Highlights from 2014: Notes from my travels

As in my previous post, I would like to continue to reflect on highlights from last year. One of the advantages of founding and directing a global center is that I get to travel a lot. In the Fall 2014, I travelled to seven countries on two continents. I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed it, even though I had little time to do anything else, including write my blog.

There are many things that surprise me as I attend conferences, meet people, and make my way through various cities. First, it is surprising how many similarities I’ve found across countries that we usually consider to be very different. I was at a restaurant in an unnamed city that was so special it could have been a very popular dining destination in New York, London, Rome, or Hong Kong, but it was in none of those cities.  And while the food has been good, the traffic has been bad and seems to be getting worse in every city around the world; this is not just a feature of Rome or Washington, DC.

And there are differences that also work in surprising ways. We refer to countries as “developed” versus “developing” or “emerging,” of course with the assumption that the developing countries have a host of problems to solve. One of the things I have started to notice in the supposedly “developing” countries is that women are often in positions of command. I was invited to speak at a conference in an “emerging” country where the rector from one of the oldest and most prestigious universities is a woman and where women are at the top management levels of financial institutions. In another developing country where I attended a conference at the beginning of the Fall, the chair of my session was a very famous journalist and, again, a woman.  Developed countries have well-developed markets, well-developed institutions, and good education systems, yet women are paid less than men, and finding women in positions of power is often rare if not impossible.  So watch out young people (young women)!

Another thing I have observed in the “developing” countries is that young people get good jobs. It is not unusual to see directors and managers who are under 30 or 40 year old, and I did not get the impression that they were considered inexperienced or less competent because of their age. In many developed countries, the unemployment rate among the young is so high that I am not sure why we do not consider it a crisis. In my native Italy, if you leave your parents’ home before age 30 or 40, you are considered an adventurous person who does not understand what a jungle it is out there.

I think we may want to change our terminology: we may want to refer to market economies as either “mature” or “young” because the lines between developed and developing countries are starting to be very blurred and there is not always such strong evidence of progress—as the term “developed” seems to imply—on how women and young people are faring in some of these supposedly developed countries. 

These are some observations from my travel last year and I hope to keep writing while sitting on airplanes…