Two weeks ago a Boeing 737 on final approach to Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, flew into a massive cloud of locusts swarming above the airport. The insects were sucked into the plane’s engines and splattered across the windshield, blinding the pilots to the runway ahead. Throttling up to climb above the swarm, the pilot had to depressurize the cabin so he […]
Back in 2000, The Economist described Africa as the “hopeless continent,” adding that the “new millennium has brought more disaster than hope to Africa”. Thankfully, in the 20 years since The Economist’s sombre diagnosis, much has changed. In fact, over the last 20 years, GDP in sub-Saharan Africa has tripled, and average per capita incomes, adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, […]
Twenty years ago this week – on Indian Republic Day, 26 January 2000 – I wandered into the slums behind the Charminar, in the Old City of Hyderabad, and my life changed forever. Building on my PhD at what is now the UCL Institute of Education, I had become an expert on private education. Twenty […]
As the dust settles on the 2010s, we’re sure to be inundated with gloom-filled thinkpieces telling us what a god-awful decade it’s been. From Trump’s election to Brexit and the readily accepted climate eschatology of the new green movement, much of today’s media is a heady brew of shrill, overblown pessimism. Here at CapX, though, we […]
As a tumultuous year draws to a close, we’re looking back at some of the most insightful interviews CapX has conducted over the last 12 months. Robert D Kaplan is widely-regarded as one of the world’s leading thinkers on foreign policy, defence and geopolitics. He is the author of 18 books, including The Revenge of Geography and […]
For the first time ever, September’s UN General Assembly Meeting included a high-level meeting on universal health coverage (UHC), a broad initiative to promote policies that lead to better health outcomes. The unprecedented advances in human longevity of the past five decades have been spurred by an extraordinary amount of innovation in the medical technology […]
Gisela Stuart is a rare figure in British politics – a Labour politician who campaigned wholeheartedly for Brexit. As an MP from 1997-2017, Gisela is perhaps best known for her role in the 2016 referendum, where she chaired the Vote Leave campaign and appeared in the TV debates. But her deep interest in constitutional and foreign […]
For many people Robert Mugabe’s leadership of Zimbabwe is associated with highly irresponsible fiscal policy, the expulsion of white farmers and a series of events that led to economic collapse and subsequent hyperinflation. What occurred during the middle period of his 37 years in power is often given greater emphasis than the earlier years when […]
“We can’t go on like this.” Thus began a newsletter written on August 19 by Eddie Cross, a member of Zimbabwe’s parliament and one of the founders of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Cross is a trained economist and a very brave man. He remained in Zimbabwe throughout its 20 year-long descent from one […]
The project for a single currency in Africa seems closer than ever. The fifteen countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) recently agreed to abandon their monetary sovereignty in 2020 and introduce a new common currency: the ECO. This isn’t the first shared currency in post-colonial Africa. The CFA franc is now […]
The UK made headlines this week, becoming the first major economy to commit to reduce its climate harming emissions to net zero by 2050. Although well received by business and the national farmers union, some critics have raised concerns about what would happen if the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit. Thankfully those fears […]
There’s been more technological innovation in the past 20 years than there was over most of the previous 200,000 years. For most of our existence as a species, humans tended to use the same sort of primitive tools, to perform the same tasks, from one year to the next. When there was, for example, a […]
Thanks to David Cameron and Theresa May’s commitment and leadership, international development is no longer seen as a Labour fiefdom – as it was in the days of Tony Blair’s premiership. Britain is acknowledged internationally as a leader in the field of development. Indeed, while America is the world’s only military superpower, the UK has […]
There is a new crisis afoot in African development. The continent has the potential to become a development success story: expanding its own agrarian economy, building infrastructure to allow for the export of not just raw foodstuffs but manufactured food goods to markets around the world. The potential growth of commerce, leisure, education and the […]
Earlier this month South Africa held its sixth parliamentary election since the birth of multi-racial democracy in 1994. Together with its two satellite organisations, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the African National Congress has won yet another term in office and will extend its rule over South Africa […]
Today, more than half of children worldwide are not reaching minimum levels in reading and maths. It is a global problem, but one which has significant implications for the British taxpayer. There is a strong argument that this lack of learning for children in low- and middle-income countries is one of the root contributors to […]
Watch or listen to CapX’s weekly podcast ‘The Capitalist’ wherever you get your podcasts.
