Here's another great documentary from our friends at Current. In "City on Steroids,"  American filmmaker Adam Yamaguchi tours the little-known megacity of Chongqing, China. Growing at a rate of nearly 200,000 people per year, Chongqing is the one of the fastest growing cities on the planet and an emblem of China's rapid urbanization. The clearly overwhelmed Yamaguchi takes viewers on a quick tour of this modern boomtown from brand new yuppie apartments to factory floors. Along the way he takes time to discuss "Desperate Housewives" with college students, lift heavy sacks with migrant workers, and get taken in a card game called "fighting against the landowner."

Check it out:

Cindy L writes in response to "Think Again: The Peace Corps":

Heh, wonder if Robert Strauss would have jumped to the same conclusions about me. Back in '83-'85, fresh out of college, I was a 'generalist,' one of those fluent Spanish speakers sent to Africa he suggests were misplaced. Would he have read my mind and heart and assumed that I, too, was in it for subsidized travel experience or bolstering my resume. [...] [O]ur volunteer group consisted of 16 or so -- some had advanced degrees, one was at Harvard Law, another from MIT, and guess what, the specialists did not outperform the nonspecialists. The Peace Corps cannot solely be blamed for not using my Spanish, as I, already familiar with Latin culture because of my Colombian background, chose to take advantage of the travel opportunity to go to Africa--not for a some exotic fun, but because I could learn more there. It took me a whopping 3 months to become [fully conversant] in Setswana, big deal. And yes, I learned it not in the training classrooms, but in the bars, in the village, dancing, running village trails, and hanging with the natives--mostly the poor, but also the rich. [...]

[E]ven when I did accomplish good things -- development things -- the locals appreciated not what I did, but who I was. For [example], my generalist self got to the village and realized we had no electricity, no water, nothing to teach agriculture with, and most of all very low morale. So I went into the capital, taught myself how to build a water catchment tank and how to write grants, raised money, got supplies, electrified the school, put up fencing for gardening, built the swimming pool size tank. But what I was always noted for was not those things, but for getting sporting goods and starting various sporting teams that became competitive against better-supplied, established schools. It was running through the village with my students, sending them on distance runs with papers to be signed w/split times by store or bar clerks. It was speaking the language, hanging out.

Development got done, but the greatest value was the cross-cultural component, the public relations, and what *I* learned and took home with me, that will stay with me for a lifetime, affecting what I do now and how I do it. The tax dollars went into me and my growth and now I'm pouring myself out for society.

Some of the political appointees, a phenomenon I noticed as well, did cause a few problems for me, in that they made some serious cultural mistakes (like insulting my landlord, which ended up being an insult to his uncle--the chief! which ended up getting the witch doctor after me), but mostly we volunteers just ignored or derived a chuckle from the clueless appointees.

 Earlier on Passport:

• Readers react to 'Think Again: The Peace Corps'
• Is the Peace Corps any good?
• Peace Corps advice: Don't 'get drunk and fall down in a ditch' 

FP reader MC weighs in on "Think Again: The Peace Corps":

As a recently returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Ukraine, I would tend to agree with some of what Mr. Strauss argued in his article... while still seeing Peace Corps as serving a useful purpose. Peace Corps is in some ways the post-college study and party abroad opportunity for those with little or no work experience. In one of our training sessions, we were told half-jokingly that the only thing we could do wrong in our two years of service was to get drunk and fall down in a ditch. I believe that the comment was based on an incident that happened earlier in the year.

On the other hand, it is also a great chance for motivated young adults to gain much-needed experience in the international development field that can serve as a stepping stone to a future career. During my time in Peace Corps, I witnessed both types of volunteers: those that over-drank and generally embarrassed the United States of America, and those whose service truly made a difference in the world. I found that the best volunteers were those who were able to find small successes despite the cultural, linguistic, and bureaucratic obstacles.

There are indeed aspects of the Peace Corps that need to be reevaluated. The site placement process to determine where volunteers will serve definitely needs to be adjusted. Many times, volunteers seem to be assigned to sites at random with little input from the person affected most by the placement decision -- the volunteer.

Overall, the Peace Corps volunteer receives much more from the experience than he/she does for the country of service... In the end, the volunteer's attitude (along with a little luck) determines whether it's worth the taxpayer dollars spent and the volunteer's time.

