Feb 10
Most of you probably don’t know that back when I first started writing for the SISGI Group about 9 months ago one of my first blog posts was about an ecotourism initiative in India. Now, I like to think that my writing has improved a bit since then, but it was still a fairly good …
Feb 09
Immigration in the U.S. is a very hot topic that often gets simplified to one word: poverty. It can very well be that poverty is one of the key issues that has increased immigration trends to the U.S. However, it is often too easy to compile all the structural and political problems into one big …
Feb 08
Ever since the recession of 2008, we have seen an incline in homeless Americans. The contradiction to this trend is that we have more vacant houses than ever in the U.S. as homes slide into foreclosure and people can’t afford to maintain a mortgage with an outrageous interest rate. When the housing bubble of 2008 …
Feb 02
You might not think it, but I bet that almost everyone reading this will make use of corn today. I’m not necessarily talking about chowing down on a buttered corn on the cob. Corn is a component of about 25% of groceries from the supermarket. It is also a major component in almost all fast …
Feb 02
Imagine today you woke up and decided, “I’m going to start a business.” Whether you have an MBA or half a year of college under your belt, there are certain steps you realize you’ll need to take to see your vision come to life. First, you’ll need a business proposal, a financial plan, investors, permits …
Jan 27
Food security is a topic that economists, agronomists and politicians are always concerned about. Since the 1800’s, some economists predicted that we were going to face serious scarcities (Malthus’s theory) causing famines and deaths. Although the theory turned out to be wrong, nowadays it is still important to take seriously Malthus’s prediction since we can …
Jan 27
Last month, I had the opportunity to travel to Colombia for school to work on a consulting project (see my previous post about Colombia here). We were focusing our work on the bottom of the pyramid (BOP), which typically means the poorest sectors of society. In business schools today, growing attention is being paid to …
Jan 26
Several months ago I wrote a post about the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, which, to refresh your memory, operates on the basis of gross national happiness, or GNH. GNH replaced GDP and GNP (gross domestic product and gross national product) as the measure of development for the country in 1972 when then King Jigme …
Jan 24
When the recession hit in 2008 I was living in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Port St. Lucie is a small city on the east coast side of Florida about midway in between Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. Florida was hit particularly hard by the recession and the unemployment rate jumped from 8% to 16% in some …
Jan 23
A few years ago, my friend introduced me to a new author she really enjoyed, Dave Eggers. I first read his work You Shall Know My Velocity, then moved on to his autobiographical book Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius. Not only did I love his writing, but also when I read his life story, …
