The Differential Impacts of Human Capital and Infrastructure on the Sustainable Development Goals
This study looks at country-level data to explore the dynamics among human capital, infrastructure, and a country’s progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Utilizing the confirmatory factor analysis method, I develop a new Infrastructure Index and combine it with the World Bank’s dataset on Human Capital Index to evaluate the relative impact…
Impact of climate indicators on the carbon footprint of data centers
Carbon emissions are usually associated with the fossil fuel and transportation industries, yet our online activities also have a significant carbon footprint. It may seem counterintuitive, but data centers account for around 2% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. It is roughly in line with the global airline industry, and not far behind the chemical…
COVID-19, Chat-GPT and International Development Assistance
The COVID-19 pandemic created an incredibly challenging situation in the international development space. On the one hand, developing countries were going through an extraordinary crisis, which increased the global demand for international development assistance. On the other hand, COVID-19 slowed down the economies of the donor countries, which faced new socio-economic challenges at home. This…
Blockchain solution to advance conscious consumerism
A couple of hundred years ago, an average person’s food source radius was around 10 miles. Today our food basket is a product of a complex web of farmers, freighters, trailers, retailers, and suppliers, that stretches into thousands of miles long supply chains. In the last few years, many ideas have emerged about how to…
A Critical Review of UNEP’s Food Waste Index
In 2015, 193 UN member states undersigned the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which consists of seventeen interlinked Sustainable Development Goals. It is a comprehensive development framework that also focuses on “responsible consumption and production.” However, it is a strategic-level document, which did not take into account the operational-level challenges for developing indicators to measure…
Data explains: who’s to blame for the Syrian Crisis?
The unfolding crisis in Syria is a subject of intense scrutiny in the global media landscape, yet the root causes remain poorly understood by the public. The narrative propagated by the Assad regime and its allies, which accuses vaguely defined Western forces, distracts from the more substantive issues at play. A detailed examination of three…