You can check out previously posted letters here and here, or send in your own thoughts.

Readers are weighing in on both sides of a hard-hitting new Web exclusive by Robert L. Strauss, a former Peace Corps country director. Here's an e-mail in support of Strauss from FP reader JH:

[B]eing a former Peace Corps Volunteer (Morocco 99-00) I think he hit the nail on the head.

I recently attempted to reenlist with Peace Corps after receiving a master's degree in international development administration with an emphasis on monitoring and evaluation of development projects in Asia and the Pacific and was rejected by Peace Corps.

After being 'medically cleared,' they wanted to send me to Africa to work on HIV/AIDS projects and I stated that I would be best utilized in an area and field I'm trained in. I was then told I was cut from the application process for being 'inflexible' when it came to placement. It seems that any questioning about the placement process is taken as a threat to the organization's authority and there are plenty of recent college graduates with no idea about development who are willing to take an available spot.

I'm sorry to say that Peace Corps is not serious about development and it seems they would rather have bright eyed idealist with no experience or idea about sustainable development practices instead of skilled or trained personnel who could point out the flaws in the system and work to improve it while have a positive impact on the community.

Thanks for pointing out the flaws in Peace Corps which could be a development system for USAID, The World Bank, or the UN, but is instead a post-college hangout where little is accomplished.

And here's a complaint from CH, who volunteered in Togo from 2004 to 2007:

The first question that came to my mind as I read this was why a former Peace Corps country director, who spent four years of his life working for the organization, would be on such a vendetta. I question his motivation in publicly bashing the organization and makes me wonder what happened in Cameroon...

It seems that his main and only recommendation is for the Peace Corps to recruit the 'best of the best' to serve as volunteers. While he may be correct in this assessment, I think his opinion makes it obvious that they should do a better job recruiting the staff as well. I have a tough time imagining what my service would have been like had I been a volunteer in Cameroon during his tenure. A country director is responsible for setting the overall tone in the country where he or she is employed and I can't imagine a very positive or motivating environment under Mr. Strauss.

Despite all this, I tend to agree with many of his arguments. Peace Corps volunteers are generally fresh out of college or untrained in the field they're expected to serve in (as I was) or both. However, this does not necessarily mean that they will be ineffective as volunteers. I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish in my three years as a volunteer in Togo. I worked with some incredibly dedicated and inspiring volunteers, some of whom did not come to Togo with any particular skills yet who excelled in their assignments.

While in no way do I believe the Peace Corps to be perfect, highly effectual or a model to be used by development organizations, it remains an incredible opportunity for Americans and, at the very least, offers volunteers the opportunity to accomplish wonderful things. It is hard not to take Mr Strauss's bitterness personally and the motivation behind his writing should be explained.

Readers, what do you think? Were you a Peace Corps volunteer? How does his analysis fit with your experience? Read the article and comment below, or send us your thoughts by e-mail. Requests for confidentiality will be strictly honored.

ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

A shipment of ammunition, rockets, and mortar bombs en route from China to Zimbabwe has been denied passage from the South African port of Durban to the shipment's landlocked destination. 

On Friday, South Africa’s High Court barred the transport of weapons aboard the An Yue Jiang, arguing that the shipment would be used by Zimbabwe's president of 28 years, Robert Mugabe, against members of the opposition party. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, temporarily in self-imposed exiled, declared himself the victor of the March 29th elections. Since then, journalists and activists alike have reported that hundreds of opposition supporters have been detained, beaten, or tortured (warning: illustrations may be unsettling).

Although the An Yue Jiang is expected to return to China, a South African paper, News24, reports that a second arms shipment from China is scheduled to arrive by air in order to "expedite the delivery and to circumvent the controversy around last week's shipment by sea." The story also claims that both orders, placed by the Zimbabwean government, were finalized just days after Zimbabwe's elections.

The arms shipments brings to light the hazards of China's growing role in the world's poorest and most unstable continent. According to Serge Michel in the current issue of FP, in the last seven years, "trade between China and Africa jumped from $10 billion to $70 billion." But the resulting projects highlight the competing interests of Chinese-African cooperation:

Take, for example, the dam being built at Imboulou in Congo. Officially, it's a huge success: It's expected to help double national electricity production by 2009... [But according to a project engineer] the quality of the cement being used is sub-standard, the Congolese workers are so poorly paid that none of them stays longer than a few months, and, above all, the drilling has been so poorly done that half of the dam sits on a huge pocket of water that continually floods the site and could cause it to collapse one day."

