This document asks whether economic development depends on geographic endowments like temperate instead of tropical location, the ecological conditions shaping diseases, or an environment good for grains or certain cash crops? Or do these endowments of tropics, germs, and crops affect economic development only through institutions or policies.

The promotion of human welfare is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges of economic development. To achieve this, many developing countries adopted trade liberalisation in the late 1980s. Analysis of Uganda, a typical Sub- Saharan Africa country largely recognized as a front-runner in trade liberalisation, finds that trade liberalisation is no panacea to developing country problems, says this paper from the United Nations University.

Despite talk from WEF officials that this evidently exclusive organisation is moving towards openness and inclusion, African officials and NGOs here are complaining that the "elitist" gathering has failed them.

UNDP has helped transform strained relations between the Zambian Government and civil society into productive dialogue on the national poverty reduction strategy and other development issues.

Foreign debt is a tool for the economic domination of the Third World by large corporate interests, and the corporate agenda is now entering a dangerous new phase: the exchange of territory for debt repayment. That was the message delivered this weekend at a World Social Forum panel on corporate domination by Council of Canadians national chairperson Maude Barlow.
World Social Forum Links:
* http://www.portoalegre2003.org
* http://www.oneworld.net/specialreports/worldsocialforum/
* http://www.choike.org/

The Nigerian government is doing far too little to prevent a wave of political violence in the pre-election period, Human Rights Watch says in a briefing paper. Some Nigerian officials have publicly condemned the rising political violence. The fifteen-page briefing paper, "Nigeria at the Crossroads: Human Rights Concerns in the Pre-Election Period," documents how politicians across Nigeria have used violence as a tool to acquire or retain political support, wealth and influence.

For more than thirty-five years, Thomas W. Dichter has worked in the field of international development, managing and evaluating projects for nongovernmental organisations, directing a Peace Corps country program, and serving as a consultant for such agencies as USAID, UNDP, and the World Bank. On the basis of this extensive and varied experience, he has become an outspoken critic of what he terms the "international poverty alleviation industry". He believes that efforts to reduce world poverty have been well-intentioned but largely ineffective. On the whole, the development industry has failed to serve the needs of the people it has sought to help.

The plot is pure le Carré, but tailored for the tropics. A bloodied body washes up on a lake shore in a central African country. The nation is shocked when the victim turns out to be a top United Nations official, clubbed to a pulp and flung to the crocodiles. Who could commit such a crime? Local police scramble into action, and make their arrests. But something smells rotten. A dogged reporter starts digging in the city's murky underworld. Soon a web of intrigue unfolds including rogue army officers, Western aid money and, maybe, the country's most powerful men.

Because I am safe, well fed and in good health, I can TRY to demonstrate against a system in which half the people in this world of plenty are not safe, do not eat enough, and are in poor health…So much so that 30,000 of them die every day of avoidable causes.

Because political and economic decisions affecting people everywhere in the world are taken in a small mountain resort called Davos in Switzerland. Here leaders of multinational corporations dictate to our "elected leaders" mostly behind closed doors. For example, the UK (represented by British Petroleum) and the Netherlands (represented by Shell) decide how to dispose of Nigeria's oil reserves. Meanwhile Nigerians live (and die) in poverty.

Yesterday, on the 25th of January 2003, I tried with thousands of others to demonstrate for democracy, peace and social justice. At Landqart and Berne, we were gassed, hosed, sprayed with rubber bullets, herded into enclosures, made to stand for hours in the cold, marched along rail tracks to reach our destination, put on and off trains, chased up and down streets, running, frightened, outraged.

BUT we had the luxury of transport home in a warm, comfortable train where we ate snacks, looked after our headaches and stinging eyes, and thought about what went wrong. That luxury is the right of every human being on earth. Next week, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families may be attacked; they have been bombed senseless since 1991. They will also be on the move but without food, water or aspirins. If this happens, many of them will die.

That is why we go to Davos.

* A letter reposted from PHA-Exchange

The prevailing political and economic cataclysms of Zimbabwe demand high priority action from the international community. Peace and security in the country is no longer a mere threat, but breeched in real terms, with dire implications internally and regionally if the atrocious human rights violations in the country are permitted to persist or escalate. The offensive politically motivated violence and blatant contempt for justice, law and order is the direct result of Robert Mugabe’s untenable governance policies.

'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' (Pambazuka News 96, Section 12) is by the late Walter Rodney, not Patrick Wilmot, who is alive, living in London, and an editor of News Africa, according to their website. A new edition of Walter Rodney's ground-breaking work is available from East African Educational Publishers.

Parliament's public accounts committee (Scopa) began 2002 deeply divided and maligned over the multi-billion rand arms deal, but new chairman Francois Beukman is now confident Scopa is back on track for 2003.

High Court Judge Samuel Odhiambo Oguk has been formally charged with obtaining money by false pretences. Oguk appeared before Nairobi Chief Magistrate, Mr Boaz Olao, and entered a plea of not guilty immediately after particulars of the two-count indictment were read out to him.

America's top trade official, Robert Zoellick, went to Africa to preach the new gospel. Free trade is good for your economies, he told representatives of 31 countries assembled in Mauritius to mark the second anniversary of the US African growth and opportunity act, a regional trade pact allowing them special access to America's markets. Africa would "benefit greatly" from reducing or even eliminating subsidies and other barriers to trade, Mr Zoellick told the meeting. Pity then, that the message doesn't seem to have got through to America's farmers - who received an 10% increase in subsidies last year - or for that matter the American steel industry, which George Bush protected from foreign competition with punitive tariffs on imports.

This report by the editor of the World Disasters Report and the New Economics Foundation's Policy Director argues that human development faces potentially the biggest u-turn in its history. After decades of painfully slow human advancement, global warming and bad development threaten a great reversal of human progress.

A coalition of 24 Nigerian political parties on Thursday filed a suit in an Abuja court challenging the decision of the country's electoral commission to impose fees on contestants in coming general elections. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had announced it would charge as "processing fees" amounts ranging from 500,000 naira (US $4,000) for presidential candidates to 25,000 naira ($200) for those seeking local government councillorships.

Bridges.org and the International Institute for Communication and Development have launched a case study project to search for innovative and effective uses of ICT at the ground level. "We are hoping that the project would establish a resource for ICTs and development stories that would, over time, begin to show a pattern of best practice. The intention is to disseminate the case studies through a variety of channels to reach the widest possible audience."

Just four months after the infamous World Summit on Sustainable Development, world leaders and corporates (such as Shell) gathered this week in Davos, Switzerland, to further entrench globalisation and its associated ills, says environmental NGO groundWork.

"The people being starved to death are not white; the majority of those killed by the regime's killing machine are not white; those who languish in jail as I speak to you and are subjected to incessant torture and sub-human conditions are not white; those in the rural areas who are daily subjected to brutal treatment are not white. It is therefore despicable and cheap for anyone to reduce such a tragedy to an issue of race for the sake of a fake African brotherhood and political expediency." - Morgan Tsvangarai, quoted in the Zimbabwe Independent, January 24, 2003

The National Director of Public Prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, has launched a multi-sectoral anti-corruption task team for the Eastern Cape. The team is being deployed in the province at the directive of President Thabo Mbeki.