importing countries. Don't blame the clinics for paying the salaries and arranging the visas.

See these two reports by the Center for Global Development: Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility and Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World. As well as this piece by the NYTimes, "Should We Globalize Labor Too?"

*Admittedly, I have not read the Lancet article yet. I can't find it online yet - so will blame Reuters for now if I have misunderstood their quote.