If you want to know the most vital ingredients to economic development, look at the indicators used by economists in measuring economic growth. The problem is that most of these formalized metrics and indicators are dominantly quantitative; which means that they are principally  concerned with numbers and statistics and not with the quality of those indicators that are …

When markets are wrong and fail, governments step in and correct them – is that so? Or, the other way around; when governments make a mess of things; markets tend to find their own ways to correct them. Absolutely not! But many seem to believe that such relations exist between markets and governments’ actions in the making and …

Most European regions are rich with folklore dating back to the “beginning of times”. These stories are a key element in most traditions, reflecting the kind of moral and ideological foundations local cultures are rooted in. In the early 19 th century, two German brothers took these bits of folklore and weaved them into well-loved classics that would …

Politics is primarily a battle of ideologies. CNN’s Jon Avlon has even called it an “ideological bloodsport”. A politician’s “power”, or authority, is drawn from the office she or he is holding at any given time, and, of course, from the amount of people that the politician in question has persuaded to side with her …

What would the world have been like without Google? It shouldn’t be too difficult to answer this question, taken into consideration that the company has been around for only less than 20 years. But really, what would life be like without Google? Most people will find it hard to imagine, considering how much of our …

Human intelligence has been a subject of extensive debate for a long time in the academic and medical fields, as well as in everyday conversations. One name stands out, however, having made waves in recent discussions about the state of human intelligence: James Flynn. Flynn is best known for the phenomenon named after him: the “Flynn effect”, in …

The fast advancement of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has made it easier and simpler to access services such as health, education, commerce, and finance, online. By use of smartphones, computers and the internet, one can apply for a health card, learn from experts in math, shop, and settle utility bills without leaving the house. ICTs are instrumental in …

The BRICS nations, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, have been exemplifying remarkable performance since they began cementing their relations, and they still continue to put the world in awe as they take on ambitious plans for the future. In their latest summit, completing their first cycle of summits, country leaders talked about having closer …

We live in a time when reading in print is almost passé, where books are merely paperweights on tables, and notebooks are reduced to the four-cornered leafy object we can sift through. The changes which science have brought around have made us, humans, almost oblivious to traditional ways of acquiring knowledge and nearly ignorant of the instruments which our …

Over the past decade, multinational companies have been engaging the practices of outsourcing and offshoring of business operations. A special report by Tamzin Booth for The Economist says that today, however, a lot of companies are rethinking their offshoring and outsourcing strategies. In the article entitled Here, there and everywhere, Booth claims that there are three reasons why the …