Author: Martin Yim

MONTGOMERY, New Jersey — What happens when a disease ravages entire regions of the world? The ramifications of outbreaks, such as the recent Ebola epidemic in Africa, can devastate the region itself. Countries like the United States may not have been hit with the brute force of the wake of the pandemic, but it had a lasting effect on Africa’s regions and its poor. The Washington Post published an article that included a profile of a woman who lost all of her family due to the Ebola outbreak. She was the only survivor. Many others were in similar positions, those…

MONTGOMERY, New Jersey — Job reports have been touted in the media, hundreds of thousands of jobs have been added in recent quarters and the unemployment numbers have looked much rosier than the immediate post-2008 financial crisis. The reality? A deeper look into the numbers shows that labor participation rates are lower than pre-recession levels, suggesting that the lowering of the unemployment rate is in part due to people simply giving up on finding work, and thus they are dropped from the unemployment statistic consideration. Also, many of the new jobs being created en masse are not high-quality jobs. Many…

BELLE MEAD, New Jersey — The poor are often the victims of geopolitical boxing among the world’s most powerful states. It is rare for the impoverished to see long-term benefits from any types of conflicts. Currently, the United States, Russia and China are some of the most powerful world actors, and tensions are rising. Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, China’s indifference to suffering in North Korea and the United States’ unwieldy foreign policy are all in some way politically motivated and have caused massive problems for the poor in different parts of the world. Indeed, there are even more potentially harmful…

SEATTLE — Economics as a field informs policy legislation in every country. As an important facet of public policy, an understanding of economics is vital to helping the poor. By understanding market forces as well as incorporating other social sciences, public policy can maximize its intended goals of creating higher levels of societal social welfare. But what if the economic theories underlying the public policies are flawed? Economics often uses basic assumptions to build models and understand phenomena. One of the most important assumptions is that people are perfectly rational decision-makers. This is clearly a flawed assumption to make; people…

BERN, Switzerland – When machines began to take over the textile work of the Luddites, there was economic and social upheaval. Now, with new efforts to advance Artificial Intelligence, what will happen to jobs and the poor? Can policies such as Universal Basic Income help? When the Luddites and the people who worked in agriculture became displaced by structural unemployment, the economy adapted and new jobs became available to these laborers. Machines and tools have been taking away jobs by replacing human sweat with steam or oil since the industrial revolution, making production more efficient. In today’s age, machines are…

BELLE MEAD, New Jersey — Low cost and reliable access to systems that allow for communications and exchange of information is often understated as a means to progressing society as a whole. The Internet has revolutionized and modernized our communications and how we share information in our society—there can hardly be an understatement of the effects of the Internet. Society’s ability to communicate almost instantly, and exchange information over huge distances to huge populations of people has changed everything from business to education and even the way people socialize. Accepting that the Internet has caused massive innovation and provided, quite…

BELLE MEAD, New Jersey — The economic growth of a region is an important piece in the path to poverty reduction; however, not all economic growth is created equal. Economic successes mean little to poverty reduction if the positive effects do not reach the impoverished. The unfortunate must be able to partake in the new economic well-being to be able to gain from it. A 2009 working paper from the World Bank defined inclusive growth as “growth that allows people to contribute to and benefit from.” The paper also goes on to say that the growth must be seen across…

BELLE MEAD, New Jersey — Recently, China has been betting chips on Africa and Europe, and the United States simply has not responded in kind. By 2009, China had sent almost half of it’s total international aid to Africa. About a million Chinese nationals have moved to the African continent in a decade. In 2012, trade between Africa and China reached approximately 198 billion dollars. Meanwhile, the U.S. only traded slightly below 100 billion dollars worth of goods and services to the African continent in the same year. China has political and economic rationale for its investments in the African…