Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

Liberia lacks doctors, teachers, lawyers, electricians ... but they may have too many cooks.

Why? To help provide jobs following the end of Liberia's long and costly civil war, many international humanitarian agencies began delivering skills trainings to women. The most commonly taught skill? Baking, of course.

But there just aren't enough jobs for all the newly trained pastry makers. So women who learned to make wedding cakes and fancy foreign pastries are now selling two-cent donuts on the street. And foreign-owned companies (mostly Lebanese) continue to dominate the pastry making business.

In the rush to help Liberia, it appears that well-intended job trainings did not reflect market demand. The problem goes beyond baking. Other aid organizations continue to train women in the art of tie-dying. But unless Liberia's demand for tie-dyed shirts and sarongs reflects 1960s America, they may be wasting their time.

To some the word "immigration" evokes an image of people standing in line at Western Union, waiting to wire money home to families for groceries and clothing. It happens thousands of times each day all over the world. All those remittances — the small amounts of cash wired across borders — add up to a whopping $300 billion a year.

Dilip Ratha believes this $300-billion industry can play an important role in international development. He's a World Bank employee who is working to make it easier for migrants to transfer money and direct the cost savings towards economic development in their own countries.

Skeptics argue that if remittances equaled development, Mexico would look like Switzerland. Ratha might argue that without remittances, Mexico's economy might look a whole lot worse. His new paper suggests that Africa could add as much as $3 billion to public coffers just by reducing the costs that migrants pay to send remittances. (Currently, charges on these cross-border money transfers can be as high as 10 percent.)

Ratha hopes to prove that hundreds of billions of remittance dollars can be funneled toward poverty alleviation by making simple policy changes.

His personal story has shaped his beliefs. In the U.S., he earns a salary that is 100 times what he could have earned in his birthplace of India, and his own remittances have helped build schools and pay medical bills there.

And while the negative impacts of immigration often make headlines, Ratha stresses that there are costs of not immigrating, too — costs borne by people living in poverty and by everyone in the global economy.

Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

James Surowiecki's commentary in The New Yorker this week offers a sobering reassessment of microfinance. His thesis is not that microloans are a bad thing, just that, if their goal is "to make poor countries richer," currently they aim at the wrong segment of the economy.

Surowiecki observes that often "Microloans are often used to “smooth consumption” — tiding a borrower over in times of crisis." This is much the same role that revolving credit like credit cards play in more mature economies. While this type of bridging consumer credit is tremendously important to the stability of a single household, it is isn't the type of credit that leads to the creation of jobs, something most developing nations are in dire need of.

"In high-income countries," Surowiecki writes, "more than sixty per cent of all jobs [are created by companies] bigger than a fruit stand but smaller than a Fortune 1000 corporation. It is this middle tier of small-to-medium-sized enterprises that a nation must cultivate if it is shooting for long-term economic growth."

Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Will America's economic troubles spill over to South Asian markets?

India, because of its close economic ties to the U.S., could get caught up in the downdraft. Rising inflation rates are causing the country's conservative commercial bankers to squirm in a country usually considered the poster child for modernization. India ships more of its goods to the U.S. than to any other country — so if Americans curtail their spending in an economic slowdown, Indian businesses could lose big.

How can India maintain its high rate of economic growth despite the U.S. slowdown?

The Brookings Institute calls for India’s government to economically reform by addressing its major inefficiencies in connecting the rural poor with the mainstream economies. BusinessWeek points out the need for reforms in agriculture, infrastructure, health care and education. But it adds that reform "is the last thing" on the mind of India's ruling Congress Party.

Struggling fishing communities Brazil may have found a way to turn their economic troubles around. A university there has set up a fishermen's cooperative to introduce oyster farming in the area and boost economic development. The advantages of oyster farming go beyond economics — the industry can increase biodiversity and water-filtration services.