From weapons to shoddy cement, the Chinese-Africa deal is looking more like a recipe for disaster every day.

TEH ENG KOON/AFP/Getty Images

Zhao Baige, the Chinese vice minister of family planning, announced yesterday that though the details still need to be ironed out, the government would like to gradually amend its controversial one-child policy. The system today is much more fluid than the original name intended. In practice, rural families and ethnic minorities can have more than one child, as can urban couples who are both from one-child familes. For the most part, so can families with money

In its desire to stay in power, perhaps the Communist Party is following Richard Cincotta's advice about mature populations giving rise to democracy. The more mature the Chinese population gets, the more stable society becomes which can yield a definitive, lasting transition to democracy. China seems to have missed the boat in multiple senses. The student protests of 1989 were a bit too early on the national democracy cosmic calendar, and according to Cincotta’s numbers, the People’s Republic passed the democracy threshold in 1998. 

This one-child policy amendment may be an attempt to assure a robust, young generation whose workforce wages will pay for the aging generation; but the higher proportion of youth would also create the unsettledness necessary to prevent democracy. It could be an act designed to draw diplomatic brownie points ahead of the Olympics by easing one of the most intrusive government policies still in place. As controversial as the system has been, population control has definitely been an important factor in curbing poverty and fostering development. It will be interesting to see what the Chinese government's new target will be for a sustainable population in the next century.

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Although President Bush's achievements in fighting poverty and disease in Africa have been lauded by popstar and social activist Bob Geldof as well as many Africans during Bush's recent tour of the continent, Brookings senior fellow Homi Kharas offers a "reality check" on U.S. aid to Africa under Bush. Kharas points out:

• U.S. economic aid to sub-Saharan Africa increased from $2.1 billion to $5.4 billion between 2000 and 2005. But EU countries gave $21.9 billion to Africa in 2006, and the United Kindgom alone gave $5.2 billion -- with an economy one-sixth of the size of the U.S. economy.
• $1.3 billion in U.S. aid to Africa was in the form of food aid, which Kharas describes as "a form of assistance which is so questionable in terms of its impact on development that several large U.S. charities, including CARE, have stopped dealing with it."
• The United States' economic assistance to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006 (and this isn't even touching upon the enormous military expenditures on this region) was more than $6 billion, which is more than what was given to all 45 sub-Saharan African countries combined.

Kharas concludes:

So while we should celebrate the U.S. contributions to Africa, we should also keep in mind the fact that it is Europe, not the United States, that is leading the international fight against African poverty."

William Easterly

If there is a "bad boy of development studies," it's NYU economist Bill Easterly. When he spoke recently on a Davos panel with Bill Gates, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Paul Wolfowitz about the usefulness of foreign aid, moderator Fareed Zakaria gently poked fun at Easterly by calling him the "devil." He may not be the devil, but he's certainly the devil's advocate, constantly questioning whether traditional conceptions of foreign aid are actually helpful to poor countries. He's done it in the pages of FP, in "The Utopian Nightmare" a couple years ago, and more recently in "The Ideology of Development."

Now, Easterly is turning his contrarian guns on the United Nations, asking, "Are the Millennium Development Goals Unfair to Africa?" At a luncheon I attended today at Brookings, his answer was, unequivocally, yes. Virtually everyone agrees, he began, that by the time we hit the MDGs' deadline in 2015, Africa will have failed all of them. Africa will not have reduced its poverty rate by half; it will attain neither universal primary education nor gender equality in schools; child mortality will not be reduced by two thirds, and so on. Easterly then went down the list of goals, claiming they were all unfair and biased to begin with. Africans, he said, never had a chance of attaining them. His argument was pretty wonky—with lots of charts and graphs showing how the U.N. should be measuring rates of change and growth in Africa, rather than absolute figures, and how the MDGs were arbitrarily designed and made Africa look worse than it really is. I found it quite convincing. Eventually you'll be able to download a transcript here to judge for yourself, or you can download the original paper (pdf).

What Easterly said made sense, and yet I couldn't help thinking, "So what?" Easterly says the MDGs paint Africa unfairly. But does that really matter if more attention leads to more investment in Africa? And even if you think the MDGs are just another meaningless U.N. project, the fact that people pay attention to them must stand for something.

