Policies that attempt to capitalize on digitalization can also help to address the trade-gender inequality nexus, as well as the trade-regional inequality nexus.

single windows (i.e., a single unified point through which documents can be submitted digitally)

Data protection laws in African countries should, and in some cases already do, recognise that there are various kinds of data with different degrees of sensitivity, and allow any data that requires protection to flow among jurisdictions in which the legal protections are equivalent.

creating a safe and secure cyber-realm for digital markets and e-trade to flourish is already recognised on the African continent through the African Union Convention (Malabo Convention) on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection, which was finalized by the African Union in 2014.

although previously e-commerce and digital services were not specifically part of the agreement, they are now on the agenda for the third round of AfCFTA negotiations.

WORLD TRADE REPORT 202182OPINION PIECEBy Alison Gillwald, Executive Director, Research ICT Africa and University of Cape TownMultiple economic resilience challenges for Africa in a rapidly digitalizing global economy

Accelerating digitalization and automation have also helped to facilitate and underpin this Schumpeterian process of “creative destruction”.

The pandemic has also shown that digital trade offers numerous solutions for a faster and more inclusive recovery.

“Ignoring the income of US factoryless manufacturers from their PRC sales not only greatly understates the benefits of US trading with the PRC but also surely distorts calculations of the bilateral trade balance,” the report says.

Today’s hyper-connected global economy, characterised by deep trade links, has made the world more vulnerable to shocks, but also more resilient to them when they strike.

If, in 2019, the decline in the rate of births was around 8%, then in 2020, that figure is already down to 3%,” she revealed. The number of women having abortions, she said, had declined by around 40%, and more mothers were carrying their babies to term.

In January, Rosstat, the official government statistics service, disclosed that the number of people living in the country dropped by 510,000 in just 12 months amid the Covid-19 pandemic, falling birth rate, and less immigration.

“From both a humanitarian and geopolitical perspective, bearing in mind the people of the country – 146 million for such a vast territory is absolutely insufficient,” the head of state said.

In October 2021, the Center organized its first event – the roundtable discussion “AI Ethics: Searching for Consensus.” In December, it hosted the conference “AI Global Dimension: From Discussion to Practice.” The Center works in both Russian and English languages. It is also tasked with publishing research results in specialized media outlets.

Moscow State Institute of International Relations. In October, it inaugurated its AI Center, which is aimed at researching ethical problems and foreign economic relations surrounding the technology, as well as boosting scientific collaboration with investigative centers from Russia and abroad.

Do future diplomats need AI?

‘Will AI and robots make people useless?’ has a clear answer: People will always be needed, it’s just that their skills will have to be modified.

the ‘Priority 2030’ academic leadership program

‘‘With one 30-second interaction, we defused the tension.’’

‘‘I got an email back from a team member that said, ‘Ouch,’ ’’ she recalled. ‘‘It was like a punch to the gut. I was already upset about making this mistake, and this note totally played on my insecurities.’’

‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’

in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.

In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

Everything is different now, data reigns supreme, today’s winners deserve to triumph because they are cleareyed enough to discard yesterday’s conventional wisdoms and search out the disruptive and the new.

it is also increasingly the world’s dominant commercial culture.

is recognizing how fulfilling work can be.

‘‘By putting things like empathy and sensitivity into charts and data reports, it makes them easier to talk about,’’ Sakaguchi told me. ‘‘It’s easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number.’’

we want to know that those people really hear us.

We can’t be focused just on efficiency.

to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy.

‘‘But the thing is, my work is my life. I spend the majority of my time working. Most of my friends I know through work. If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?’’

The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond.

‘‘There was one senior engineer who would just talk and talk, and everyone was scared to disagree with him,’’

But the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place.

clear goals and creating a culture of dependability

the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard.

some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.

‘‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’’

is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,

the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.

They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.

people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda.

‘‘average social sensitivity’’

an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test

‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well

‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’

‘‘Other groups had pretty average members, but they came up with ways to take advantage of everyone’s relative strengths.

The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another.

the researchers wanted to know if there is a collective I. Q. that emerges within a team that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.

When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. This team is efficient. There is no idle chitchat or long debates.

only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them.

Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down?

Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams.

Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly and that team leaders reinforced that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders enforced conversational order, and when someone cut off a teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to wait his or her turn. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal chitchat about weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip. There were teams that contained outsize personalities who hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and others in which introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.

the group’s norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.

Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound.

Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather

‘‘group norms.’’

Most confounding of all, two teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness.

it was almost impossible to find patterns

reviewing a half-century of academic studies looking at how teams worked.

good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical;

groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems.

an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.

‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’

pick apart the small choices

‘We’re living through a golden age of understanding personal productivity,’’

‘‘we all felt like we could say anything to each other,’’

Despite their disparate backgrounds, however, everyone clicked.

‘‘People would try to show authority by speaking louder or talking over each other,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘I always felt like I had to be careful not to make mistakes around them.’’

To prepare students for that complex world, business schools around the country have revised their curriculums to emphasize team-focused learning.

A worker today might start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers, then send emails to colleagues marketing a new brand, then jump on a conference call planning an entirely different product line, while also juggling team meetings with accounting and the party-planning committee

‘‘I wanted to be part of a community, part of something people were building together,’’

Our military representation, currently restricted to just 44 nations, must be substantially increased.

as a signal to our principal adversary, China

joint bilateral/multi-lateral exercises

the exchange of timely terrorist related intelligence

military attaches

regional defence forums (like Shangri La and Raisina Dialogues)

The exception to this rule was India’s willing participation in UN peacekeeping endeavours.

remained ‘isolationist’ in its orientation

India matters more and our worldview must process that in all its aspects.

85 percent of productivity software used by US government agencies was from Microsoft.

Amazon has been the most active, with $15.3 million spent in the first three quarters of the year, versus $9 million at Google and $7.8m at Microsoft. The figures do not include contributions to trade groups such as the Internet Association.

we will continue to be more focused on adapting to regulation than fighting against it.”

Microsoft has also not yet been the focus of any action announced by President Joe Biden’s reinvigorated Federal Trade Commission.

“Microsoft has realized that it doesn’t want to be associated with Google, Facebook and Amazon,” said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly campaign group. “It’s really, really simple.”

with Microsoft in particular looking to distance itself from its Silicon Valley peers.

The initial development of financially, environmentally, and socially sustainable soft infrastructures provides the basis for a strategic rearticulation between the West and developing nations, boosting global multilateralism.

The geopolitical reading indicates that the B3W initiative is intended to be the West’s return to a more active presence on the global chessboard, modifying its critical stance toward the Chinese BRI and offering a real alternative with concrete options to developing countries.

The truth is that both initiatives seem, at first glance, to be more complementary than competitive.

the BRI keeps the focus of its global development interests on traditional projects such as ports, roads, railroads, power plants, and telecommunications facilities (hard infrastructure), although recently, China has expressed its intentions to develop the Health, Green, and Digital Silk Roads.

The B3W in its initial objectives focuses on human (soft) infrastructure such as education, environment, healthcare, gender equality, and digital technology.

a possible “strategic competition” with BRI.

Importantly, the G-7 fell into a pattern of highlighting the BRI’s shortcomings without presenting a concrete alternative to it.

health security, digital technology, and gender equality

Standards will follow, as a benchmark, the Blue Dot Network, an initiative launched by the United States, Australia, and Japan in 2019 to provide evaluation and certification criteria for infrastructure projects for development.

quality standards in relation to environment and climate, anti-corruption, social inclusion and labor guarantees

transparency in public financing.

the mobilization of private capital

“a values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnership”

“people are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”

I do hope is that next year is a lot more settled than this one.

for pandemic preparedness efforts,

I’m hesitant to suggest that anything about the COVID-19 pandemic has been positive. But when we look back at this period, I suspect history will view it as a time of terrible devastation and loss that also sparked lots of massive changes for the better.

Telehealth

in health care.

gain a deeper understanding of how your students are doing

able to get feedback from the software while you do your homework online.

hat curriculum become more responsive as demand goes up, and it will only become more tailored to the individual needs of students and teachers in the years ahead.

dynamic curricula

One of the biggest improvements over what we use now is the use of spatial audio, where speech sounds like it’s actually coming from the direction of the person talking. You don’t realize how unusual it is to have meeting audio only coming from your computer’s speaker until you try something else. There’s still some work to do, but we’re approaching a threshold where the technology begins to truly replicate the experience of being together in the office.

The idea is that you will eventually use your avatar to meet with people in a virtual space that replicates the feeling of being in an actual room with them. To do this, you’ll need something like VR goggles and motion capture gloves to accurately capture your expressions, body language, and the quality of your voice. Most people don’t own these tools yet, which will slow adoption somewhat. (One of the things that enabled the rapid change to video meetings was the fact that many people already had PCs or phones with cameras.) Microsoft plans to roll out an interim version next year, which uses your webcam to animate an avatar that’s used in the current 2D set-up.

