Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

International development experts love what are called microfinance experiments,

lending people small amounts of money to help lift them out of poverty.

But these trials don't always work, and one in Sri Lanka seems to be making matters worse.

And China's country scale highways and vast logistics networks have developed in less than a generation.

But its 30 million truck drivers aren't the folk heroes that they are in other countries.

We take a ride with a trucker there to find out why.

First up, though.

In northeastern Syria, a fragile peace has turned into a violent rebalancing of power.

Turkey's military has been battering the region after President Trump's abrupt decision last week to withdraw key troops from the area.

That left the Kurdish fighters who controlled the northeast exposed.

Fighters who had been strongly allied to American forces and it helped quash Islamic state's ambitions in the region.

The Trump administration has been critical of Turkey's rapid incursion,

but the president has long wished to extricate America from the quagmire of the Syrian war.

We'll see. We have a very good relationship with Turkey.

They're a NATO partner. We do a lot of trade with Turkey, but we don't want them killing a lot of people.

And, you know, we have been out of there. We beat ISIS. We knocked the hell out of them.

Some Islamic state fighters who had been imprisoned by the Kurds are reported to have escaped in the chaos.

The advancing Turkish army presents an even greater danger to the Kurds than Syria's Russian-backed forces do.

So, the Kurds have struck a protection deal with the Syrian government.

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