Suchergebnisse

For months, the news out of West Africa has been unrelentingly grim. As of early December, the devastating Ebola epidemic had infected a reported 17,942 people and killed 6,388, according to the World Health Organization (WHO); the actual toll, which would also account for unreported cases, is presumed to be even higher. Yet there have been glimpses of good news amid the tragedy, including some emanating from unlikely sources: multinational companies that play an outsized role in West Africa's economy. As the Ebola epidemic continues to rage, therefore, foreign investors such as Firestone and ArcelorMittal find themselves cast on both sides of a complicated, perennial debate. In the end, the threat of Ebola is so dire that the world community would be foolish not to deploy whatever lines of resistance are available. That includes the WHO, Doctors Without Borders, armies, volunteers -- and, yes, even rapacious extractive industries. Because the problem here is not the power of foreign firms. It is the weakness of local states. Adapted from the source document.

Between 1965 and 1991, Singapore grew at an astonishing compound annual growth rate of nearly 14%. Critics of the island's performance accused its celebrated leader, Lee Kuan Yew, of thinly veiled tendencies toward communism and authoritarianism; they argued that the country's pace of growth was being artificially inflated by investment rates that would quickly prove impossible to sustain. Yet Lee and Singapore outlived, and outperformed, their detractors. The real reason behind Singapore's success was the country's unique understanding of what it had to offer the world and how to craft a development strategy around an honest appraisal of those assets. The Singaporean model is more powerful than dreaming and more likely to achieve results. And it is widely replicable, not with regard to the details of what Lee and his colleagues did, of course, but with regard to how. These are lessons that Cuba's next generation of leaders, unshackled from their predecessors' ambitious but ultimately unrealistic goals, would be well-advised to consider. Adapted from the source document.