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Pakistan: Realities beyond the clichés "Natural disasters have invariably been transformed into man-made disasters, through the unpreparedness and dysfunction of government institutions, the incompetence of its politicians, the greed of its economic agents, the tenuous nature of support from civil society..."
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Time to Deliver: The Group of 20 at the Crossroads The summit meeting of the Group of 20 most important industrialised and emerging countries (G20) in Toronto on 26-27 June 2010 reminded us that even extended informal management bodies in the global economy can only be as good as their member governments.
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Hungary's Defiance of IMF and EU Authorities The government of Hungary has taken on a lot of powerful interests in the last couple of months, and so far appears to be winning - despite provoking outrage from "everybody who's anybody." "The IMF should hold the line," shouted the Financial Times in an editorial the day after Hungary sent the IMF packing in July.
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Taming of Finance in Times of Austerity It was not long ago that we could say, "We are all Keynesians now." The financial sector and its free-market ideology had brought the world to the brink of ruin. Markets clearly were not self-correcting. Deregulation had proven to be a dismal failure.
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Special Report: Cotton Made in Africa “Love for Africa” was the motto at “Tchibo-World,” which took place in the third week of June in 2008. In addition to fair coffee and African furniture, 700,000 tops, skirts and table cloths bearing the Cotton made in Africa (CmiA) label have been sold in the 900 (app.) Tchibo retail stores.
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Pressure on Workers Grows as Crisis Hits Jobs The ITUC's Annual Survey of Trade Union Rights has documented a dramatic increase in the number of trade unionists murdered in 2009, with 101 killings - an increase of 30% over the previous year. The new Survey also reveals growing pressure on fundamental workers' rights around the world as the impact of the global economic crisis on employment deepened.
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Minister Niebel's Leitmotiv: "German Interests" Barely in office, German development minister Dirk Niebel unambiguously mapped out the road: he wants to ensure that development cooperation once again focuses on German interests. This position provoked-probably intentionally-protest from the greater part of the German development community.
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The Baltic Future of Greece Latvia and Estonia show us what Greece may look forward to if it follows the advice it gets from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union. As noted previously, Latvia has experienced the worst two-year economic downturn on record, losing more than 25% of GDP, a recent study shows.
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Strauss-Kahn on the Stand-by Agreement with Greece IMF Reaches Staff-level Agreement with Greece on €30 Billion Stand-By Arrangement. Statement of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF
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Greece: A European Crisis Needs European Solutions A group of economists has written an open letter to European policymakers criticising their collective failure to address the Greek crisis as a European crisis. It sets out the various causes of the Greek crisis, of which poor fiscal management by that country is only one, and points out the European dimension of the problems. It calls for decisive and coordinated policies by European and national actors to stem the crisis.
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IEG Evaluated World Bank's Gender Support The evaluation of the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the World Bank's support for gender issues between 2002 and 2008 is of significant relevance in the light of the Beijing+15 review and the launching of gender mainstreaming as crucial strategy for all institutions and organizations.
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BRICs Urged Reform of Financial Architecture At a summit in Brasilia the leading emerging economies said IMF and World Bank urgently need to address their "legitimacy deficits", and the world in the long-run should move from the dollar. The meeting underscored the need for a greater say of the new economic heavyweights of the South.
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How Top Banks Assist Producers of Cluster Bombs Almost a year and a half after the historic signing of the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) in Oslo in December 2008, 146 financial institutions from 15 countries around the world still provide over US$43bn worth of investments and financial services to seven producers of cluster bombs.
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Poverty Up as European Union Aid Falls The data for official development assistance (ODA) 2009 published by the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in April 2010 give a bleak picture. In a year of severe world economic crisis, ODA, generally acknowledged as the essential tool to fight poverty, stagnated. And EU ODA fell.
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The IMF's Green Fund Proposal Just eight weeks after IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn ventured the expertise of his organization to help the international community to "think outside of the box" on climate financing, the IMF staff has delivered: Print-fresh from Washington's 19th Street comes a short, but content-heavy paper.
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Millennium+10: Making the MDGs More Sustainable A series of meetings to prepare the upcoming MDG+10 Summit in New York has begun. A Special high-level event of UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) with the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), took place on 18-19 March 2010.
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Special Report: Towards a Global Ruling Class? Presumably, ever in history there was a small group of extremely rich people. Now, in the actual financial crisis, two new aspects seem to emerge: More obvious than ever since the end of World War II are governments eager to fill the coffers of the rich. Second, the former families of big money have immersed in a global ruling class extending beyond all geographic and sectoral limits.
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Lisbon Treaty and EU Development Cooperation In December 2009 the Lisbon Treaty came into force. What difference will this make for European Union development co-operation and humanitarian assistance? Mirjam van Reisen identifies the changes in the legal framework and interprets what difference this will make for the policy in practice.
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