Without action to de-carbonize our economies, unchecked climate change threatens to batter lives and economies around the world, hitting the poorest people hardest.
Economic desperation often drives wildlife destruction like poaching or illegal logging. But trade can help create powerful financial incentives for communities to preserve the biodiversity around them.
Technology is making it easier for women to connect to business opportunities around the world. Legal obstacles must not be allowed to stand in their way. That's not just because it's economically smart. It's because discrimination shouldn't be the law.
The tourism industry has considerable potential to be a sustainability role model in its role as a buyer of goods and other services, from building materials and green construction standards to farm produce.
Fully implementing the WTO trade facilitation agreement is one ingredient to reduce border delays and costs for traded merchandise.
Trade and investment are good for innovation - open economies allow new ideas and technologies to diffuse more quickly from wherever they are created.
Policy and business elites did not speak frankly about the unequal distribution of benefits from trade and failed to adequately accompany market-opening with good domestic policies to equip displaced workers to upskill, adjust, and share in the new opportunities being created.
In their pursuit of growth and diversification, African economies should consider transforming the discourse from a focus on industrialisation to a broader one centred on value addition in agriculture, manufacturing, and services.
Growth without diversification, technological improvement, and increased productivity is easily reversed: all it takes is a dip in commodity prices.
Governments around the world are looking for economic growth and job creation. African economies are no exception, with increasing recognition that growth has to be built on a more diversified economic structure in order to make a lasting contribution to development.
Governments can't credibly claim to be concerned about stagnant growth and ageing workforces unless they are actively seeking to empower women economically. One way they can speed up progress towards gender-equal economic opportunity is to change laws that are holding women back.
Economic policy that adheres to the tenets of orthodoxy while failing to deliver for large sections of society is doomed to fail.
The fact is that during the post-1989 heyday of globalization optimism, political and business elites did not think enough about the prospect - plainly predicted in economic theory - that trade would harm some people even while leaving society as a whole better off. The result was overpromised benefits and inadequate adjustment plans.
The lack of livelihood opportunities in refugee camps pushes many people to embark on dangerous journeys in the quest for a better life.
Skills development as a means to income generation is the key to integrate vulnerable migrants into the mainstream of society and to equip them for an eventual return home.
There is no intrinsic reason African countries should be importing, rather than exporting, basic staples like rice or higher value products like frozen chicken, cooking oil, or instant noodles.
Exporting firms are more productive and pay higher wages than their domestically focused counterparts, especially in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. If firms manage to thrive in world markets, they tend to increase their productivity even more.
Many African smallholder farmers did not share in the 'green revolution' productivity gains driven by modern seeds and techniques, irrigation, and greater fertilizer use in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s.
In a climate where governments are limited in what they can spend, trade and investment offer a path to fiscally responsible growth.
For Latin American countries seeking to play a bigger role in global trade, effectively implementing trade-facilitating reforms could be an important tool in their toolkits.