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

Easterly is famous for opposing much of the research of anti-poverty crusader Jeffrey Sachs (in his talk, he even joked that he's mandated to take potshots at Sachs at least once in each speech), and for being highly skeptical of the efforts of celebrities like Bono, Madonna, and Angelina Jolie. He thinks they give off a neocolonial air, the sense that Africa needs the West for salvation. Asked if all the attention brought by such celebrities was helping, Easterly said he didn't think so. Quite the opposite: He thought the kind of attention Africa gets because of celebrities, or because of failing the MDGs, does more harm than good because it reinforces stereotypes that Africa needs to be dependent on the West to be lifted out of poverty.

What do you think? Do celebrities help or hurt? Is the U.N. setting unfair, arbitrary goals? Share your thoughts at passportblog@ceip.org.

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

Further proof that blogging is injurious to your plans to enjoy Davos: Having sent off my previous post after 3 a.m., I awoke too late to show up at a UNICEF panel with the former child soldier Ismail Beah, whose bestselling memoir has just come under attack from a section of the Australian media. Last night, with my blogging duties in mind, I managed to forget the Google After-Hours Party, a much sought-after event where the likes of Bono, Bill Gates, and Tony Blair hobnob with the regular pass-holders. So this will definitely be my last post: In future years, if I return, it will be to enjoy myself fully rather than enlighten the cognoscenti.

The last full day of the Forum, Saturday, began to show a slight slackening of the pace, as many attendees started bidding farewell to Davos. (The official closing is on Sunday, with a final session expected to attract so few that it has been shifted from the plenary Congress Hall to a smaller room, and a lunch in the mountains, both of which are likely to be feel-good events and neither of which I intend to blog about.) There was a strong session on the global economic outlook, which nonetheless only confirmed that the outlook is mixed and that economic forecasting is usually slightly less reliable than meteorology.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty

I attended one of the prestige private events, a lunch with the Japanese prime minister (who had flown down to Davos in the midst of a regular session of his country's parliament, the Diet, something that in the previous 37 years had only been done once by any of his predecessors). But the number of empty seats at the half-dozen tables around the PM testified to the declining salience of Japan, a country that two decades ago was seen as the world's economic powerhouse and, bluntly, no longer is.

Otherwise, it was a day of conversations—some accidental, some planned—with a host of friends from the multilateral world: Juan Somavia, the head of the International Labor Organization, EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo of the Yale Center on Globalization, and my old U.N. colleagues Zohreh Tabatabai and Nick Van Praag. Talking to these dedicated servants of the international system was itself a reminder of how little Davos had focused this year on multilateral institutions, once seen at the Forum as the foundation of global cooperation and now largely treated as somewhere between an irrelevance and an afterthought.

So, how would I wrap up this week's experience of Davos? A few observations, not meant to be comprehensive:

• The Forum remains, above all, a networking event. People come to meet and be met, and officials as well as executives expressed satisfaction with the large number of private and "bilateral" meetings they were able to hold in Davos. By this yardstick, the Forum was a success—as it always is.
• The panels were, as usual, of varying quality, with world-class speakers and a few slightly off their game. The scheduling—a huge challenge—meant that no one could really attend everything they'd have liked to, because each interesting panel clashed with another interesting panel.
• Some of the topics chosen were of limited interest, and some of the omissions surprising ones. There was surprisingly little discussion of U.S. politics in a presidential election year—and few American political figures were present. The first few days, thanks to the gyrations in the financial markets, prompted an excessive degree of short-termism in the conversation, which was unfortunate for an event that likes to think of itself as taking the grand and long view of the really important trends in the world.
• In my opening post, I mentioned I'd pay attention to India. There was an extraordinary number of Indians present. The movers and shakers from the worlds of business and politics ranged from the finance minister to the CEOs of all the top information technology companies. But what struck me was the extent to which India is now taken for granted at Davos, in a good way. There's scarcely a panel without an Indian on it, and most discussions of world affairs—economic or geopolitical—witnessed several mentions of India. This Forum afforded confirmation, if any were needed, that my homeland has truly arrived at Davos. It no longer needs any special effort to promote itself to this audience.
• I also promised to look at the attention paid to poverty and development. Some years ago, a World Social Forum was created as a challenge the World Economic Forum. This was the first year in nearly a decade that there wasn't a rival gathering proclaiming that "another world is possible." This is at least partly because Davos has quietly taken on board the same slogan, as this year's Forum demonstrated. The discussions of development and corporate social responsibility have reached a level of seriousness that can only be applauded by an old U.N. hand like me. Of course, action must follow and results have to be visible, but both are beginning to be seen, and the companies and political leaders at the Forum are in many cases responsible for that positive trend.

