Former Honduran President Zelaya’s return home today has important implications for the Western Hemisphere that, we can predict, will be widely overlooked.  Zelaya was ousted from the presidency when he was kidnapped at gunpoint by the military on June 28, 2009.  Although no hard evidence has yet emerged that the U.S. government was directly involved […]

Various observers have noted this week that China’s economy will be bigger than that of the United States in 2016.  This comes from the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) latest projections, which were made in its semi-annual April World Economic Outlook database.  Since 2016 is just a few years away, and it will be the first […]

Corruption takes many forms, and if the United States seems like it has less of it than many developing countries, this is partly because we have legalized so much of it.  Election campaign contributions are only the most costly and debilitating form, a legalized bribery that, for example, gives the pharmaceutical and insurance companies a […]

Executive Summary: This paper is the third installment in a series (the first and second editions were in 2001 and 2005) that traces a long-term growth failure in most of the world’s countries.  For the vast majority of the world’s low- and middle-income countries, there was a sharp slowdown in economic growth for the two […]

In 1915 the U.S. Marines invaded Haiti, occupying the country until 1934.  U.S. officials rewrote the Haitian constitution, and when the Haitian national assembly refused to ratify it, they dissolved the assembly.  They then held a “referendum” in which about 5 percent of the electorate voted and approved the new constitution — which conveniently changed […]

It didn’t get much attention in the media, but U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did something quite surprising on Sunday.  After taping interviews on five big Sunday talk shows about Egypt, she then boarded a plane to Haiti.  Yes, Haiti.  The most impoverished country in the hemisphere, not exactly a “strategic ally” or a […]

Haiti’s infamous dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier returned to his country this week, while the country’s first elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is kept out.  These two facts really say everything about Washington’s policy toward Haiti and our government’s respect for democracy in that country and in the region. Asked about the return of Duvalier, who had […]

As the infamous dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier returns to Haiti after 25 years in exile in the south of France, the U.S. State Department and the French Foreign Ministry have been ratcheting up the pressure on the impoverished, earthquake-destroyed, and cholera-stricken country of Haiti. The pressure is not to prosecute the dictator for his […]

A draft copy of the Organization of American States (OAS) Report on Haiti’s election, “Organization of American States Expert Verification Mission, President Election — First Round 2010 — Final Report,”1 was leaked to the press last week, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research posted a copy on its website after receiving it from […]

What is it about Haiti that makes the “international community” think they have the right to decide the country’s fate without the consent of the governed?  Yes, Haiti is a poor country, but Haitians have fought very hard and lost many lives for the right to vote and elect a government. Yet on November 28, […]

Executive Summary Before Haiti’s November 28 election was held, its legitimacy was called into question because of the exclusion of over a dozen political parties from the election — including Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas.  The ban on Fanmi Lavalas was analogous to excluding the Democratic or Republican Party in the United States. […]

The polarization of the debate around WikiLeaks is pretty simple, really.  Of all the governments in the world, the United States government is the greatest threat to world peace and security today.  This is obvious to anyone who looks at the facts with a modicum of objectivity.  The Iraq war has claimed hundreds of thousands, […]

As another one of the so-called “PIIGS” countries is being led to the slaughterhouse, it is worth asking whether all the carnage advocated by the European authorities is really necessary.  Ireland is in its third year of recession and income per person has already declined by more than 20 percent since 2007.  Unemployment has more […]

It has long been argued that expanding commercial relations between countries acts as an incentive for nations to avoid hostilities up to and including armed conflict.  Indeed this was a major impetus behind the economic integration of Europe1 after World War II, which led to the European Union and more recently the currency union of […]

If the G-20 is going to be nothing more than a talking shop on economic issues, they ought to at least talk about the economic problems that really matter, and the ones that they can do something about.  Not that currency values don’t matter — they are actually very important.  And it is interesting to […]

Like the rally led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Washington DC on Saturday, Brazil’s election on Sunday was a contest of “Restore Sanity” versus “Keep Fear Alive.” Dilma Rousseff of the governing Worker’s Party coasted to victory against the opposition […]

Introduction The IMF’s most recent World Economic Outlook (WEO) projects world economic growth will slow, from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 4.2 percent next year.  Throughout the report, there are numerous concerns expressed about the “fragility” of the global economic recovery.  The Acting Chair of the Executive Board states that “[t]he recovery is losing momentum […]

The sudden death of Néstor Kirchner today is a great loss not only to Argentina but to the region and the world.  Kirchner took office as president in May 2003, when Argentina was in the initial stages of its recovery from a terrible recession.  His role in rescuing Argentina’s economy is comparable to that of […]

The demonstrations that have rocked France this past week highlight some of its differences from the United States.  This photo, for example, shows the difference between rioting in baseball-playing versus soccer-playing countries.  In the U.S., we would pick up the tear gas canister and THROW it — rather than kick it — back at the […]

In Brazil, as in the United States, most people do not vote for a president on the basis of foreign policy issues.  Yet sometimes the result matters for the rest of the world — as when President George W. Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 election, and subsequently started two destructive, costly, and […]