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by Bruce Gilley This article was first published in The Communist dynasty is collapsing in China, and in retrospect one of the first signs was a Chinese-language computer virus that began spreading when I was a reporter in Beijing in the early 1990s. The virus would pop up on your screen and ask a question about the hard-line prime minister, Li Peng, who had presided over the massacres that ended the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement. “Do you think,” the virus pop-up asked, “that Li Peng is a good prime minister or a bad prime minister?” Li Peng is widely despised, and those who sai...

Trade figures published by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) in early January reveal a further increase in both exports and imports in December 2020

[1] Using the same population estimates as the 2018/19 Nigeria Living Standards Survey, this means that more than 80 million Nigerians were living in poverty before the pandemic, even without data from Borno state where the survey could not be fully carried out. [2] However, projections suggest that the combined effects of the COVID-19 crisis and natural population growth could leave 100 million people living below the national poverty line by 2022, rationalizing the government’s ambitious poverty reduction aspirations. Since Nigeria is home to the largest number of poor people in Sub-Sah...

There is hardly any doubt that failing health systems result in poor health outcomes and hamper progress towards the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Universal Health Coverage (UHC). In Africa, health systems are hobbled by leadership and governance challenges, extreme shortages of health workers, corruption in procurement systems for medical products and technologies, poor information systems, and health financing constraints. This brief discusses ways in which decision-makers can hurdle these challenges. Attribution: Daniel Mwai & Theresa Ndavi, “What Ails Health...

Blame COVID-19? But blame informality too (or maybe more)  Employment nationwide decreased by 40% in the second quarter of 2020. Peru is one of the countries in the region most affected by the pandemic, both in terms of declines in economic activity and in terms of rates of infection and deaths from the disease. On the economic side, unemployment and informality increased significantly, wages and working conditions deteriorated, and many companies were unable to stay afloat.  All of this has been further aggravated by the political situation (three presidents in a week) and the growing div...