Finally—as the debris of the extensive Bahrain-sponsored lunch is cleared away and preparations begin for tonight's concert and the black-tie Gala Soirée—it is time to reflect on those peculiar habits of Davos Man (and Woman) that they will have to struggle to shed when they fly away from this snow-capped wonderland. These include, but are not limited to:

• The Davos bend-and-bob: the peculiar movement required to stretch your smart-card badge to one of the ubiquitous scanners that determine whether you can be granted entry, whether you can read your e-mail, and whether you can attend a session for which you may have forgotten to register.

• The furtive chest glance: The quick darting movement of the eye toward the dangling badge that sports a participant's name, which usually precedes a familiar exclamation of pleasure at meeting its wearer, whose identity you had completely forgotten until you saw his or her badge. (Davos is the only place where it is completely socially acceptable, when you meet a woman, to look quickly at her chest first. The operative adverb is "quickly.")

Enough amateur anthropology. Now for the real thing—time to don my glad rags and get ready for the Gala Soirée, which begins at 9 p.m. and goes into the wee hours—a veritable smorgasbord of food, drink, music and last-minute networking. Your faithful blogger relinquishes his keyboard at last. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a pleasure.

Shashi Tharoor, a former Under Secretary General of the United Nations, was India's candidate in the 2006 race to succeed Kofi Annan as Secretary General and came second out of seven contenders. He is the award-winning author of 10 books, most recently The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century. Visit him at www.shashitharoor.com.

You can find Tharoor's previous Diary entries here or at the following links:

• Davos Diary, Day 5: Never tempt Providence
• Day 4: Fatigue can't stop this blogger
• Day 3: Panels galore
• Day 2: Snowy arrival
• Day 1: Setting the scene

Before Bill Gates even had chance to present his ideas for "creative capitalism," the National Review's Larry Kudlow had already misrepresented Gates's argument:

I just have to smile when a billionaire like Bill Gates turns a cold shoulder to the blessings capitalism bestows. Or when his buddy, Warren Buffett, broadcasts the importance of hiking tax rates on successful earners and investors. Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn't noticed, it was a miserable failure.

What's in the drinking water at this place called Davos?

Of course, the Wall Street Journal article from which Kudlow based his comments explicitly noted, "Mr. Gates isn't abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system."

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

And if you look at what Gates actually said, he didn't call for governments to seize control of the means of production. Nor, truth be told, did he actually say anything profoundly new. He just wants to push for "an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities." 

Another Davos-goer mentioned in Gates's speech, FP contributor C.K. Prahalad, has long advocated that businesses sell to the "bottom of the pyramid"—the poorest of the poor. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, named in 2005 by FP and Prospect magazine as one of the world's 100 top public intellectuals, literally wrote the book on why capitalism runs aground in some of the poorer areas of the world. De Soto also won the Cato Institute's "Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty" in 2004. So Gates is well within the bounds of acceptable capitalist discourse.

Maybe he's wrong—and in today's WSJ article FP contributor Bill Easterly raises an important question about the effectiveness of efforts to sell to the poor—but Gates is no socialist. He also recognizes, as he said in his speech, that "profits are not always possible when business tries to serve the very poor" and that we need to find other incentives—not Soviet diktats—for companies that do so. Gates's final closing remarks were a humble plea for market-driven efforts to combat poverty:

I'd like to ask everyone here—whether you're in business, government or the non-profit world—to take on a project of creative capitalism in the coming year. It doesn't have to be a new project; you could take an existing project, and see where you might stretch the reach of market forces to help push things forward. When you award foreign aid, when you make charitable gifts, when you try to change the world—can you also find ways to put the power of market forces behind the effort to help the poor?

That's hardly a call to implement the recommendations of Das Kapital. Too bad Kudlow would rather launch ideological polemics and attack strawmen than consider Gates's ideas on their merits.

