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Business Matters: Refugees and Migrants Top UN Summit Agenda

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Refugees, Migrants Top UN Summit Agenda

20/09/2016 GMT

Refugees and Migrants Top UN Summit Agenda

BBC World Service - Business Matters, Refugees and Migrants Top UN Summit Agenda

World leaders are gathering at the UN in New York to discuss the crisis

World leaders are gathering at the UN in New York to discuss the crisis. President Obama is due to host his own event on the fringe of the General Assembly on Tuesday.

Every minute of every day, somewhere in the world, 24 people are being forced to flee their homes. That shockingly precise - or precisely shocking - figure comes from the United Nations, which says there are more refugees today than at any time in history - more than 65 million at the end of last year. World leaders are gathering at the UN in New York to discuss the crisis. President Obama is due to host his own event on the fringe of the General Assembly on Tuesday - called the Leaders' Summit on the Global Refugee Crisis. Jordan Fabian is White House correspondent for The Hill. Does he think this is a legacy issue for the president?

We've talked quite a bit on this programme about the respective platforms of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump when it comes to international trade - which has sometimes been reduced to a more-protectionist-than-thou tussle. Few have taken time to find out what those plans - if implemented - would mean for American workers. Well now the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC has done just that. The short version: Clinton's plan would be harmful - Trump's plan would be horribly destructive. Marcus Noland wrote their report.

Here's some good news for the environmentally minded: China has massively increased its production of wind power and solar photovoltaic cells or PV. In fact, China has been putting up wind turbines at the rate of two an hour in recent months. But here's the bad news. It's also been building coal-fired generators - and it's coal that's given priority access to the national grid. And that results in the strange situation of brand new wind farms being switched off because there's nowhere for the electricity to go. Dr Paolo Frankl is the Director of the Renewable Energy Division at the International Energy Agency.

All this and more discussed with our two guests: Gernot Wagner, in Boston. Author of the book Climate Shock - Professor of Economics at Harvard University and senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund. And David Moser, Academic Director at the CET Chinese Studies programme at Beijing Capital Normal University. 

(Photo: British Prime Minister Theresa May delivers a speech on the refugee crisis at the UN General assembly, 2016, New York. Credit: Getty Images)

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