Maybe you have one team try one configuration while a different team tries another, so that you can compare the results and find the right balance for everyone.

an A/B testing approach to remote work.

why companies need to make firm decisions right away.

Although most companies will likely opt for the hybrid approach, there’s a good deal of flexibility around what exactly that approach might look like.

Digitization is here to stay, but the technologies we’re using will continue to get better over time.

much attention paid to adaptation.

Progress is possible, but not inevitable

Thinktanks and academics can point in the right direction, but at the end of the day—in a democracy at least—it seems to me like you need to pick the right leaders and give them the space to try new ideas.

I believe that governments need to regulate what you can and can’t use social media for. In the United States, this topic has raised a lot of free speech questions. But the reality is that our government already has all sorts of norms around communication.

We caught this variant earlier than we discovered Delta because South Africa has invested heavily in genomic sequencing capabilities, and we’re in a much better position to create updated vaccines if they’re needed.

the latest progress toward ending the COVID-19 pandemic, why decreased trust in institutions might be the biggest obstacle standing in our way, what the climate conversation can teach us about making progress, and how the rapid digitization brought on by the pandemic will shape our future.

This year’s Goalkeepers Report outlines how the pandemic hasn’t set us back as badly as feared.)

Collaboration has been a constant theme with my work this year.

Gartner, a consultancy, calculates that spending on public-cloud services will reach nearly 10% of all corporate spending on information technology (IT) in 2021, up from around 4% in 2017.

Gartner, a consultancy, calculates that spending on public-cloud services will reach nearly 10% of all corporate spending on information technology (IT) in 2021, up from around 4% in 2017.

Messrs Zuckerberg, Huang, Sweeney, Ma et al may promise a future for the internet that is more open, immersive and engaging than the mobile one that exists today. But each wants to get there first, so that they can set the rules to their advantage.

that blockchains and cryptocurrencies are the next big thing—though as Ben Thompson, a tech pundit, points out, these may find much better use cases in the metaverse than in the real world.

Rapidly growing platforms like Roblox, offering a build-your-own games model that attracts 200m users a month, have already captured young hearts.

to promote interoperability—ie, no closed systems—as well as common standards.

Apple is a particular bugbear for Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Sweeney.

Those who remain standing need a compelling new story to tell.

First, the mobile internet is reaching the end of an era. In America and Europe

his firm’s popular WeChat super-app, including WeChat Pay, is already a 2D version of what the metaverse could become in 3D.

Epic has been creating virtual worlds for years, including “Fortnite”.

the omniverse, a technology based on its chips

Mr Zuckerberg has earmarked $10bn this year mostly to develop the virtual- and augmented-reality headsets and glasses that he hopes will provide a dominant access point to the metaverse, much as Apple’s iPhone does with the mobile internet

it will be fought with reality-bending headsets, blockchains, cryptocurrencies and mind-frazzling amounts of computing power.

Epic’s founder, Tim Sweeney, is himself a force to be reckoned with.

Pony Ma of Tencent

Jensen Huang of Nvidia

Microsoft

It says markets with potential annual revenue of at least $2trn could be disrupted by the metaverse.

To others, he was merely the latest middle-aged tech billionaire to chase a childhood fantasy, much as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk were doing with space rockets.

“the hour will come”

His father’s library, with its statues of Buddha and Plato? What room does Tomio Okamura see when he thinks of the EU, with its open doors of nationality and sexuality, and its directors lecturing in unfamiliar languages?

Asked about Hayato, Tomio cannot resist a dig: he would be happy to offer his brother more work someday. “He is a very good tour guide.”

combining right-wing stances on immigrants, gender and the EU with left-wing ones on social welfare and pensions.

“you have to remember that when he was young Vienna was full of people thinking about a new world order, in every café,” Barbara explains. Trotsky, Stalin and Hitler all lived there in 1913. “Lots of cranks with ideas about the future were mixing, and Dicky was one of them.”

“He was a child of the multinational Habsburg empire.”

In “Practical Idealism” he writes that people of mixed race can see things from many sides, but the more they do so, “the weaker usually is their will to act”.

A rival British-backed group, the United European Movement , did most of the planning for the Congress of Europe in 1948, which led to the Council of Europe, an inter-parliamentary body.