PIERRE VERDY/AFP/Getty Images

The first real day of the formal Forum got off to a lively start Wednesday morning with a panel on the geopolitics of a divided world. At least it did for me: There were several other panels to choose from. Selecting which of six or seven alternative (and parallel) panels to attend is the most difficult thing you can do in Davos (other than learning to suffer silently through security). It's possible for two people to spend the same week here and experience two entirely different Forums.

But a divided world is one of my concerns, so I made a beeline for that session (assuming that bees negotiate paths involving makeshift temporary passageways, wood-plank paths, tent-flaps, and multiple floors). The shuttle from my home base in Klosters was late, but that meant shorter security lines, since the majority of participants follow Swiss norms of punctuality and throng the airport-style scanners early in time for the first panels.

By the time I snuck in, the discussion had warmed up nicely. There was much intelligent talk about the changing world that will confront the next American president, and thoughtful concern about the need to restore U.S. soft power — defined by a panelist as America's reputation for legitimacy and competence internationally, both categories in which it has suffered under the Bush administration. A senior Chinese participant (I'm trying to honor Davos's non-attribution policies here) argued convincingly that China has no interest in promoting any division in the world: "It's our first chance since the Opium Wars of the 1840s to develop and modernize our country, and all we want is peace, not confrontation anywhere in the world." Reacting to comments about China's lack of democracy, he pointed out to the Americans (and the Frenchman) present that neither country had given the vote to women until the 1920s, and the United States had denied it to many blacks until the 1960s. "Give us time, too," he said, adding for good measure, "And don't expect us to be like you."

An Indian strategic analyst pointed out that power and influence are not the same thing: the United States is the world's sole superpower but its influence is on the wane, and the need for coalition-building is increasing. He dismissed the moderator's talk of "Chindia" — a convergence between India and China—by tartly observing that the two countries do not share norms and values. In today's world, he pointed out, economic interdependence has nothing to do with political closeness—an intriguing insight given that China will overtake the United States as India's largest trading partner in the next two years. The moderator observed in closing that the panel had featured the rare spectacle of a Chinese offering lessons in democracy and an American offering lessons in humility!

Swiss Image/World Economic Forum

"Come back, Bill Gates!"

That's the opening line from Brian Winter's illuminating profile of Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helú, "How Slim Got Huge," which ran in FP's November/December 2007 issue. Winter was pining away for Gates, a self-made billionaire who—unlike Slim—got rich thanks primarily to the power of his brain, not his Rolodex. 

Well, rumor has it Gates is looking to make a splash at this year's Davos: 

Gates, a loyal and normally upbeat participant, plans a potentially provocative speech titled "A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century." A spokesman for Microsoft was cagey about the details. But people involved in his appearance said Gates would take both big business and government to task for what he views as their inadequate response to the twin scourges of disease and poverty in the developing world.

World Economic Forum chief Klaus Schwab has granted Gates an unusual amount of time by Davos standards, 30 minutes starting at 12:20 p.m. EST on Thursday, to make his case. We'll be tuning in.

Swiss Image/World Economic Forum

The first temporary denizens, of Davos, Switzerland, are beginning to trickle in for this year's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. (The meeting doesn't officially start until Wednesday, Jan. 23, and it lasts until Sunday, Jan. 27, but the pre-meetings are getting underway.)

One person who's not going to make it to Davos this year? U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who has his hands full at home with the subprime mortgage crisis and canceled at the last minute. Also not coming: Brangelina, the Hollywood power couple whom many Davoisie complained were a distraction from the real business at hand (I have some sympathy for this gripe, having witnessed firsthand the hoopla surrounding Brad and Angie at last year's Clinton Global Initiative).

There are still plenty of names to watch, of course. Bono is back, for one. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is attending for the first time and will be giving Wednesday's opening address. Pakistan's tottering president, Pervez Musharraf, is sure to attract attention wherever he goes. And many of the usual Davos suspects are returning: Microsoft's Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Tony Blair and his protégé, Gordon Brown, not to mention former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Here on Passport, our main guide to this year's festivities will be Shashi Tharoor, an acclaimed author, one of India's most influential foreign-affairs pundits, and a former Under Secretary General of the United Nations to boot. We'll also be checking in periodically with noted author and columnist Ian Buruma, who will be giving us his take on the people and ideas he comes across at the conference, and we may hear from some other folks as time allows. And finally, my colleagues at FP and I will be keeping an eye out for the most interesting moments from among the 233 sessions on offer and from coverage elsewhere. So check back all week by clicking on the davos08 category, and enjoy the show!

