The BBC reports that the Chinese toy scare of 2007 has led to an export boom for India's traditional wooden toy makers.

The Economist recently took a look at how the process of recycling is helping to sustain one community in India. The dalits, a lower caste of Hindu, are participating in an economy that not only provides them with income, but helps to reuse some of India's waste.

Disposable plastic cups are many times reborn in Dharavi. In a spiralling continuum, they are discarded and gathered in, melted down to their polypropylene essence, and re-moulded in some new plastic form. Recycling is one of the slum's biggest industries. Thousands of tonnes of scrap plastic, metals, paper, cotton, soap and glass revolve through Dharavi each day.

Interesting article about migration from one low-income country to another. In 2005, two World Bank researchers determined that an estimated two in five migrants traveled to urban areas of relative wealth outside rich countries.

One reason why outsiders pay little attention is that most poor migrants do not move far. Roughly half of all South-East Asian migrants are thought to have remained in the neighbourhood, and nearly two-thirds of migrants from eastern Europe and Central Asia have stayed in their own region. Nearly 70% of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa remain on their continent.

Migration experts believe climate change is a key contributor to such high migration rates:

“There is a direct impact on migration. You see people leaving sub-Saharan Africa in search of more habitable land,” says Mr Ameur, the minister for Moroccans abroad.