Frightened civilians flee from a hotel in Nairobi, Kenya that has been attacked by suspected terrorists on Tuesday, 15 January 2019...
Read MoreBy Kumar Balani NEW YORK, NY – A new year has begun and Filipinos are once again optimistic about their future, a decade after the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis negatively impacted many countries and millions of people worldwide. In the Philippines, exports, remittances from overseas workers and relatives, and foreign direct investments (FDIs) were all hit and became smaller in volume. In the United States, many people lost huge sums of money and other assets. Some lost all their lifetime savings; others lost their homes to foreclosure, putting them into bigger and deeper holes of growing debt. Many lost their jobs as well, that were their sole sources of income Economic confidence has rebounded since that financial debacle for many around the world, based on a Pew Research Center three-month-long (May to August 2018) survey involving 27 countries worldwide representing two-thirds of the global domestic product or GDP. Filipinos: Second most optimistic worldwide Asked to choose between “better off” or “worse off” on this question: “When children today in our country grow up, they will be __ financially than their parents,” Filipinos are up there in second place (69 percent) after Indonesians (75 percent) in choosing “better off”. Indians and Nigerians are No.3 and No.4 in expressing optimism – 66 percent and 65 percent respectively. Other Asians and Africans are not as hopeful, with the median among emerging economies...
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By Kumar Balani NEW YORK, NY – In our column last Sunday 30 December – Boosting Exports Can Grow Philippine Economy – we mentioned that the Philippines had a worldwide net trade deficit (imports larger than exports) of $34.08 billion representing 11.2 percent of the country’s $314 GDP in 2017 per US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) data. The Philippines Statistics Authority or PSA indicated in an April 11, 2018 report that the country’s total imports of goods in 2017 were $96,093 million and exports were $68,712 million, resulting in a trade deficit in goods alone of $27,381 million. Dollar...
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Author: William J. Nellis Publisher: Cambridge University Press – 158 pages Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram This short book of just under 160 pages is about dynamic compression, a field of science that is only about 150 years old. In 1870, W.J. Rankine published a paper on conservation equations relating to momentum, mass, and energy. It was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Another scientist contributed to the development of this field. He was H. Hugoniot who derived Rankine’s equations on conservation on a more general basis in the 1880s. About four decades later in...
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Editors: Margaret Chon, Pedro Roffe, and Ahmed Abdel-Latif Publisher: Cambridge University Press – 437 pages Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram The United Nations has an ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) program consisting of 17 goals that it wants its member-states to accomplish by the year 2030. It is also known as the 2030 Agenda. The goals include fighting hunger, reducing poverty, enhancing health, furthering education, reducing global warming, assuring adequate water supply, improving sanitation, conserving energy, guiding sustainable urbanization, protecting the environment, reaching gender equality and ensuring social justice for all. Through the SDGs program, the UN wants to...
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