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is slated to kick off next week. More than more than 2,500 of the world's top CEOs, political leaders, journalists, and other public figures will gather in the Alpine resort town of Davos, Switzerland, to network, munch on canapés, and share ideas to make the world a better place. But you don't have to be a member of the global elite to contribute. Perhaps taking a cue from this year's United States presidential debates, the WEF is calling on Web denizens to share their ideas through video submissions on the new Davos YouTube channel:

The WEF wants ordinary "global citizens" to post answers to the simple question, "What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?" (FP embarked on a similar, though admittedly less populist effort last year with our "21 Solutions to Save the World" package of stories. It contains contributions from such Davos luminaries as Paul Saffo, Esther Duflo, and C.K. Prahalad.)

Some of my favorite responses include:

• "Silvercracker" wants to pump desalinized ocean water into barren lands in the Tropic of Capricorn to grow genetically modified tree farms.
• "Neddotcom" says that NGOs need to collaborate better and suggests an independent body to coordinate and measure their efforts.
• "Stejones," a Canadian engineering student, wants to create a product-labeling system that displays the product's environmental footprint and the percentage of its manufacturer's profits that have gone to international charities, so that consumers can make informed choices.

Any Passport readers out there with their own video answers? Let us know, and we'll blog them here.

CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP/Getty Images

The World Bank released a report Wednesday entitled Global Economic Prospects 2008: Technology Diffusion in the Developing World. As the name implies, the report details what kind of technical progress developing countries are making—how many people have computers, access to the Internet, that kind of thing. The report is quite long, so I'm going to focus on a few key points:

The number of people living in absolute poverty in developing countries has decreased from 29 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2004. This is one of the upsides of globalization and the spread of technology. As technology spreads to poor countries, incomes grow. Yet as the World Bank acknowledges, it's very difficult to quantitatively prove a relationship between technology and income growth, so the causation here is murky.

There is a large technology gap between the rich and poor. This is one of the downsides of globalization. A good example of this phenomenon is India. India has a robust high-tech industry concentrated in its cities. However, in poorer rural areas less than 10 percent of people have access to a telephone let alone a computer, according to the Bank's own figures. Such stratification is dangerous and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look at income growth in the United States over the last few decades: the gap between the rich and the poor has grown dramatically. Once this separation starts, it's hard to stop.

Developing countries have difficulty absorbing new technologies and are incapable of innovations. Because of low literacy rates and infrastructure shortcomings in poor rural areas, poor countries have difficulty embracing technology. For instance, computers are great, but are pretty worthless if the person trying to use one can't read. And cell phones are a great way to connect people, but many rural areas in developing countries don't get coverage. These difficulties embracing basic technology make it impossible to innovate.

The spread of technology is inevitable, and it does have enormous benefits. But the second and third points listed above have dangerous implications. Once the fortunes of rich and poor begin to diverge, the trend is nearly impossible to reverse. And problems in developing countries make it very difficult to get technology into the hands of the poor. Hundreds of millions of people are being dug into a technological hole that they can't emerge from. They're being left behind by the global economy.

GENIA SAVILOV/AFP/Getty Images

I'll bet you didn't know that 2008 has been designated the "International Year of the Potato."

No, cuddly spuds aren't going to replace Tai Shan the panda and Knut the polar bear as the photogenic organism that dominates the cuteosphere in the coming year. Rather, U.N. officials at the Food and Agriculture Organization have decided to push potatoes as an efficient way to combat hunger and poverty:

[The potato] is ideally suited to places where land is limited and labour is abundant, conditions that characterize much of the developing world. The potato produces more nutritious food more quickly, on less land, and in harsher climates than any other major crop - up to 85 percent of the plant is edible human food, compared to around 50% in cereals.

So, what does the Year of the Potato mean on a practical level? The first step is "increasing awareness" about potatoes and "activities related to the potato." Over the longer term, the U.N. hopes to boost sustainable potato production in the developing world.

As it happens, a shift of potato production from developed to developing countries is already underway. In 2005, for the first time, the developing world harvested more tons of potatoes than did the developed world. As usual, China and India explain much of the shift: China is now the planet's top potato producer, and together, China and India harvest about a third of the world's spuds.

