Poverty, Inequality and Opportunity

BY NIELS PLANEL, HAY BADRA, YUSAKU KAWASHIMA, RASHA KENAWI, SUMI KRISHNAN, AND NINA PAUSTIAN “It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,”  U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley recently stated, strongly criticizing a new U.N. report doing just that. But is it really so ridiculous? For the past few decades, […]

BY JENIE SON AND ANDREW HONG When Americans think of North Korea, they tend to focus on the country’s dictatorial leader and the threat of nuclear war as Kim Jong Un squares off with Donald Trump. It can be easy to forget that there are ordinary people living there, continuously suffering under the most repressive […]

BY LINA HIDALGO In Harris County, Texas, the third largest county in the nation and home to Houston, the “education gap” is something that tens of thousands of families struggle with daily. One-in-five children in Texas is born in Harris County, and nearly 35 percent of them live below the federal poverty line. Low-income students […]

Latin America’s economies are experiencing record growth. The continent’s middle class is expanding, and new jobs are flourishing in the global information economy. Yet, even as people are moving up from extreme poverty, 360 million citizens of Latin America and the Caribbean remain at what is known as the “bottom of the pyramid,” according to […]

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement that President Trump has decided to rescind DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, came as a shock to some and is disappointing to us. Although DACA recipients come from places as wide-ranging as Jamaica and the Philippines, the vast majority of them are from Latinx communities. (Latinx is […]

BY ANIKA MANZOOR The international development sector, like many other sectors under the Trump Administration, is undergoing some deep soul-searching as US foreign aid faces significant cuts. From a former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees official calling the humanitarian system “broken” to our newly-appointed USAID Administrator’s blatant aversion to handouts, development practitioners in the […]

By TOMÁS INSUA “I commend His Holiness [Pope Francis] and all faith leaders here, for raising awareness of the urgent need to promote sustainable development and address climate . . . Your influence is enormous. You speak to the heart of humanity’s deepest hopes and needs.” Ban Ki-moon, former UN secretary general, addressing an interfaith […]

This piece was published in the 27th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Abstract This paper examines wealth distribution and ethnically structured inequality among Asian American elderly. This paper uses three different datasets—the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), Health and Retirement Study (HRS), and micro-level data from the American Community Survey (ACS)—to […]

BY MARTA MILKOWSKA “This technology will save millions of patients!” This was the elated comment from the head of a tuberculosis health facility in Lesotho, in response to my prototype of a mobile phone application. Last summer, I was exploring the value of machine learning in predicting patients’ default rates in HIV and tuberculosis treatment […]

Youth unemployment is a major driver of radicalization in Tunisia, which supplies more fighters to Syria and Iraq than any other country.

Water is the cornerstone of human life – but what happens to countries when they start running out of “blue gold”?

In one of India’s most far-reaching decisions since it gained independence, Prime Minister Modi suddenly announced on November 8th that the country would be withdrawing the legal status of its 500 and 1000 rupee notes. Equivalent to about USD $7.40 and USD $14.70 respectively, these two bills alone comprise over 80% of the currency in […]