World Organization for Development (World Organization of Creditors / WOC), an international non-governmental Organization, holds consultative status with the ECOSOS of the United Nations. Founded in 2009 according to the principles and ideas proclaimed by the United Nations, WOC leads its activities on the territories of developing and developed countries, as well as in Russia, CIS countries and the BRICS.

Russia’s and China’s gas agreement has already been called “the top three-decade deal.” Its scale is quite impressive – in the next six years, the Chinese will be investing $55 billion in Russia’s mining and gas transportation system. But much more important than the numbers is the fact that the agreement formalizes that the two superpowers have common interests, at least for the foreseeable future. We are witnessing the emergence of new global political-economic blocs.

Politics in the APR occupies an increasingly important place in U.S. foreign policy, with particular emphasis currently on the new bloc which plans to create free-trade zones across the entire region. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is without a doubt one of the Obama administration’s main priorities and offers an alternative to the Chinese project, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which is also in the negotiations stage.

The new book “Russia and the World on the Way to Sustainable Economic Growth” was released recently by the World Organization of Creditors. This work was prepared on the basis of WOC analytical studies, published in the World Economic Journal in 2013-2014 years.
While reading this book, it becomes obvious that the current economic crisis is threatening mankind with a real catastrophe. And the financial issues are just the tip of the iceberg. So there can be no simple or quick solution to the crisis. If they want to avoid a social disaster, leading countries need to push to recover industrial production, to ensure that businesses and capital return home, to create new jobs, and to provide tax breaks for investors. And the task of servicing financial institutions is to provide investment, and to create opportunities for investors to obtain a real income.

In 1959, Fidel Castro imposed a ban on the sale of residential property in Cuba. For more than fifty years after this decision was made, the only way that Cubans could move was to exchange properties on the basis of similarity. A new property should not be different from the old one in terms of square footage or style. And even if a family had the need to expand their living space and, more importantly, the means to do so, it would not have been legally possible. At the same time, other families could have housing that was too large for their needs. For example, childless families or older couples might prefer to live in a modestly sized apartment, but the paradox was that this exchange was impossible. In addition, according to one unofficial estimate, by 2011 there were about 200,000 units of vacant housing on the island, despite the fact that about a third of Cubans had to squeeze into a few square meters of living space each. According to the 2012 census, the Cuban population (11.2 million) lives in 3.9 million housing units, meaning that there is an average of 2.8 inhabitants per unit.

We wrote about the economically unequal position of women and the gender wage gap in the February issue, stating that this is a topical issue for all countries, both developed and developing. The issue of equal gender participation in the political decision-making process is even more acute. Historically, women have always been outsiders in the political arena, and until the 20th century they did not have the legal right to vote. Women began to gradually make inroads into politics once they won suffrage rights. At least three women always appear in rankings of outstanding political figures from the 20th century: Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, and Benazir Bhutto. But in the perception of many, female heads of state are still the exception to the rule.