The European Central Bank looms large over the Euro debt crisis. Photo: soumit (flickr)

As Europe attempts to thwart a broader global recession, it is facing what many economists refer to as a trilemma, and poorer countries could be the victims.

A financial trilemma is comprised of three goals that policy makers try to achieve: (1) a stable/fixed exchange rate; (2) an economy open to international flows of capital; and (3) a sound monetary policy to stabilize the economy.

Here's the catch: In reality you can only achieve two of these goals, not all three.

In 1999, the Eurozone decided to give up the third goal, independent monetary policy. In exchange, they enjoy a common currency across 17 member nations and the freedom to exchange money and goods across borders. Though the European Central Bank creates monetary and fiscal policy for the European Union, each member nation relinquishes its own control.

This becomes an issue when a country gets into financial trouble and must defer to the European Central Bank or greater European Union. This was recently evidenced with the bailout and continuing debt problems in Greece.

Potential for problems arise due to our ever globalized, interconnected world. Eurozone policies are far-reaching, extending their grasp to neighboring emerging markets dependent on foreign dollars. With austerity measures becoming the norm, lenders are avoiding risk and could cut foreign lending in favor of keeping business in their own backyard. The Economist references a speech by the Financial Stability Board head, Mark Carney, in which he warned about the damage if the European bank were to deleverage on the world economy.

Many emerging economies in Eastern Europe depend on both foreign aid and outside investment. If the Eurozone's financial well runs dry the effect will ripple throughout Eastern Europe, even the U.S. Poorer E.U. members worry that they'll emerge the victims. French president Nicolas Sarkozy rocked the political world after his comments at a University of Strasbourg debate on November 8, where he described a proposal for a two-speed Europe, presumably divided between richer and poorer nations.

What part does the European Central Bank (ECB) play in this? That’s the question everyone is asking. Similar to the U.S. Federal Reserve, the ECB has the power and leverage to swoop in and bail out E.U. members on the brink of collapse. They are hesitating, however. Germany feels the ECB should step in only as a last resort. Many policymakers in Germany believe that the current crisis is forcing reform and thus serving a purpose, as recently expressed in The New York Times.

With optimism waning on debt solutions for the U.S. and abroad, tensions mount and consensus becomes imperative. Politics need to be set aside before any sort of real dialogue can exist. Will the E.U. decide on a two-speed Europe? Will any countries abandon the Euro? The implications for emerging markets are considerable; several outcomes could result in global recession.

Managing Director of the IMF Christine Lagarde meets China's Vice Premier Wang Qishan, Beijing, China. Photo: International Monetary Fund (flickr)

The global financial crisis has shaken up the international seating chart, and China may be vying for a better spot.

Though China was one of the International Monetary Fund’s original members, that invitation to the table didn’t mean it had a voice in the conversation. But last year, the World Bank and IMF both moved the country to third place. While the move changes the pecking order for Germany, the UK and France, traditional leaders, it matches China’s increasing position in the world economy with voting power.

Now, we wait to learn whether China will use its power to ease the Eurozone crisis. The IMF, typically the lender of last resort for sovereign states, needs more capital to provide the kind of liquidity Europe needs. China has that liquidity. In loaning to the IMF to play middleman, China can keep itself out of European politics, while keeping world economies - and important European trading partners - humming.

China’s funds would go far. Just last week, the New York Times reported, the IMF offered an additional short-term credit to “bystanders” - member nations feeling the “contagion" of regional and global default. One tool is a “precautionary and liquidity” credit line that would help countries approved by the Fund as having sound economic policies to meet short-term payments. The other new tool combines emergency disaster and post-conflict relief under a new rapid-financing instrument, which can now also be used after exogenous shocks like global financial crises.

The announcement immediately reversed earlier market slides the same day, showing the move boosted investor confidence, according to the Times. But if even a few countries take up the IMF on its offer, its account will soon run dry.

If that happens, China and its ocean of cash will be waiting. The country has shown signs that it’s at least willing to play, but it remains to be seen what rules it will follow. With Western economies looking increasingly desperate, China has the opportunity to play tough. Its decision could relieve the global economy, but it could also help put a new country at the head of the table.

PepsiCo and Cambridge University recently unveiled the i-crop, a web-based system that could reduce agricultural water waste by 50 percent. Photo:zekasaur (flickr)

This article was republished in The Christian Science Monitor.

