Across Two Worlds

TOMS Shoes is one of the most well-known “double bottom line” companies, where generally the two bottom lines include both profit and social impact.   For every pair of TOMS Shoes…

Book review of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDun’s A Path Appears. Appearing in Christianity Today, February 25, 2015. Thanks to innovations in accountability, poverty-fighting efforts are flourishing like never before. The global…

Academic papers can be both obscure and intimidating for development practitioners and others whose interests are rooted in practical, everyday issues, especially academic papers written by economists.  Trying to stay…

Excerpt from a forthcoming article in the Harvard Economics Review, the on-line student economics magazine of Harvard College. The beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians and the kidnapping of 250 Assyrian Christians are latest act…

Microfinance has been one of the most popular approaches to micro-level development over the last twenty years.  It has grown in scope from just 13 million borrowers worldwide in 1997 to around…

(Christianity Today Online, January 8, 2015) A feeling of hopelessness and insecurity in Central America has fueled the exodus of 43,000 unaccompanied Central American children and teenagers to the US…

(World Bank Impact Blog, January 7, 2015) There is arguably little that makes development economists sharpen their fangs as the use of tear-jerking, heart-warming, credit-card-mobilizing anecdotes by development NGOs to…

If you think that the jing-jing of Christmas bells is being slowly replaced by the ca-ching of the Christmas cash register, you are not hearing strange noises. December 2013 retail…

(From the Huffington Post, August 7, 2014)  I see you, smugly smiling over your morning cup of fair-trade coffee, gratified at the unimaginable impact your thoughtfully chosen beans must be…

In this blog the Shrewd Samaritan will occasionally wander off topic to examine an issue tangential to economic development and globalization issues.  In this case, I’ve been reflecting on our…

 (Written for Christianity Today Online, June 18, 2014. Click for full article.) This summer many of us will head out on short-term mission trips, spending anywhere from a week to a…