Eighty-one year old Luigi Aceto lives in the small coastal village of Amalfi where his family has been working as lemon farmers for six generations. Located in a seashell shaped valley along Italy's western coast, the Acetos' 20 acres of land funnel the sea and mountain air together to create the perfect climate for the cultivation of sfusato lemons that are uniquely large and tasty. But today, even with exquisite two-pound lemons that can be eaten off the tree like oranges, Luigi and his family worry what the future will bring, since land on the Amalfi Coast is far more valuable for luxury tourism than for the cultivation of boutique lemons.

In some ways, the Aceto family parallels Italy's shift from an agrarian-based feudal society into an industrial and economic power. But with this change comes uncertainty of whether Italy wants to, or can compete globally. The debate however, has become ever more one-sided toward remaining domestic, especially with the change from the Lira to the Euro, which raised the price of Italian exports, making it harder for local businesses to remain competitive.

The Acetos have a very niche product: world-famous lemons, prized for their low acidity and delicate flavor that allow them to be eaten raw without experiencing the usual bitter taste. Moreover, cutting into the thick rind produces an abundance of essential oil that is very difficult to extract from normal varieties.

The farming of sfusato lemons requires much more than that of common varieties. The fruit is grown on stepped terraces on which wooden trellises stand, requiring periodic protection throughout the year. The upkeep process requires continual work and maintenance. As a result, sfusato cultivation is effective in creating long-term jobs that pay enough to support families year round, thus stimulating the local economy and reducing the need for seasonal migrant workers.

Due to this employment pattern, the Aceto enterprise boasts more people working for them than the national average. That being said, the one-of-a-kind microclimate as well as expensive and limited real estate prevents local expansion of the Acetos' lemon growing operation. In addition, there is even pressure from other locals to drop the production of sfusato lemons completely in favor of regular ones that offer greater crop yields. Nonetheless, Aceto is firmly set on the quality of lemons over quantity; tradition over local expansion.

By Craig Yugawa

Big pharma and its big price tags have been the target for many a politician seeking to lower the cost of health care in the U.S. Martin Shkreli and his questionable big-pharma persona are an easy target and embodiment of how some continue to squeeze increasing profits out of America's declining health. Drug prices have been identified by both sides of the aisle as a possible solution to stave off people's possible bankruptcies due to health care costs.

One of the easiest ways to reduce drug prices is by replacing more brand-name drugs with generic drugs, or generic substitution (GS). You've seen them sitting side by side when you visit your neighborhood pharmacy or maybe even had a doctor mention something to you on a routine visit: acetaminophen replacing Tylenol, cetirizine hydrochloride replacing Zyrtec, even atorvastatin replacing Lipitor.

The complicated names you see next to the common, usually more well-known, brand names are the generic form of drugs. Generic drugs are medications that have undergone FDA testing to prove that they are made of the same active ingredients. These typically come to market once a medication's patent has run out and other companies are allowed to formulate the same active ingredients. Much of the debate about generic equivalence involves the proprietary formulations of inactive ingredients by the various companies and whether generics provide the same net benefit, or bioequivalence, to the patient.

A recent study in Applied Health Economics and Health Policy found that 76 percent of new generic prescriptions and 64 percent of continuing generic prescriptions were judged to have the same clinical effects as their more expensive counterparts. Most of those with differing effects were drugs that had a narrow therapeutic window, or concentrations over which the drug is effective and not toxic.

The year 2015 was a significant time for the world as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - targeted at a core of eight different issues, ranging from universal primary education and HIV/AIDS to extreme poverty and hunger - were replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are an even more aspirational set of goals targeted at 17 different issues. With the adoption of this new set of ambitious goals, designated to be achieved by 2030, it may be the right time to ask a simple but forward question - do big goals work?

In 1943, economist Paul Rosenstein-Rodan introduced the term "Big Push" - an idea that manifested itself in policy when President Harry S. Truman introduced the Point Four Program in 1949, calling for a "bold new" way to "relieve the suffering" of humanity. Through shifting thinking and fluctuations in aid money during the Cold War and the oil-influenced global recession of the 1980s, aid agencies' approaches to foreign aid were influenced by a distinct planning mentality - what development economist William Easterly calls "applying a simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in the Rest." A particular example is that attempts at comprehensive reforms, or "structural adjustment" that aid agencies used to help post-Cold War Russia, largely proved to be unsuccessful.

The Big Push idea saw a revival of interest with the signing of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. At the World Economic Forum in 2005, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for "a big, big push forward" in Africa to help reach its MDG-defined targets by 2015. The G8 Summit later that year agreed to forgive debt owed by African aid recipients accrued during previous Big Push programs, and to double aid from $25 billion to $50 billion annually.

Speaking from years of experience as a senior research economist at the World Bank and at the Center for Global Development, Easterly argues that despite the great amount of attention, goodwill and aid money ($2.3 trillion over the last five decades) that went into solving the problem of poverty, such efforts to aid the poor should become less of a public relations affair and take on a more scientific approach.

By Jessica Cooper

Sara is a young, single mother living in Moldova. For the last two months she's been looking for work with no luck. She reads an ad in the local newspaper that's offering good paying jobs serving in restaurants in Italy. She calls the number and in a matter of weeks she has a passport in one hand and a suitcase in the other. She plans on sending money back to her mother who took charge of her son. Upon arrival to Italy, she is sold to a pimp for $4,000, raped, and beaten. She is then locked in an apartment and forced to have sex with five men a day, earning $1,400 a week for her pimp. She never writes to her family.

For our purposes, we define human trafficking as the trade of humans, most commonly for the purpose of sexual slavery, forced labor, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. Human trafficking happens when a person is coerced to move from one place to another in order to work for nothing (or close to it). The conditions are often dangerous and exploitive and many don't survive long enough to escape.

As with Sara, the people who most often fall victim to human trafficking are migrants, wanting to immigrate to another country with the hope of finding better work. Victims often lack the skills necessary for a good job, are easily lured by risky opportunities, and have been misguided about the migration options and working conditions of their destination country. There are others, however, who aren't looking for work at all. These could be kidnapping victims or children whose parents have sold them to traffickers for as little as $11.

The International Labor Organization estimated in 2005 that those involved in human trafficking yield a $150 billion profit every year. The business is lucrative, given that the average victim is bought for so little and brings in an average of $13,000 in profits each year.