Alex Singleton

The UK Government has cancelled £5m in foreign aid to Uganda, the BBC reports, because it has not done enough to allow free and fair elections.
Political parties have for years been severely restricted and some opposition groups have urged donors to cut aid.
Multi-party elections are expected to return next year, but some say the government […]

The new issue of The Economist is out and, as usual, is essential reading. They have an article entitled Who’re you calling naive?:
This week Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, called for a challenge to the Church of England’s teaching on the sufficiency of the scriptures for salvation in the light of new evidence […]

Yesterday, Bill Gates, co-founder and Chairman of Microsoft, called for the scrapping of the limit on H-1B Visas in the United States. He said that the limit would mean that American companies would be held back from technological innovation by their inability to hire skilled workers from overseas. The H-1B visas allow highly skilled foreign […]

Protectionism and export subsidies help specific producers, but do not help society as a whole. So the World Trade Organization’s ruling that the European Union’s subsidies to sugar producers are currently in breach of WTO agreements is good news. It’s good for European taxpayers and it’s good news for excluded producers.
According to The Hindu (India):
Phil […]

The Financial Times used a leader this week to discuss Christian Aid’s campaigning:
If the archbishop wants to make a more useful contribution, he could dissociate himself from the statements of Christian Aid, some of whose policy officers are quite sensible but whose campaigning on trade has been strikingly irresponsible. One of its more bizarre statements […]

Most developing countries are committed to increasing access to safe water and thereby reducing child mortality, but there is little consensus on how to actually improve water services. Some NGOs put ideological purity before water purity and oppose private sector water provision despite knowing that private sector capital and know-how can be used to build […]

In the Washington Times, syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts says:
No-think economists assume new, better jobs are on the way for displaced Americans, but no economists can identify these jobs.
American economists are so inattentive to outsourcing’s perils they fail to realize the incentive that leads to outsourcing one tradable good or service does the same for […]

A leader in tomorrow’s issue of the The Times says that Archbishop Rowan Williams was too lukewarm towards free trade in his speech today:
The Archbishop, like Pope Benedict XVI, is wary of shallow materialism. Dr Williams wrongly implies that this is the inevitable by-product of market economics. Capitalism, though, like Christianity, is a matter of […]

I am delighted to see that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has taken the time to read my report, Trade Justice or Free Trade? and chose to discuss it in a sermon today at St Paul’s Cathedral.
We have recently seen the publication of a very interesting report from the Globalisation Institute which is highly […]

Sub-saharan African is undercapitalised. People with ideas of how to improve their communities cannot get the finance to set up new businesses. The lack of capital means that African productivity remains low, and yet productivity increases are the cause of wage rises. Microcredit helps to rectify this. It is good to see that microcredit has […]