What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?

The unemployment crisis is a hard thing to solve - businesses sometimes have no choice but to let workers go. An innovative program tries to prevent joblessness by temporarily paying a portion of workers’ salaries at struggling companies.

In a pilot program in a Canadian city, the working poor were given monthly cash supplements to their income. The recipients did not stop working and were able to access opportunities to make a better living long term.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, necessity has bred an interesting kind of financial invention for the New York MTA: the world’s first “catastrophe” bond - a reinsurance for the insurer - designed to protect public transportation infrastructure, specifically against storm surge. These bonds privatize risk for public gain, creating a kind of tool that may protect economic development against all kinds of natural and man-made disasters around the world.

An increasingly popular way to attract foreign direct investment is to let the world’s wealthiest trade cash and property investments for citizenship. The $2 billion-a-year industry allows the ultra-rich to buy passports that permit visa-free travel to nearly the entire world, often with no residency requirements. Highly controversial, the industry is marked by a lack of transparency and concerns about what happens to civic ties when citizenship can be bought and sold.

Europe's generous social policies, such as allowing employees to retain their salaries while taking sick time to care for themselves or family members, may help to mitigate the coronavirus outbreak while also safeguarding the economy. Although the long-term impacts are yet unknown, in the short term, government-provided incentives are helping people and businesses stay afloat.

A solar workgroup in Virginia is inviting developers to present information on the best ways to build solar and battery storage projects for the region; a new approach they are taking after previous failures in getting solar projects off the ground. Despite a lack of funding and local developers in the area, solar advocates are hopeful that the passage of a new energy law in the Commonwealth could be an economic incentive for commercial-scale solar projects.

Four years before the pandemic caused unemployment compensation claims to spike, South Carolina took advantage of a federal grant to modernize its claims processing systems. That upgrade saved thousands of hours of time once claims rose sharply, which meant that people making legitimate claims got paid relatively quickly. That stands in contrast with the Virginia Employment Commission's huge backlog, which must be run through a decades-old system. The state was finally upgrading its systems when the pandemic put that work on hold, leaving some laid-off people in financial limbo for several months.

Este reportaje cuenta y explica la solución energética de Ticino, un pueblo de la provincia argentina de Córdoba. Quemando biomasa (cáscara de maní), la manicera de la localidad, que es también la empresa más grande del lugar, genera energía eléctrica que vende al Estado para abastecer al pueblo y a zonas vecinas. Esta solución beneficia a cientos de familias y permitió que durante el gran apagón nacional de 2019, Ticino continuara con luz.

Viele Baustoffe sind derzeit Mangelware, die Preise sind hoch und die Herstellung schadet oft dem Klima. Eine neue Plattform katalogisiert deshalb gebrauchte Baumaterialien: von Stühlen und Schränken bis zu Fenstern und Dämmwolle. Schon jetzt hat sie 20.000 Tonnen Material vermittelt.

Dėl specialiai pritaikytos atrankos, autizmo spektrą turintys žmonės gali sėkmingai integruotis į darbo rinką - tai parodė Danijos patirtis, kurią bandoma pritaikyti ir kitose pasaulio šalyse. Lietuvos autizmo asociacijos atstovė teigia, jog geroji praktika būtų naudinga ir Lietuvoje.