A large majority of people in the developing nations are below the poverty line. They are deprived of adequate access to such basic needs as health, education, housing, food, security, employment, justice and equality. Sustainable livelihood and social and political participation of the vulnerable groups are the major problems of developing nations. Governments have failed to guarantee the fundamental rights.In India, almost 94 percent of women workers are engaged in the informal sector; about 2

NEW HAVEN ― You might think that we have been living in a post-bubble world since the collapse in 2006 of the biggest-ever worldwide real-estate bubble and the end of a major worldwide stock-market bubble the following year. But talk of bubbles keeps reappearing ― new or continuing housing bubbles in many countries, a new global stock-market bubble, a long-term bond-market bubble in the United States and other countries, an oil-price bubble, a gold bubble, and so on.Nevertheless, I was not expec

Last week around the July 17 Constitution Day, I read both our Constitution and the constitution of North Korea, the latter rather more carefully. My curiosity about the basic law of the North had in fact been rising as I watched all the extraordinary developments in Pyongyang over the past few years since the death of Kim Jong-il and his son Jong-un’s succession. Rule of law does not seem to be a foremost principle in the other half of the Korean Peninsula when we hear the shocking stories of s

French mathematician Blaise Pascal once apologized to the recipient of his letter for its length by saying “I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” It was Mark Twain who said, “If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.” They were trying to say how difficult it is to write short but precise statements. Interestingly, this very statement of Twain was quoted

We know Americans value independence and self-reliance. As soon as you graduate from high school in America, you are regarded as a grown-up and expected to be on your own. Upon entering college, often your parents will help you with either your tuition or living expenses, but rarely both. Of course, the extent of parental support differs by each family, and it is well known that partial financial support for a child’s college education is common in American society. Often, American college stude

WASHINGTON ― After the Egyptian revolution in February 2011, the U.S. had a good idea: Why not create an “enterprise fund” to make loans to small and medium-sized Egyptian businesses? President Obama announced the plan “to build networks of entrepreneurs” in Egypt in a speech on May 19, 2011. But more than two years later, the fund has yet to make a single investment. And the question is: What happened? The story of the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund is another example of why almost nothing w