Nathan and Erika have a chance encounter with Serge Dubois and his friends in lavender-drenched Northern Provence. Serge's mission is to stop helicopter test flights planned by a company in Aix en Provence – to begin once the French government's missile silos in the region are de-commissioned. Nathan promises to help.Flashback to Nathan's youth in Quebec province and his exploits growing up in Canada – including encounters with his teenage foe, Allan.After university, Natha...

In Beyond Question Period you travel with a Canadian Member of Parliament and discover how challenging, yet exhilirating, the work of an MP can be. Running for election, debating and voting on bills, committee work, constituency work, representing Canada internationally, and speaking at a variety of events - this is just the beginning. How the role of an MP changes in a minority,or a majority government, or in opposition is described with living examples. The cut and thrust of politics in ...

The fight to eliminate world poverty is being severely hampered by corrupt leaders in developing countries. According to the African Union, some $150 billion is lost every year to corruption in Africa. In China, it is estimated corruption diminishes the annual value of gross domestic product by 15%. The pattern repeats itself elsewhere.This bleak situation compounds the poverty problem even more because donor countries are justifiably reluctant to support jurisdictions whose leader...

In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse.In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of do...

Economic growth does not demand a secret formula. Good development examples now abound in East Asia and further afield in others parts of Asia, and in Central America. But why then has Africa failed to realise its potential in half a century of independence? Why Africa is Poor demonstrates that Africa is poor not because the world has denied the continent the market and financial means to compete: far from it. It has not been because of aid per se. Nor is African poverty solely a ...

Politicians, financiers and bureaucrats claim to believe in free competitive markets, yet they have built the most unfree market system ever created. In this Gilded Age, income is funnelled to the owners of property – financial, physical and intellectual – at the expense of society. Wages stagnate as labour markets are transformed by outsourcing, automation and the on-demand economy, generating more rental income while broadening the precariat.Now fully updated with an introduction...

For some time, Australia's democracy has been slowly sliding into disrepair. The nation's major policy challenges go unaddressed, our economic future is uncertain and political corruption is becoming normalised. It's tempting, but distracting, to point to the usual list of reasons, from the declining calibre of the political class to the growing polarisation of politics. But we can't understand the current predicament of our democracy without recognising the central role of Murdoch's natio...

**From one of the world’s best-known development economists—an excoriating attack on the tragic hubris of the West’s efforts to improve the lot of the so-called developing world."Brilliant at diagnosing the failings of Western intervention in the Third World." —BusinessWeek**In his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired...

"Canada's prime minister is a dictator." "The Sun King of Canadian government." "More powerful than any other chief executive of any other democratic country." These kinds of claims are frequently made about Canada's leader – especially when the prime minister's party holds a majority government in Parliament. But is there any truth to these arguments? At the Centre of Government not only presents a comprehensively researched work on the structure of political power in Canada but also offe...

In the universally acclaimed and award-winning The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier reveals that fifty failed states--home to the poorest one billion people on Earth--pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living ...

Scott Morrison wants to spend a lot more money on defence, the business community wants more spending on infrastructure and education, an ageing population wants better health and aged care, and young Australians want more action on climate change and affordable housing. Each problem requires more public spending, but for decades Australians have been told that the less government spends, the better their lives will be.Furthermore, while spending more money will be essential to fun...

"Lucid, deeply informed, and enlivened with striking illustrations." -Noam ChomskyOne economist has called Ha-Joon Chang "the most exciting thinker our profession has turned out in the past fifteen years." With Bad Samaritans, this provocative scholar bursts into the debate on globalization and economic justice.Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" orthodoxy of Thomas Friedma...