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That should be good news for some of the poorest countries in the world's poorest continent. After all, Norway and Britain used North Sea oil to underwrite their welfare states, while small oil powers like Oman and Brunei found themselves catapulted out of subsistence living in a generation. Likewise, Alberta's burgeoning petroleum industry has transformed the province into a major driver of the Canadian economy. But oil is not always a boon. What if it fuels corruption rather than development, and creates the same combustible mix of great wealth, relative poverty, grievance and instability...
...Taiwan, Singapore is losing high-tech manufacturing jobs-once crucial to economic growth-to lower-cost countries such as China. Manufacturing now provides work for just 20% of the island's 2.5 million workforce, down from 33% a decade ago, a decline reflected in people's paychecks. The poorest 30% of Singaporeans have seen their wages drop consistently for the past five years, according to United Nations data. This economic predicament is complicated by flagging demographics. Younger Singaporeans-the most productive workers-are increasingly seeking employment overseas, while the ones who remain are having fewer children. At the current birth...
...cars. At the time, a gallon of gasoline cost 18¢, which today would be close to $4--exactly where some experts think we might be headed. But that was still a bargain compared with the oats and tack and stables needed to sustain what Thomas Edison called "the poorest motor ever built...
...increased," says Gajanan Madhavrao Akkalawar, 70, who has farmed cotton for more than half a century. "It's difficult to run the family show." And then there's the growing obsession with the luxury goods that now consume much of Indian families' incomes. Television has given even the poorest a glimpse at the world outside. India is adding more than 6 million cell-phone subscribers every month, many of them in small villages and towns; its road network is quickly expanding, bringing increased commerce, trade and ideas. "If I say to people that materialism is upsetting the equilibrium of society...
...many in the Middle East see as the carte blanche given Israel by Washington, and also promoting debt forgiveness in order to spur development. He has also emphasized the responsibility of the industrialized world to take the lead in combating the environmental crises whose greatest impact is on the poorest nations. Says Reyni?, the sum of Chirac's foreign policy reflected a world-view "that stresses multilateralism, and supports cultural diversity as a manner of both enhancing peace and resolving conflict." And it is this combination of advancing French national interests while going to bat for smaller allies that often...