"More Bounce to the Ounce.” In the 1950’s, it was a cola slogan; thanks to a new partnership with Cambridge University, it could become the catch phrase of PepsiCo’s i-crop, a web based program that helps farmers reduce water waste.

Here’s how it works: data systems collect information on local weather conditions, farming activity, and soil moisture from underground probes and compiles them online. With a few keystrokes, farmers can eliminate the guessing games about water consumption, resulting in more precise and environmentally-friendly farming. In October, PepsiCo publicly announced its goal of reducing carbon emissions and water usage from their largest UK farms by 50 percent in five years. So far i-crop is testing well: preliminary reports from 22 farms in the UK show farmers have achieved 90 percent efficiency in water usage.

"Farming is in the DNA of our business - we rely on fresh produce everyday," said Richard Evans, President of PepsiCo UK and Ireland, according to PR Newswire. "Finding ways to produce more food with less environmental impact is essential to our future." He added, "i-crop has the potential to revolutionize the way we farm, enabling our farmers to save costs and [reduce] water and carbon consumption, while at the same time improving their yields.”

PepsiCo’s potential to revolutionize water efficiencies in farming is sizable. Netting approximately $43.3 billion annually and employing more than a quarter million people, PepsiCo is the second largest food and beverage business in the world.

Ever enjoyed Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Lay's, Gatorade, Tropicana, 7Up, Doritos, Lipton Teas, Quaker Oats, Cheetos, Ruffles, Aquafina, Tostitos, Sierra Mist, or Fritos? If the i-crop can deliver as hoped, those products will soon be made with less water waste than most competitive grocery items (and who doesn’t want something positive to hold onto after downing a bag of Cheetos?).

Although the i-crop is only accessible to UK farmers, PepsiCo hopes to introduce its technology to farms in India, China, Mexico, and Australia by 2012. However, speculation about i-crop’s availability has raised some eyebrows and provoked the question: Will the i-crop technology, owned privately by PepsiCo, be withheld from those who most need it?

Brain Pickings editor Maria Popova argues that owning such coveted technological rights will put PepsiCo in the middle of an often tense relationship between profiteering and humanitarianism. “The technology is currently only available to PepsiCo-affiliated growers, which raises interesting questions about the relationship between corporate interests and social good in innovation, as well as bespeaking the disconnect between the value of open-source software and the fact that the best-funded research initiatives, most competent scientists and highest-grade technology tend to be subsidized by private corporations.”

If, how, and with whom PepsiCo shares i-crop technology has yet to be determined. In any case, PepsiCo has taken corporate social responsibility by the horns, hopefully luring other influential corporations to recognize that being green is achievable. "Every Generation Refreshes the World," Pespi ads claim. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that PepsiCo can do so for the next generation’s water supply.

Some say a transaction tax could put humans back in charge of financial markets. Photo: RoGb77 (flickr)

As lightning-fast computer programs replace human brokers on Europe's virtual trading floors, anti-poverty warriors want to slow things down.

There's never been a better time, they say, for a redistributive "Robin Hood tax," which would slap a fee on each financial transaction, deterring meaningless trades and putting the revenue toward fighting poverty and climate change. The center-right leaders of France and Germany called for such a tax last month, Reuters reported, and leftish outlets like The Guardian have happily joined their choir: "Even if such a tax was levied at just 0.05%, it could raise hundreds of billions of dollars, which could be ploughed into development projects," the paper wrote of a petition signed by 1,000 economists from around the world. The EU plans to gather support for a tax at November's G-20 summit, says Reuters.

Political attacks on money-changers are nearly as old as money itself. What's new is that the usual arguments against such a tax – that it'd reduce trading volume and hurt the economy by making financial markets more volatile – may be getting weaker. In fact, people like former London Stock Exchange executive Martin Wheatley now argue that computer-driven trades make volatility worse.

Exhibit A: Wall Street's May 2010 "flash crash," in which computer algorithms temporarily wiped 10 percent off major stock indexes in a squall of rapid transactions, apparently because they saw one another doing the same thing.

On the Robin Hood Tax website, spokesman Richard Gower called this "casino capitalism cyborg-style" and suggested that humans could tax irrational computer programs out of the market.

Others use less colorful language.

