Dear Broker

I really like your magazine, more and more. I advertise it wildly in my various global networks.

Since quite some time I struggle with an uncertainty. I remember the days...   Read more >>

I agree that the end of the Second World War marked the decline and indeed obsolescence of inter-state war. Modern military technology had become to destructive to use in wars between equally well-armed...   Read more >>

When the Cold War ended, Mary Kaldor (along with several other scholars and analysts) was right to intuit that this momentous development was likely to impact decisively on the landscape of conflicts. N...   Read more >>

René Grotenhuis is correct that there is little new about human well-being: human beings have written about it for centuries. But it would be wrong to assume that further thinking about the concept of w...   Read more >>

In his article on well-being as a new development concept, Romesh Vaitilingam seems to offer new perspectives to develop a more comprehensive approach to development (‘Be well’, The Broker 12). B...   Read more >>

(Response to: Romesh Vaitilingam, ‘Be well’, The Broker 12)

We are now at the end of a 25–30 year era of development thinking and practice. The idea of development as a mainspring for politica...   Read more >>

In ‘Chocolate and child labour’ (The Broker 12), Erwin Bulte tries to outline the relationship between chocolate consumption and child labour in the cocoa-growing regions of West Africa. In contrast wit...   Read more >>

In her article ‘A curse with no cure?’ (The Broker 11), Bertine Kamphuis concludes that when looking for cures for the so-called resource curse, the following aspects are crucial to determining t...   Read more >>

I am not surprised by the reactions of Mennes, Gunning and Elbers to my column, ‘Weak links’ (The Broker 10). In a nutshell, they argue that cross-country regressions may be imperfect but can be useful...   Read more >>

In their recent comments on Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion Paul Hoebink and Erwin Bulte have questioned the use of cross-country regression analysis in the study of economic growth. Their discus...   Read more >>