Search results for: all

After a bitterly contested election campaign and two controversial postponements, Muhammadu Buhari engineered an upset of Nigeria’s incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan in April of 2015. Remarkably, this was Nigeria’s first-ever case of electoral turnover of government authority. Later in April, two other African countries, Sudan and Togo, staged elections that...

Observers often assume that when people are dissatisfied, they will demand changes. But cognitive and behavioral scientists know that frequently is not the case, because a situation called “the default effect” prevails. Here is an example. Americans have widespread concerns about how software and entertainment companies are collecting and using...

It’s been a little more than ten years since the UN declared 2005 the Year of Microcredit – referring to an informal banking system that extends small loans to very poor people for self-employment projects that generate income, allowing them to care for themselves and their families. Microcredit had been...

There is a long history of measurement misleading policymakers. Current National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster’s account of the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty, suggests that an over-reliance on quantitative measures hurts military performance, shifting control from field personnel to analysts based in headquarters. Some postmortems of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign...

In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement – called “NAFTA” for short – brought Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single free-trade zone. My research reveals new chronic health problems spurred by transformations of Mexico’s food system unfolding after the signing of NAFTA. Mexico was required by...

The newly approved and recently implemented Trade Facilitation Agreement is the first international trade agreement of its kind. It will make it easier for all member nations of the World Trade Organization, but especially developing nations, to participate in and profit from international trade. Perishable goods produced in small quantities...

Civil unrest is a threatening reality for countless individuals across the globe. The regions prone to extreme violence have shifted through history, but today’s headlines are dominated by terrorist events ranging from Syria, South Sudan, and Belgium to Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. In Latin America, the drug trade serving U.S...

Although the Department of Veterans Affairs – “VA” for short – has undergone many changes since its inception after World War I, its core mission has remained constant: to manage a set of entitlements available to former service members. In a nation where many view centralized, federally sponsored assistance with...

An unwilling and unprepared United States has, on occasion, found itself pulled into war. But this has been the exception, not the rule, because the United States has usually gone to war by choice rather than necessity, following a period of public debate. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example...

According to the administration of President Donald Trump, a United States bilateral trade deficit with another country raises the specter of that country engaging in “unfair” trading practices. A presidential executive order signed on March 31, 2017 required officials to produce a report naming trading partner nations with which the...