The claim that this was the origin of the Victor Laszlo plotline in the film “Casablanca” is circumstantial but persuasive. Among other things, Paul Henreid, who played Laszlo, was a fellow graduate of the Theresianum.

Europe could be unified by cultivating leaders and elites.

Due to migration, he wrote, “today’s races and castes will gradually disappear,” becoming “the Eurasian-Negroid race of the future”. The Jews would furnish the “leaders of humanity”.

that politics be organised by profession and class rather than simple democracy.

He believed in an aristocracy of education and talent, and associated universal suffrage with nationalism.

In “Pan-Europa”, Coudenhove-Kalergi argued that unless Europe chose political and economic union, it would slide, again, into war and end up ruled by America and Russia.

a secret “Kalergi plan” comprising the EU’s real mission: to destroy European nations through miscegenation.

Few Europeans remember Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.

He counselled Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle on creating a European federation, and proposed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as its anthem.

He was probably the model for Victor Laszlo, the activist fleeing the Nazis in “Casablanca”.

Matakadya kare haanyaradzi mwana literally means, “If a child is crying because they are hungry, you cannot tell them to stop because they once ate in the past.”

“We don’t learn from the past as much as we should,” concludes Mr Chirikure. “Here is a place that was occupied by people who were heavily invested in production, who developed regional links, who were also interacting with other parts of the world—and they built a place with such strength and resilience.”

Just 17% of Africa’s exports go to other countries on the continent, compared with 68% in Europe and 59% in Asia.

The site’s connections with other African states, he adds, underline the need for more intra-African trade.

The more African scholars do the writing, the more likely it is that the field benefits from new methods and insights.

Of these only about 10% were written by authors based in Africa (compared with 86% for America, 76% for Europe and 40% for Asia and Oceania).

Just 3% of the papers published in four prestigious history journals from 1997 to 2020 were about Africa.

about incorporating “local sources of knowledge”

After living there they moved on again (no one knows precisely why), ending up in Khami, from 1400-1650, near what is today the city of Bulawayo in southern Zimbabwe.

It was seen as the successor state to Mapungubwe, in contemporary South Africa, which dates to 1200-1300. When this state collapsed its inhabitants allegedly left for Great Zimbabwe.

And since even minorities could occasionally prevail over quadratically constrained majorities, everyone could win at some point. As the Dodo said, “All must have prizes.”

That would allow passionate minorities occasionally to outvote indifferent majorities.

the “best way to explain it is to do it”

to go beyond “the simplicity of yes or no,”

In Brazil the city council of Gramado has also used quadratic voting to set its priorities for the year and to find consensus on tax amendments.

In both cases, a strong statement costs nothing. In the quadratic poll, people faced a constraint. Expressing vehemence on one issue required them to weaken their stand on another. This constraint forced them to be more discerning about their passions.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of a blockchain platform called Ethereum, has used similar principles to govern his crypto-community’s decision-making. He describes it as “an initial foray into a fundamentally new class of social technology”.

voters are nudged to cast some relatively cheap votes for second- or third-choice options. In this way, the method encourages compromise.

The first vote for a candidate costs one credit. But casting two votes for a single candidate costs four credits (ie, two squared); casting three costs nine (three squared), and so on.

In its simplest version, each voter would be given a budget of “marks” as Carroll might call them or “voice credits” as Mr Weyl calls them.

“the square root or death”.

He instead proposed a middle way between the two. Each country should be allocated a number of votes corresponding not to the size of its population, but to the square root of its population. The population required for one thousand votes might be one million. For two thousand, four million. For three thousand, nine million. To put it another way, the population required for a given number of votes should be that number multiplied by itself (or squared).

Giving every country a single vote, regardless of its size, was undemocratic.

voter’s power diminishes as a committee grows in size, but it does not shrink proportionately. It shrinks at a more gentle pace, proportionate not to the size of the committee but to the square root of its size.

with nine members, many more potential knife-edge combinations of votes exist.

By the same index, the voter’s power is 140 out of 512 or 27.3%—down by less than half.

You might think that would divide a voter’s power by three.

Like Carroll he was fond of riddles, paradoxes and inconclusiveness.

to reserve some marks for their second or third choices.

One was a version of the “method of marks”. Each voter is given a number of points or “marks” to spread across candidates as they see fit. They would give the most marks to their favourite candidate. But they might also give a few to acceptable alternatives. This would allow voters to express both the fact of their support and its intensity.