Darejani Markozashvili
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
Turning the Tide Against Cholera
New York Times
Two hundred years ago, the first cholera pandemic emerged from these tiger-infested mangrove swamps. It began in 1817, after the British East India Company sent thousands of workers deep into the remote Sundarbans, part of the Ganges River Delta, to log the jungles and plant rice. These brackish waters are the cradle of Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium that clings to human intestines and emits a toxin so virulent that the body will pour all of its fluids into the gut to flush it out. Water loss turns victims ashen; their eyes sink into their sockets, and their blood turns black and congeals in their capillaries. Robbed of electrolytes, their hearts lose their beat. Victims die of shock and organ failure, sometimes in as little as six hours after the first abdominal rumblings. Cholera probably had festered here for eons. Since that first escape, it has circled the world in seven pandemic cycles that have killed tens of millions.
The Link Between Internet Access and Economic Growth Is Not as Strong as You Think
CFR-Net Politics
Mark Zuckerberg recently published a manifesto about the future of Facebook and our increasingly technology-saturated world. In it, he argued “Connecting everyone to the internet is…necessary for building an informed community.” For those familiar with Zuckerberg’s statements, this is a familiar claim. He argues that not only should we connect everyone in the world to the internet, but that doing so is a necessary step in solving some of the planet’s most pernicious problems. Zuckerberg is not alone in this thinking. Huge sums of money have been invested in projects that connect the billions of people who lack an internet connection. These schemes tend to present digital connectivity as a mechanism to achieve key social and economic developmental goals. This is especially true in Africa–the part of the world with both the lowest incomes and rates of connectivity. Because of the vigor with which such claims are made, and the vast resources that tech companies are able to deploy, we decided to examine the actually existing evidence base that might support them. In a new paper, we set out to test those claims.
From ‘false news’ to ‘fake news’: 3 lessons from history
Humanitarian Law & Policy
Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” their word of the year for 2016. According to them, this adjective, which is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, has been increasingly used in 2016, going from peripheral to mainstream over the course of the year. In the last few months, concepts such as “fake news” have also been on everyone’s lips. While reflecting on those concerns, it is worth looking back in time to see what lessons can be learned from history. The latest edition of the International Review of the Red Cross on the evolution of warfare sheds lights on the issue from a different perspective. Here are three insights that stand out and bring a new outlook on the role of media and the news in shaping public opinion. To borrow from Rain Liivoja, when looking for solutions to contemporary and emerging challenges “one cannot neglect history books”.
How Blockchain Is Changing Finance
Harvard Business Review
Our global financial system moves trillions of dollars a day and serves billions of people. But the system is rife with problems, adding cost through fees and delays, creating friction through redundant and onerous paperwork, and opening up opportunities for fraud and crime. To wit, 45% of financial intermediaries, such as payment networks, stock exchanges, and money transfer services, suffer from economic crime every year; the number is 37% for the entire economy, and only 20% and 27% for the professional services and technology sectors, respectively. It’s no small wonder that regulatory costs continue to climb and remain a top concern for bankers. This all adds cost, with consumers ultimately bearing the burden.
Trade Misinvoicing in Developing Countries
Center for Global Development
This paper discusses selected issues in the analysis of trade misinvoicing. It starts by examining various motives for the misdeclaration of trade activities. It is argued that the broad range of incentives to fake customs declarations provides an important challenge for the empirical assessment of the extent of trade misinvoicing. After analyzing the costs and benefits of different empirical approaches to quantifying trade misinvoicing, the accuracy and reliability of estimation results reported in the literature are reviewed. It is shown that quantitative findings are heavily dependent on the underlying assumptions in the empirical analysis, making estimation results on trade misinvoicing practices largely a matter a faith.
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