Childbirth needn’t be this deadly

Today there is a commonplace — and wrong — impression that inequality is inexorably rising. Oxfam just contributed to the misunderstanding by claiming that the richest eight people own the same amount as half the world’s population.

One of the biggest problems affecting the world’s poor is one that few have ever heard about: illicit financial flows. Though such flows cost people in Djibouti, Congo, and Chad more than one-fifth of their incomes every year, they almost never make headlines. With the world preparing to establish the specific targets that will guide global development efforts for the next 15 years, the time to change that is now.
 

In this eighth instalment of The Do-able Dozen: Development projects for 2030 and beyond, Bjorn Lomborg explains how freer world trade was key to the historic reduction in world poverty over the past four decades and could bring big future payoffs, too.