Slums reflect both the limited capacity of local governments to accommodate swelling urban populations and policy failures. More rational policies could help reduce their growth while also improving the lives of the urban poor.
William Shaw is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment.
William Shaw was a visiting scholar in Carnegie’s International Economics Program. He is the co-author of Juggernaut: How Emerging Markets Are Reshaping Globalization (Carnegie Endowment, 2011).
Shaw has been staff member, and then consultant, for the World Bank’s research department since 1980. Much of his work has involved contributions to the World Bank’s flagship reports on the international economy, with particular focus on trade, capital flows, technology, and international migration.
He also has written on debt relief, structural adjustment and the poor, trade facilitation, and migration in Sub-Saharan Africa, and collaborated on edited volumes dealing with corporate restricting after crises, export diversification, and South-South migration.
From 1988–1995, Shaw served in operational assignments for the World Bank in Bolivia, the Caribbean, and Tanzania. He joined the Bank’s research department in 1980 to contribute to the analysis of global macroeconomic issues.
Slums reflect both the limited capacity of local governments to accommodate swelling urban populations and policy failures. More rational policies could help reduce their growth while also improving the lives of the urban poor.
Developing countries must not wait as long as advanced countries did to address the environmental effects of rapid economic growth. Market signals can help curtail environmental damage at minimum cost to growth.
Though globalization is increasing labor market integration and income inequality, policymakers should help workers adjust to a changing world rather than erecting protectionist measures.
With recent financial headlines echoing those just before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, European and U.S. policymakers must take urgent steps to reduce risk and prepare for bad times ahead.
While it may no longer be possible to provide manufacturing workers the kind of security they once enjoyed, given the fact that technology and globalized markets are changing too quickly, a much better job can be done to help workers adjust to these changes.
The United States must take urgent steps to help Europe resolve its debt crisis, while simultaneously preparing for the worst—the collapse of the both the euro and global financial system.
The euro crisis has grown too big for Europeans to handle alone. The United States must act to help save the euro—or risk paying a much bigger price if it collapses.
Plagued by high or rising inequality, the world’s largest emerging economies must preserve the pro-growth policies introduced in recent decades while improving economic and social mobility.
World trade is expanding rapidly, helping forge modern industrial sectors in emerging economies. Managing this evolving global trading system requires new leadership from the World Trade Organization.
As emerging markets transform mineral markets through strategic investments and export restrictions, advanced countries should work to secure access to crucial supplies, but be careful not resort to measures that impair free trade.