JOSE CENDON/AFP/Getty Images

As you probably know, earlier this week FP posted the Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2007, our roundup of the most important news stories that flew under the radar this year.

But we're not the only ones keeping an eye out for little-noticed items and trends. Doctors Without Borders also posts an annual list. Theirs is of the Top 10 Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2007. Click here to see it. Sadly, of the those 10 stories, four of them are directly about Africa. Two others, tuberculosis and malnutrition, concern the continent as well. As usual, Africa got shafted and ignored this year.

Not long ago, FP editor-in-chief Moisés Naím looked at the phenomenon of "rogue aid" emanating from cash-rich countries like China, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia. Their no-strings-attached assistance to the developing world, he argued, threatens to export undemocratic practices. Illiberal lending may foster a world that is "more corrupt, chaotic, and authoritarian." Now it appears the Bank is trying to make common cause with at least one of the lenders:

The World Bank is planning joint projects in Africa with China's Export-Import Bank to address concerns that Beijing is taking more than it gives as it scours the continent for oil and minerals. World Bank President Robert Zoellick, wrapping up a four-day trip to China, said the pros and cons of the country's push into Africa had been an important topic during his talks with senior officials including Ex-Im Bank Governor Li Ruogu.

A worthwhile effort, no doubt, but as long as China remains ravenous for energy and raw materials it's hard to imagine that Beijing will stop cutting deals with African autocrats. Better Chinese aid practices may well depend on a slower Chinese economy. 

iStockphoto.com

Vermiculate. Lobscouse. Desuetude. Macerate.

Just about every American high school student who has planned to attend university has had to learn words such as these in preparation for the SAT exam that is used as part of the college admissions process.

Now, by learning these words, whether for fun or for test preparation, you can also help end hunger. A computer programmer created a Web site, Freerice.com, that throws multiple-choice vocabulary questions at you. For every one you answer correctly, the site donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. The first few questions are relatively easy, but as you answer questions correctly, subsequent ones become progressively more difficult.

Advertising income pays for the donated rice. The site averages close to 200,000 hits daily, and since October 7, 6.9 billion grains have been donated. How munificent.

NORBERT MILLAUER/AFP/Getty Images

Where's the most car-crazy place in the world?

An easy question, right? Of course it's United States, where the U.N. estimates there are 776 cars for every 1,000 people. But other countries are catching up. China has held the top spot for new-car sales for several years, and by 2012, India is projected to take over as the world's fastest-growing car market.

Indian officials are preparing for the jump. Along with the biggest highway-construction boom since independence, India will also be raising its speed limits from the current upper limit of 80km/h (48mph) to 100km/h (60mph), thereby lopping nearly 3 hours off the trip between New Delhi and Mumbai.

With all the highways and faster speed limits, India might have to come up with a better driver's licensing scheme. That is to say, the country might actually need to develop one. No driving test is required to obtain a license despite India's 96,000 traffic fatalities each year.

Cars seem to be a global right of passage for fast-developing countries, but with more cars and higher speed limits, critics are already complaining. With higher speeds generally comes lower fuel efficiency, increased carbon emissions, and higher global oil prices. Despite billions in new highway spending, increased public transportation is not in India's plans.

China and India both seem to look at the U.S. transportation system as a model worth replicating, but it's a system that was developed over 50 years ago at a time when oil was cheap and efficiency was not a concern. It's time to get a new model.

Update: It seems that this post has generated a bit of criticism from The Other Side, which takes exception to my characterization of the Indian driver's licensing system and the efficiency of motor vehicles. I'm not one to shy away from criticism so allow me to clarify two points:

1. Mr. Kumar is absolutely correct in that India does indeed have a driver's licensing system on the books. I was using a bit of blogger's "poetic license" to say that whatever system is in place is entirely unsatisfactory; a point made in the original Guardian article.
2. In regards to efficiency, one can debate endlessly about the engineering mechanics of combustion engines, the price of gasoline and the possibility that there could be great advances in alternative fuel technologies. But in the meantime, cars and trucks are still less efficient than transporting people and goods by other means, such as trains. The United States erred in investing heavily in highways starting in the 1950s when we could have instead promoted mass transit systems. India's trains, from what I can tell, are in need of some serious upgrades. Of course, there will always be a need and a use for highways but, in my opinion, India shouldn't attempt to copy our own outdated model.