"For the first time in financial history, machines can execute trades far faster than humans can intervene," Bank of England executive Andy Haldane said in July, according to The Telegraph. "Grit in the wheels, like grit on the roads, could help forestall the next crash."

Haldane was speaking in favor of internal or regulatory changes, not a redistributive "Robin Hood" tax. But with Western economies in a skid, some think financial markets might be safer with Robin behind the wheel. After all, at least he's human.

Belu's eco-friendly, socially responsible bio-bottles. Photo: Courtesy of Belu

There are few things more satisfying than a cold drink of water. But for lots of people in the world, clean drinking water is hard to come by. A UK-based company called Belu is helping change this. Pronounced "blue," the nonprofit sells bottled water in their eco-friendly "bio-bottle," made from compostable corn plastic and capped with a PVC-free top.

For every bottle of water they sell, the folks at Belu provide one person in a developing country with clean water for a month:

In collaboration with Oxfam, WaterAid, and Fresh2O, Belu has thus far funded the installation of wells, hand pumps and rainwater harvesting technology in four countries: India, Mali, Bangladesh and Madagascar. These projects are rated to provide safe drinking water to over 43,264 people for at least fifteen years.

For a bottled water company, that's pretty refreshing.

In 1978, the poor West African country of Liberia borrowed $6 million from a New York bank. The Liberian government promised to use the money to buy and develop an oil refinery, and to pay the money back in seven years.

Today it's not clear if either of those things ever happened.

Two years after the loan, the Liberian government was overthrown in a coup, which later led to a 14-year civil war. Meanwhile, the loan was bought and sold several times, according to allAfrica.com.

But now two investment funds say they hold the note and are entitled to $20 million from the current government of Liberia — a claim upheld by a London court. Today Liberia is led by a democratic government whose president is working with the IMF and World Bank to settle old debts. The Guardian says Liberia struck deals with most of its private-sector creditors, but these two funds are refusing to settle, demanding full payment through the courts.

A representative for the Jubilee Debt Campaign, a coalition fighting for debt relief for the world's poorest countries, accuses funds like these of "profiting from poverty."

As Al-Jazeera's Barbara Serra reports:

So-called vulture funds have been condemned by several governments for preying on the world's poorest states. They buy up the debt of near-bankrupt nations at a cheap price from financial institutions. They then sue those nations in international courts for the full value of the debt, plus steep levels of interest and penalty charges. Every year, developed countries spend billions of dollars to help pay off the debts of poorer nations, but vulture funds siphon off that money for themselves.

Even the lawyer for Liberia says this is a moral issue as well as a legal one. Get the full scoop from this Al-Jazeera video:

The G-20 is meeting this week in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Chaired by President Barack Obama, the purpose of the summit is to, “review the progress made since the Washington and London Summits and discuss further actions to assure a sound and sustainable recovery from the global financial and economic crisis.” I’ve heard of the G-8, but the G-20? I began to wonder about this alphanumeric soup of organizations. Who are they and what are they concerned with? The following scorecard should help interested followers of this subject keep track of the major players.

The G-6: Organized in 1975 by the finance ministers of Germany and France who were frustrated with the formality and structure of larger international meetings, the G-6 and subsequent evolutions of this body are strictly informal bodies that meet to discuss economic issues of mutual interest. After the creation of the G-8, the term G-6 is now used to refer to the six most populous members of the European Union. The member countries are: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan

The G-7: Formed in 1976, this is an informal forum for the finance members of seven big industrial economies to discuss economic issues and seek agreement. Member countries include: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States. Now also includes the European Union.

The G-8: An evolution of the G-7, membership grew to include Russia. The European Union is a limited member; it cannot host a meeting or hold the presidency of the body. Members are: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States, Russia. European Union (limited member)

The G-8 plus Five: Recognizing the growing influence of other countries, the original group sometimes broadens their meetings by including the Outreach Five. As with all meetings, other countries are sometimes invited to attend. Members: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States, Russia. European Union (limited member) Plus: Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa.

The G-20: According to their website, “[t]he G-20 was created as a response both to the financial crises of the late 1990s and a growing recognition that key emerging-market countries were not adequately included in the core of global economic discussion and governance.” Where the earlier groups (G-6 through G-8) were organized around the industrialized countries of the world, the G-20 begins to bring emerging economies into the dialog. Their first meeting was in Berlin, Germany. The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the President of the World Bank, plus the chairs of the International Monetary and Financial Committee and Development Committee of the IMF and World Bank, also participate in G-20 meetings on an ex-officio basis.

