It was once said that the sun never set on the British Empire. The Brits colonized vast areas of the earth, civilizing exotic places  with the likes of afternoon tea and cricket. Oh, and happily using up natural resources along the way.

Read more on The New Colonialism: Renting Wombs…

Earlier this month, India experienced the worst blackout in global history. Over 600 million people—more than double the number of people in the U.S. and nearly one in 10 people in the world—were left without power.

Read more on Lawlessness Keeping India in the Dark…

From India comes this tragic headline:

As India’s kids starve, $1.5 billion worth of grain rots

How does a country have starving people while it is producing so much food that it is literally rotting from being left outside in the open? The depressing answer is that it’s the result of government intervention in the agricultural market. The article from MSNBC goes on to detail how government policies produce too much grain relative to other agricultural products such as fresh fruits or vegetables. Worst of all, the price supports that the country puts in place are a major contributor as well.  The natural outcome of a market subverted by the government to serve some groups interest, in this case the farmers, is too often a catastrophe. Sadly, India’s poor are often the target of someone’s “good” intentions, as Joe Carter pointed out a couple months ago.

Read more on Feeding the Poor, Bureaucracy Style…

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Business as Mission (BAM) model has become a global phenomenon. As more Christians embrace BAM it is not only changing the lives of individual Christians but is helping to change, as Daniel Devadatta explains, the culture of business in India:
Read more on An Indian Perspective on Business as Mission…

Picking up the comment thread from this post.

pauldanon says: “Because distributism is people-centred, things like medicine would be a priority. There’d need to be infrastructure for that, but nothing like the grotesque infrastructure we presently have for shipping frivolous imported goods around the country.”

Read more on Distributism’s Fixed, False Beliefs…

Acton’s tireless director of research Samuel Gregg has a post up at NRO’s The Corner in reaction to yesterday’s bad poverty numbers (46.2 million Americans live below the poverty line now—2.6 million more than last year). Gregg is ultimately not surprised about the increase, because not only does the American welfare state produce long term dependence on governmental support, but the huge debt incurred by poverty programs tends to slow economic growth.

Read more on Samuel Gregg: Welfare State Continues to Fail…

Current events in India have left the country wrestling with an important question: What is civil society and what does it consist of? These are not easy questions to answer as definitions of civil society can greatly vary.

Read more on Samuel Gregg on India’s Civil Society…

Over at the Comment site, I review Dambisa Moyo’s How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly—and the Stark Choices Ahead. In “War of the Worldviews,” I note that the strongest elements of Moyo’s work are related to her analysis of the causes and the trends of global economic power. “Faced with the combined might of the Rest,” writes Moyo, “the West is forced to grapple with a relentless onslaught of challengers from all corners of the globe. And all these countries are growing in confidence, gaining in competence, and jockeying for a frontline position in the world’s economic race.”

Read more on The West and the Rest…

An interesting report in The Economist on the rise of flashy and free spending entrepreneur “gazillionaires” in India and China and how they are perceived:

In much of India, life is getting perceptibly better each year. Wealth per person has vaulted by 150% in the past decade, from $2,000 to $5,000. Many Indians think the nation’s entrepreneurs deserve some of the credit. In Dharavi, a slum outside Mumbai, an illiterate mother called Aruna sits in her tiny one-room flat, which is home to ten people. Asked how she feels about the rich, she says: “They have worked hard. And we must work hard, too.” Her eldest daughter has a job entering data at a bank. The next one is studying diligently. The family may be near the bottom of the ladder, but it sees a way up.

Read more on What Indians and Chinese make of their tycoons…

This August 3 Wall Street Journal article is based on a Legatum Institute survey comparing Indian and Chinese entrepreneurship and raises important issues about the roles of the state and the family in promoting entrepreneurship.

Read more on Family vs. the State in Indian and Chinese Entrepreneurship…