Philippe Legrain

We can’t give people so much security with their income that it affects their willingness to work… We can have equality in access to education and health but not in equality of income… We can’t have a situation where it is not work that gives access to goods. Unexceptional stuff. Except it comes from a […]

I read so many books last year as part of my research for Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them that I have taken it easy this year, and taken more time to enjoy novels such as Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar The Clown and  Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Among the non-fiction books I read, five of […]

It might seem odd that the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to a banker, but Muhammad Yunus, who set up the Grameen Bank, is no ordinary financier. 

An admission and an apology: I have been spending my spare time watching the World Cup instead of writing my blog. After Ghana beat the Czech Republic, who were ranked second in the world by FIFA, I thought about trying to link my two passions by writing about the beneficial impact of globalisation on football: […]

Prospect, May 2006. The outlook for the Doha round may not be as bad as it looks; why a dreary North sea gas pipeline is at the centre of things; and Gordon Brown’s productivity problem

Geneva, a great place to live? You could have fooled me. When I first arrived, a colleague tried to cheer me up by saying “the best thing about Geneva is that it only takes 15 minutes to get to the airport.”