The G-20 is made up of the finance ministers and central bank governors of 19 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, European Central Bank

The G-33: The name for a group of developing countries that coordinates on trade and economic issues. It was created in order to help group countries which were all facing similar problems and give a unified voice to countries that were traditionally excluded from discussions among the industrialized countries. Members: Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Botswana, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guyana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Laos, Mauritius, Madagascar, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, St Kitts & Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Senegal, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Tanzania, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

There are other groups variously labeled as G-8, G-20, G-33, and even N-11 (countries which Goldman Sachs considered in 2005 to have a high potential of becoming the world’s largest economies this century: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam).

One of the best, reliable, sources of information about these groups and their members may be found on the websites of the World Trade Organization and the previously mentioned G-20.

You can Track the ongoing discussions of the Pittsburgh G-20 Summit here. But be prepared for slow page loading. It is a very busy website.

What happens when tens of thousands of impoverished Africans sue one of Britain's biggest oil companies for sickening them with toxic waste?

In 2006, the British company Trafigura unloaded a ship full of untreated chemical slop at a household garbage dump in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. Scores of people living nearby were diagnosed with poisoning, hundreds lost their livelihoods as trash-scavengers, and 17 died. Now, 30,000 residents are suing the oil trading company for exposing them to toxic sludge. The company paid for a clean-up and admitted to "neglecting its duty of care," but has denied responsibility for the poisonings. The trial starts this fall.

Al Jazeera chronicles this David-versus-Goliath tale of Britain's biggest-ever lawsuit in the first installment of Corporations on Trial, which covers five lawsuits that pit ordinary people against the world's most powerful and wealthy corporations.

The other shows are just as compelling: Yesterday, the program aired the story of why Native American villagers in Alaska are suing Exxon Mobil. Next week, learn why 40,000 Indonesians who fled their homes after a volcanic eruption blame a gas company for their troubles.

Hostage takings, vandalism and attempted assault sound like charges on a rap sheet for a hardened criminal. But they're the collective crimes of people who've been laid off recently.

Workers in the French factories for 3M and Sony — enraged about the size of severance packages for laid-off workers — held their bosses captive last month. The captured CEOs actually ended up bargaining with the kidnappers, while the police — not wanting to incense the workers even more — promptly responded by doing ...nothing.

Just last week, workers at a Caterpillar plant in France held their bosses captive as well. They, too, were looking for better treatment for laid-off coworkers. In another incident, workers at the French luxury retail company PPR surrounded their CEO's car and blocked roads so he couldn't escape. This time police did intervene and escorted François-Henri Pinault to safety.

Across the Channel in the United Kingdom, people are outraged with the multimillion dollar pension package given to former Royal Bank of Scotland CEO Fred Goodwin. One group was so upset that it vandalized Sir Goodwin's house and car.

An ominous e-mail from the vandals threatened more attacks:

We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money, and living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless. This is a crime. Bank bosses should be jailed. This is just the beginning.

Joining in the spirit of protest, as many as 5,000 protesters gathering in London's financial district on the first day of the G-20 summit, expressing discontent over the financial crisis, climate change and war. Several demonstrators threw projectiles and forced their way into an RBS branch through broken windows.

Bert Klandermans, a professor of applied social psychology at Amsterdam's Free University, offers a psychological explanation for why some people are expressing their frustration in this way.

Anger is an emotion that spurs collective action ... [It's] an emotion that results from feeling that somebody is responsible for something, and could have acted differently ... [For many] the bankers did it wrong, and they did it wrong because they were greedy. That's what makes people angry.

Frustrated by executive compensation and the economy, protesters broke windows of an RBS branch in London. Photo: Camus Live Art (flickr)

A call center in India. New U.S. policies against outsourcing jobs overseas will hurt India's IT sector the most. Photo: David Robinson (flickr)

In spite of the global recession's painful effects on most of the world's economies, India has managed to stay stable. The country even expects its economy to grow by 5 percent this year. However, this prediction came before President Obama announced that his administration would be cutting tax breaks and refusing bailout money for companies outsourcing jobs overseas.

