Read all posts from ‘Global Issues’

Since the first Gold Rush 160 years ago, Australian history has been tainted by a conflict between mining and indigenous land rights. Aboriginal communities have long been excluded or abandoned by government – forced off their lands into settlements and ignored in terms of health care, resulting in statistics that […]

Should we blame the people for the welfare state or the state itself? How the Brazilian government is dealing with the elderly  citizens? In this article, we discuss the state role and responsabilites and if a new model of welfare should rise – or not.

For people who want to change the world, the departure lounge of Bhutan’s Paro international airport was the place to be on February 3rd this year. The simple confines of the terminal became an extension of the high level meetings that had taken place the week before, as members of […]

While developing countries move towards the welfare state, European countries need to redesign their welfare model. European states have become so big they are now unwieldy. Basic safety nets have been stretched to unexpected sizes and because the state supports everything that “people deserve”, it’s getting harder and harder to […]

Whenever I hear about the so-called “welfare-state model”, I always think of Polygraf Polygraphovitch Sharikov. He is a protagonist in Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastic story The Heart of a Dog. In the early days of the USSR, a professor-surgeon created a hybrid between a dog and a man, which turned into […]