Urbanization

Billions of dollars are zooming around the world from one wallet to another. Photo: <a href="http://worldbank.tumblr.com/post/36217284197/which-developing-countries-received-the-most?cid=EXT_TWBN_D_EXT">The World Bank</a>

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Mobile Technology

Follow the [mobile?] money

According to a new World Bank report, most remittances are flowing to India, China, the Philippines, Mexico and Nigeria, most of it in cold, hard cash.

Hong Kong and other Chinese cities are driving an economic explosion that's blessing the world as a whole - but threatening many Westerners. Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/95572727@N00/953669278/">Trey Ratcliff (Flickr)</a>

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Does the economic growth of poor countries terrify Westerners?

A Vancouver Sun story published Sunday offers a fascinating way of thinking about the scale of China's economic explosion:

With just a few simple materials, a community can map boundaries and see how they fit within the larger city. Photo courtesy "Design With the Other 90%: CITIES"

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Portland hosts the West Coast Premier of "Design With the Other 90%: CITIES"

Of the world’s 7 billion people, 1 billion now live in urban slums.

As the world gets richer, competition for resources like water and livestock will likely increase. Photo: Erin Gray for MercyCorps

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Extreme poverty could end by 2030, but the planet might pay for it

The world’s soaring wealth will nearly wipe out poverty worldwide by 2030, according to the National Intelligence Council.

Mercy Corps CEO Neal Keny-Guyer in Gaza. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps.

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Q&A with Mercy Corps CEO about market innovations to poverty

Mercy Corps CEO Neal Keny-Guyer and NextBillion's editor Scott Anderson discuss where Mercy Corps is heading and how its past has informed its future, especially when it comes to business development.

The world's economic center of gravity is rapidly moving east, after thousands of years of westward movement. <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/daily-chart-19">Image: The Economist</a>

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World’s ‘economic center’ races east, thanks to ‘middleweight’ cities

Rapid urbanization in emerging economies has the world’s economic center of gravity whizzing east faster than ever before, according to this infographic in The Economist last week.

An improved sanitation system allows private sanitation companies to access new customers in narrow urban slums, where some of the 94 million Indonesians live without access to such services. Photo: Mercy Corps

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Value Chains

Disruptive sanitation: Can 3-wheeled carts and better septic tanks clean up Jakarta?

This article was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.

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Honduras: Up for sale

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Transforming poo into a valuable resource

In Haiti, one nonprofit may have figured out how to make a pot o' gold out of a port-o-pot.

Jeffrey Garten explored the massive shifts taking place in the global economy with an audience at<a href="http://www.mercycorps.org/portland"> Mercy Corps' Action Center</a>. Photo: Kyla Springer/Mercy Corps.

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Yale economist to world: Don't panic. Embrace uncertainty and innovation.

Presented by Jeffrey Garten at Mercy Corps

The world is not ending, and the sky is not falling. But the rise of the global South and East promises to reward the world's most innovative risk-takers.

A crowded market in Dhaka, Bangaldesh. Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ifpri/4860343116/"> IFPRI</a>

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How to make population growth work for Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is getting bigger. But despite warnings from neo-Malthusian alarmists, population growth—if managed correctly—could be the key to unlocking Africa’s economic potential.

Failure to adapt to global climate change led to unrest across the Arab World. Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/6argoo3a/6253592631/sizes/m/in/photostream/">Saleem-Homsi (Flickr)</a>

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How climate change puts the heat on governments

Incompetent, unjust governance by some of the Middle East’s worst despots brewed a recipe for disaster before the Arab Spring, but it took climate change to turn up the heat.

Highly populated, poor urban areas are particularly susceptible to disasters that result from climate changes. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps.

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Four ways an Indonesian city is planning for climate disaster

As the Planet Under Pressure conference wrapped up in London last week, MercyCorps’ Indonesia team explains why you want to be in Semarang when the next major climate change related disaster strikes.

Why Nations Fail asks, "Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?" Image: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26107309@N05/2550699761/">Crystal Davis</a> World Resources Inst. (Flickr

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"Why Nations Fail" : An antipoverty polemic for people who believe in change

Poverty isn’t random or predetermined—it’s man-made.

That’s Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s answer to a simple, ancient question: why are some countries rich while others are poor? Why do some people live in poverty while others prosper?