Rising unemployment in the U.S. has renewed the political and economic debate over shipping jobs abroad. More than 1,000 U.S. firms that have outsourced jobs abroad are being criticized for taking jobs away from Americans. Countries like India — which gets more than 60 percent of its outsourcing work from U.S. businesses — will likely be hit the hardest by the Obama administration’s protectionist approach to reviving the U.S. economy.

President Obama also announced a hiring ban on foreign workers for companies receiving federal bailout money. Of the 65,000 H1-B work visas that the U.S. issues annually, 21,667 have been for Indian citizens who mostly join the information technology industry. These non-immigrant visas are granted to educated and skilled foreign workers.

But the U.S. is not alone in adopting policies against outsourcing jobs and limiting foreign workers. In Persian Gulf countries like the United Arab Emirates, millions of Indians who are employed in the construction and banking industries have been laid off and forced to return home. In the United Kingdom — where Indians are one of the most prevalent immigrant groups — the government has announced plans to potentially limit foreign workers to sectors of the economy that have documented labor shortages.

New policies against hiring foreign workers in the U.S. may have a long-term impact that policymakers are not anticipating, according to a study by Duke and Harvard researchers. With increased job opportunities in places like India and China, more than 100,000 foreign workers could leave the U.S. for jobs in their home countries. The study found that many Indian professionals in Silicon Valley have already left, and predicts many more will leave to start businesses in India.

This is bad news for the long-term economic recovery of the U.S. because nearly half of Silicon Valley start-ups, including Google, were started by immigrants, the lead Harvard researcher tells BusinessWeek. This long-term “brain drain” will mean that “when we start recovering ... the people we need are going to be in India and China,” according to the researcher, Vivek Wadhwa.

The U.S. has historically welcomed immigrants and their innovative ideas. A reversal of policy could prove to be very harmful — hurting economic growth and limiting the expansion of key industries.

This week's comment contest winner is anonymous, which is technically against the rules, but we liked the comment anyway.

Anonymous commented on a 2006 article that questions whether China or India will become the dominant global force of the 21st century.

This is a belated comment on the article in June 2006. I believe many Indians these days have moved on from the pre-2006 India Shining or India Poised hype.

I am responding in particular to the comment in the 2006 article that the economy China has only recently overtaken that of Britain despite Britain having a small population and resources compared with China because 'Britain has all of the economic dynamism associated with free societies.'

If that be the case, why is India's economy, being a democracy which adds creativity and dynamism to an economy (according to the author) and not to mention a population which will soon bigger than that of China is not bigger than that of China's or indeed that of Japan's, Germany's, Britain's, France's and Italy's?

As to people in India feel empowered by the ballot box why do so many Indian people choose to live in slums then? Surely such empowered and happy people will choose better than living in slums? Perhaps Indian people need so many religions in their country to tell they really live in a wonderful paradise?

As to the better command of English, of course, India is notorious for poor literacy rate in the world especially amongst the female population. Successful economies like Japan and Germany, of course prove that you need more than being able to speak English to make your a country a success.

Global Envision is offering a $25 cash prize to the weekly comment contest winner. Read more about the contest here, and good luck!

The next step: providing energy efficient solutions and products to 16 million customers. Outi Koo(flickr)

Apparently around 52 million.

After announcing a 35-percent rate increase, British Gas is sending free energy-efficient light bulbs to customers to help lessen the blow of higher prices.

In response to the rate hikes, British Gas managing director Phil Bentley, said:

The only answer to cope with higher energy prices, I'm afraid, is for all of us to be more energy efficient and we will be contacting all our British Gas customers to show how they can save energy to try and offset these price rises.

The first step taken by the company was to send four free energy-efficient light bulbs to every customer. British Gas has also added a new section to their website that focuses on energy efficiency, featuring information on solar panels and energy-saving home improvements as well as a place to purchase green gadgets such as solar battery chargers and wind-up flashlights.

British Gas clearly isn't alone in feeling the pain of rising fuel prices but their willingness to educate their customers is refreshing — could you imagine your local gas station handing out tire pressure gauges to drivers waiting at the pump? As other energy companies are faced with tough decisions, they may want to take some hints from British Gas and increase awareness of energy efficiency among their own customers.

These squares represent how much land would be needed to power the world, Europe or Germany with solar-thermal power. Photo: Treehugger

A single solar farm in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for all of Europe.

