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this course from Global Fairness Initiative. Global Fairness is committed to making the global economy work for all through raising living standards in poor nations and maintaining a healthy middle class in wealthier ones. It brought together executives from garment companies, and government and multilaterals like the World Bank with trade experts in Cambodia to highlight Cambodia’s labor practices as a model for development and an asset for business. The International Labour Organization is helping to extend the Cambodia model to Morocco, Romania, and the Philippines. Madagascar has started a similar program, and Global Fairness is working to establish similar standards in Central America. All this would not be possible without the willingness of U.S. clothing companies to buy slightly more costly products in the belief that their customers will agree to pay a little more to ensure a decent workplace and standard of living in countries struggling to grow. When American consumers buy clothing made in Cambodia, they know they’re making the world a little more just.

Individuals can do this kind of work too. More than thirty-five years ago, the Cottrells, a young New Zealand couple, set up their own fair trade operation to create income for Tibetan refugee carpet makers in northern India by selling their work in New Zealand. Their NGO, Trade Aid, now runs a nationwide network of stores selling a variety of fair trade products, including hats and shawls from Bolivia, baskets from Uganda, and sculpture from Zimbabwe.

It’s hard to describe any cell-phone market as organized, but its expansion into poor countries has had a very positive impact on local economies. A 2005 study found that every 10 percent increase in cell-phone penetration in a developing country increases per capita GDP by six-tenths of a percent, largely because people use it to get information that allows them to earn more money. Sudanese-born entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim made a fortune betting on the potential of cell phones in Africa. By 2005, 11 percent of the continent’s population had access to them, with the number rising fast. Irish businessman Denis O’Brien is the largest cell-phone operator in Haiti. Young people now work selling time cards on the street, creating a whole new kind of employment for people desperate for jobs. The Grameen Bank has turned cell phones into a small-business opportunity by financing the purchase of at least one phone per village to a woman who then earns money by selling phone time to her neighbors.

In the United States, next to clean energy, the most underorganized and undercapitalized markets are those that employ and serve low-income people and neighborhoods in rural and urban areas. When I signed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, requiring able-bodied people who could work to do so, there was legitimate concern that there would not be jobs available for them because they tended to be under-educated and to have less experience than most workers, and that when the economy slowed down, as it inevitably would, they would be the first laid off. While there have been some problems with the five-year lifetime benefit limit, and some people have dropped off both the welfare and employment rolls, welfare reform has been largely successful. The welfare rolls had dropped nearly 60 percent, more than seven million people, by the time I left office and have continued to drop since. The poverty rate among single mothers and the out-of-wedlock birthrate also declined, and the child poverty rate was the lowest since 1978. In 2000, the percentage of Americans on welfare reached its lowest point in four decades. During the economic downturn of 2001, many of those who came off the welfare rolls were able to stay in the workforce in part due to policies designed to help them succeed, including a doubling of the refundable earned income tax credit; a new child tax credit; an increase in the minimum wage; a doubling of child-support collections; a welfare-to-work tax credit to encourage employers to hire; more funds for child care, education, and