A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats

Making Strategy Real

Please consider the environment before printing this document In today’s competitive global business environment virtually all firms work diligently to analyze alternatives and to create a business strategy that enables competitive advantage. Once the strategy has been defined however, nine out of ten organizations fail to implement it effectively.1 Trends such as globalization, increasingly em...

The Neoliberal Pea and Thimble Trick: Changing Rhetoric of Neoliberal Champions across Two Periods of Economic History and Two Hypotheses about Why the Message Is Less Sanguine

Neoliberalism, or faith in the capacity of markets to solve social and economic problems, is a key element of the prevailing public policy orthodoxy in G20 countries. Throughout the 1980s, key proponents of the Neoliberal message such as UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and American President Ronald Regan spoke optimistically about the philosophy’s inevitability and its benefits. During that...

Does a Rising Biofuels Tide Raise All Boats? A Study of Cash Rent Determinants for Iowa Farmland under Hay and Pasture

Counting the poor versus monitoring the floor: Understanding alternative perceptions of progress against poverty

One hears very different views within the development community on the question as to whether the world’s poorest are participating in the benefits of economic growth.1 One view is reflected in John F Kennedy’s famous aphorisms that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats,’ or claims that ‘growth is good for the poor’ (Dollar and Kraay 2002) and that the poor are ‘breaking through from the bottom’ (Rade...

Another Look at Whether a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

Periods of rapid U.S. economic growth during the 1960s and 1970s coincided with improved living standards for many segments of the population, including the disadvantaged as well as the affluent, suggesting to some that a rising economic tide lifts all demographic boats. This paper investigates the impact of U.S. business cycle conditions on population well-being since the 1970s. Aggregate empl...

Food insecurity - not just about rural communities in Africa and Asia.

In June, the FAO reported that world hunger will reach a historic high this year, with over one billion people projected to go hungry every day. Here is what Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, had to say in July: ‘We are in a mess. The financial crisis hit the world like a sudden jolt, and it hit the world where it hurts the most: money. [y] All countries, rich and poor, north and south, a...