What We’re Reading 6/22/09

Jun 22nd, 2009 3:36 PM UTC
By Chris Scott

Financial Times: World Bank warns on emerging markets
Leading developed nations are misguided in focusing efforts on restoring demand in their own economies, the World Bank will say today. In its annual Global Development Finance report, the World Bank expects private capital flows to developing countries to fall almost three-quarters this year. The Bank says that emerging markets are fundamental for a return to global growth. The drop in credit flows will undermine investment in emerging and developing economies, with a consequent hit on rich country exports of capital-intensive goods – one of the sectors hardest hit in the global recession. In poorer developing counties, which contributed least to the crisis, the concern is that recent years of rising incomes will end with the risk of a backlash and a return to the inward-looking domestic policies so damaging to prosperity.

Reuters: Africa Worst at Meeting U.N. Anti-Poverty Goals
Ethiopia and Cape Verde are the only African countries on target to meet U.N. anti-poverty goals, a U.N. development chief told Reuters. U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty were agreed at a United Nations summit in 2000 and set African and other poor countries targets to raise living standards by 2015. The U.N. Development Fund said that Africa has made the least progress in reaching these goals because many African countries did not get the support they needed – in both funding and policy – from the international community. The U.N. official emphasized that only $3 billion of the $25 billion that G8 nations pledged for Africa by 2010 had so far reached countries it was earmarked for.

Wall Street Journal: A Recipe for Reviving Doha
The European Commissioner for Trade and the Australian Minister for Trade write in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that it is possible to re-ignite the Doha round of trade talks. Although many believe there are ‘irreconcilable differences’ between countries on the substance of the negotiations, the ministers argue that completing a Doha deal would immediately give a serious confidence boost to the world economy. They also believe that the agreement should reflect all of the WTO’s 153 members, rather than seeming a creation of the world’s greatest powers. If the new talks fail, though, “the multilateral system would take a serious hit beyond trade policy, bringing into question our ability to solve other global problems like climate change.”

Boston Globe: The US Must Keep Its Promise on AIDS Programs
The Boston Globe published a letter by the Director of Physicians for Human Rights which said that the US must keep its promise on AIDS Programs in Africa. She says that AIDS clinics in Africa are turning away patients in need of treatment because of stagnating funding levels. And with drug stocks dwindling, they run the risk of returning to the days when one member of a family received treatment as their spouses and children left clinics empty-handed and were left to die. She says that as “As our nation weighs how to best invest in the health of the world’s most vulnerable people, we must remember that the United States has the resources and the responsibility to keep its promise to scaling up HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs.”

-Grace Lamb-Atkinson

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