Scientists are investigating solar farms in the Sahara, as part of a $62 billion plan to provide all green power for a new, carbon-neutral European super-grid.

Because the sunlight in northern Africa is more intense, solar panels in the Sahara can capture up to three times more energy then panels located in northern Europe.

Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission’s Institute for Energy said today at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona that a mere 0.3 percent of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts would supply all the energy Europe needed.

The proposed solar farms will utilize advanced solar technology created by the California-based firm Ausra. These solar power plants use movable reflectors to concentrate sun light on pipes. The water in these pipes is solar-heated to produce high-pressure steam, which then goes through a turbine to generate electricity.

These innovative solar plants store enough hot water to make electricity even at night, and to increase production during peak demand periods. The plants are much more effective than traditional solar panel designs, allowing the plants to generate electricity at a mere 10 cents per kilowatt hour, much less than what the average consumer is paying now.

Ausra’s technology has been made cost-efficient by advances in transportation. Jaeger-Walden explained today that transporting the solar electricity would be relatively easy using new high-voltage direct current transmission (DC) lines instead of the alternating lines currently used. Energy loss using DC lines is very low, making the usual issue of transportation over long distances less of a problem.

Sixty-two million dollars for a project of this kind seems expensive — until you compare it with the more than $45 trillion in green-energy systems the world needs over the next 30 years to avoid global catastrophe, according to the International Energy Agency.

Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK's chief scientist, welcomed the project, saying:

"A large scale renewable energy grid is just the kind of innovation we need if we're going to beat climate change. Europe needs to become a zero-carbon society as soon as possible, and that will only happen with bold new ideas like this one. Tinkering with 20th-century technologies like coal and nuclear simply isn't going to get us there."

A young girl working in Guatemala. Photo: noesnjoc (flickr)

According to Unicef estimates, one in six children (158 million) aged 5-14 are engaged in child labor. These kids aren't working at the local shopping center. Rather, they sell goods on the street, clean houses, or work in small factories and stay away from the watchful eye of local law enforcement or inspectors.

Despite being considered exploitative by many organizations and countries, child labor is still common and occurs in countries like India and Guatemala, as well as the United States and the U.K.

The problem of child labor is complex and stems from adult poverty. For many poor families, working children contribute much needed income that prevents their family from falling deeper into poverty. Product boycotts and factory raids over child labor can sometimes prove more harmful as children turn to more dangerous jobs like mining and prostitution to earn money.

Slate Magazine's Today in Pictures captures images of working children dating back to 1942. What's most striking to me is how young and tiny some of the children are in the photos. I'm used to seeing adults performing the jobs that these small children are doing.

In Japan, her overnight hospital stay would only cost her $10. Photo: Hamed Saber (flickr)

“Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem,” according to the National Coalition on Health Care.

The United States spends the most in the world on health care – about $2 trillion annually. Yet, the U.S. ranks 37th in world in terms of the quality and fairness of its health care, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The U.S. has no comprehensive national health insurance system. Those who have insurance get it through their employers, government programs, or private suppliers. However,there are 47 million people that are not insured. Furthermore, millions more are underinsured, which has led to a growing epidemic of medical debt and bankruptcy in the United States. A Harvard University report found that about 50 percent of all bankruptcy fillings were partially due medical debt.

In light of this growing problem, correspondent T.R. Reid traveled with Frontline to investigate if other free-market countries were having the same problems with medical-related bankruptcy. What he found was shocking.

Traveling to the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland, Reid found that health-related bankruptcy is almost unheard of in these countries. Unlike the United States, all five of the visited countries have universal health care and pay a lot less.

Switzerland spends the second-highest amount on health care, but the government still spends 44-percent less per capita than the United States.

The full program, "Sick Around the World," is available online, along with a list of resources and a Q&A with Reid.

All the countries have varying degrees of private, market-based health care, like the United States. They, however, also limit the level of freedom the health care market can have. According to Frontline:

First, insurance companies must accept everyone and can't make a profit on basic care. Second, everybody's mandated to buy insurance, and the government pays the premium for the poor. Third, doctors and hospitals have to accept one standard set of fixed prices.

It's unnecessary for health care costs to send hundreds of thousands of Americans into debt each year. As Reid has learned, it is possible to make health care universal and affordable in a free-market economy.