'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
The problems of eradicating Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are not only medical, but also linked “to a variety of political and social factors”, the head of the UN mission in the country told the Security Council on Wednesday [24 July 2019]*
The 2019 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) data and publication “Illuminating Inequalities” released on 11 July 2019 shed light on the number of people experiencing poverty at regional, national and subnational levels, and reveal inequalities across countries and among the poor themselves.*
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22 July 2019, Valencia (Spain) – FAO‘s Director-General José Graziano da Silva urged cities around the world today to redouble their efforts to promote healthier and more sustainable urban diets and food systems to tackle the increasing levels of overweight and obesity.*
– International financial institutions (IFIs) have typically imposed wide-ranging policy reforms – called ‘conditionalities’ – in exchange for country governments to secure access to financial assistance.
While IFIs may demand anti-corruption policies, other IFI policy conditionalities, such as the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), can create new rentier opportunities, undermining government will and capacity to curb corruption.
IMF cure worse than disease?
Statistical analysis of International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities on 141 developing countries from 1982 to 2014 has found that requiring privatization of SOEs has undermined anti-corruption efforts.
The World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO, named Switzerland as the world’s most innovative country on Wednesday [24 July 2019], during the launch of its latest Global Innovation Index, (GII) in the Indian capital New Delhi.
