inequality

On February 6, 2024, HKS Student Policy Review Senior Editor Ala’a Kolkaila spoke with David Beasley, the former Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP). The conversation focused mainly on food security and Beasley’s time at the WFP.

African history did not begin and end with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It began with the birth and advancement of human civilization. Ancient Africans weren’t barbaric and uncultured, but the progenitors of modern humanity. From the world’s oldest universities and empires to the shapers of society, Africa was the foundation of humanity. Across the world, […]

I comb through the accent of my adolescent street views and patterns. Deciphering the moral compass that orients its existence. In morse code street peddlers dot, dit, and dash cash flows Bringing movement to our traffic jammed economy. This is a revolt against our arrested feats. Pinned down political beats, whose sub frequencies have yet […]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump ran under the slogan “Make America Great Again”. Although the first three words of the slogan were uncontroversial, the last one – “Again” – led many observers to wonder what bygone era Trump was referencing. His harshest critics claimed that he was referring to a time when racism […]

BY HENRI BREBANT January 19th was the 10th consecutive Saturday that the “Yellow Vests” protested in France. The movement started in October 2018 with a viral video, a change.org petition and some Facebook events that pushed 290,000 people[i] into the streets and onto the roundabouts. Unstructured and distancing itself from political parties and unions, the […]

In 2013, President Barack Obama give his first major speech on income inequality. He called inequality the “defining challenge of our time” and said that his administration would seek to combat inequality during his final years in office. President Trump hasn’t applied the same focus to this issue — Twitter apparently isn’t a good forum […]

Singapore has enjoyed rapid growth since independence, due in part to the hard choices made by the government regarding economics and politics. Agnes Chew’s research explores some of the costs of growth, and raises questions about the sustainability of the current growth paradigm as it relates to societal wellbeing.

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, […]

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 […]

BY IVAN RAHMAN The cover of the most recent Nation magazine portrays a student about to cross a crosswalk, perhaps to a school in a different neighborhood than his own. The accompanying story examines the secession movement in education, a movement in white communities that effectively excludes black and Hispanic youth from majority-white schools. Against […]

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 JENNIFER HELFRICH I am an environmentalist. Friends call me a “tree hugger.” Tree huggers are a rare breed here at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). My fellow students each have their public policy area of focus—and the environment is not one of them. I understand the dilemma; HKS students tend to exhaust themselves through […]