RMG: Smartest Strategies

By Nicholas Newman, Oxford Prospect.  Increasingly, we are hearing the term that something must be done to solve the world’s almost never-ending ending crises. The media is full of pressing appeals that every problem is urgent and must be tackled immediately, with often little regard to the economic and social costs involved. Unfortunately, for policy makers, the real world of geopolitics and budgetary issues forces politicians to prioritise decisions. Often such policy decisions will be both tough to make and politically unpopular with the public at large.

A new report revealing that using wood pellets to generate electricity can actually speed up global warming should be the final nail in the coffin for the flawed policy of biomass subsidies. Policies designed to incentivise green energy use are not only having a dubious effect on climate change, they are destroying biodiversity and even killing many thousands of people.

There are as many different ideas to improve the well-being of Haiti as there are Haitians. After talking to more than 700 people to identify all of the nation’s biggest challenges and most promising solutions, the project Haiti Priorise has asked specialist economist researchers to focus on 85 key ideas across topics from health to infrastructure to the environment.

Two research papers have recently been released that study on two ideas that have been long-discussed in Haiti. Are they ideas whose time has come?