Personal Finance or A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty

Personal Finance

Author: E Thomas Garman

Personal Finance teaches students how to save and invest, manage student loans, decrease credit card debt, find reliable financial online and much more. Throughout the text, students receive advice from personal finance experts, and encounter a variety of real-life scenarios featuring people facing a wide range of financial challenges. The Eighth Edition also includes an easy-to-use guide to recent changes in tax laws, updated graphics and a more sophisticated color scheme, and coverage of the latest trends and topics.

• "Golden Rules of Personal Finance" boxes appear on the second page of every chapter. Each list provides concise advice on making good personal finance decisions early in life to avoid financial hardships later.
• "Advice from an Expert" boxes are co-authored by some of the nation's most renowned personal finance authorities.Topics include Money Mantras for a Richer Life, How Inflation Affects Borrowing, and Buy Your Retirement on the Layaway Plan.
• Group discussion issues appear as end-of-chapter activities, offering students an opportunity to share some of their personal finance experiences with others in the classroom.
• Chapter 19 has been rewritten to cover the basics of estate planning and focuses on actions newly employed college graduates should take to secure their assets.

Book review:

A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty: How Multinationals Can Help the Poor and Invigorate Their Own Legitimacy

Author: George Lodg

World leaders have given the reduction of global poverty top priority. And yet it persists. Indeed, in many countries whose governments lack either the desire or the ability to act, poverty has worsened. This book, a joint venture of a Harvard professor and an economist with the International Finance Corporation, argues that the solution lies in the creation of a new institution, the World Development Corporation (WDC), a partnership of multinational corporations (MNCs), international development agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

In A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty, George Lodge and Craig Wilson assert that MNCs have the critical combination of capabilities required to build investment, grow economies, and create jobs in poor countries, and thus to reduce poverty. Furthermore, they can do so profitably and thus sustainably. But they lack legitimacy and risk can be high, and so a collective approach is better than one in which an individual company proceeds alone. Thus a UN-sponsored WDC, owned and managed by a dozen or so MNCs with NGO support, will make a marked difference.

At a time when big business has been demonized for destroying the environment, enjoying one-sided benefits from globalization, and deceiving investors, the book argues, MNCs have much to gain from becoming more effective in reducing global poverty. This is not a call for philanthropy. Lodge and Wilson believe that corporate support for the World Development Corporation will benefit not only the world's poor but also company shareholders as a result of improved MNC legitimacy and stronger markets and profitability.

Foreign Affairs

The late Milton Friedman once wrote that the corporation's soleresponsibility is to maximize profits for its shareholders. The authors of this extended essay take sharp exception. On the contrary, they argue, firms that neglect public sentiment lose legitimacy and invite hostility and blame for all the alleged evils of globalization. Among a range of social objectives that firms should recognize, the authors focus on global poverty. Reducing poverty is an important international aim, but multinational corporations (MNCs), which in fact provide many new jobs in developing countries, typically do not include the reduction of poverty in their cost-benefit analyses for new overseas investments, nor does any international mechanism exist for evaluating and monitoring claims of poverty reduction or for giving credit where it is due. The authors make some dubious assertions in arguing that the social impact of MNCs is overwhelmingly positive, and they underestimate the practical difficulties of convincingly measuring the total social impact of any new activity. But they make a persuasive case that MNCs should broaden the range of issues they take into account in making decisions on their increasingly conspicuous activities, if for no other reason than to restore and maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of the public. The authors also advocate the formation of a new global institution, made up of governments, corporations, and nonprofit advocacy groups, to facilitate this broadening of objectives -- and to award kudos when it is merited.

Table of Contents:

1	Introduction	9
2	The legitimacy of business	21
3	NGOs and the attack : critics, watchdogs, and collaborators	45
4	The corporate response	71
5	International development architecture	90
6	The emerging international consensus	117
7	The options for business contributions	137
8	A world development corporation	155