If you have been following the news, you know about the shake-up, the rescue and the proposal to buy off bad loans. Reuter’s report on the current state of the industry: Two of Nigeria’s nine rescued banks are in talks with foreign investors about recapitalisation but most of the others are more likely to be… Read More »
From NEXT: A study by the USAID on the West Africa Trade Hub has revealed that the region’s transport costs is the highest in the world and remains so because the trucking market in the region is highly regulated. “The regulationof the industry deter competition that would go a long way toward reducing transport costs”… Read More »
… is the title of a recently published book by Kate Meagher of LSE’s Department of International Development, my friend and fellow student of African trade networks and informal economy. Nicolas van de Walle writes in Foreign Policy about the book: Within development circles, conventional wisdom has it that successful manufacturing sectors often develop in low-income… Read More »
From a commentary on Owen Barder’s comment on Bob Zoellick’s speech on development discourse: … if we really want to democratise the development discourse we should also publish, say, the minutes of Bank board meetings and other relevant internal documents to understand how ideas and statistics are translated into ‘reality’ through powerful interlocutors like the… Read More »
President Goodluck Jonathan says Nigeria’s power industry can only grow through liberalisation: The government will sell 11 distribution companies created out of Power Holding Co. of Nigeria, the state-owned utility, and allow private companies to set up power plants using natural gas, hydro-electric dams and coal-powered stations, Jonathan said in a speech in Lagos, the… Read More »
Apparently, the fairly fragmented but resilient world of money transfer is getting consolidated: Sigue, a US money-transfer company strong in Latin America, is buying the money-transfer business of Coinstar for $41.5m. Coinstar’s network allows users to transfer cash to 23,000 points worldwide – and Sigue’s CEO, Guillermo de la Viña, says the acquisition will make his company… Read More »
Examining data from China – the biggest internal migration experience in human history – this column finds that migrants from the same village tend to cluster at the same destination for the same occupation. This pattern is driven by social networks within villages that reduce the moving costs for future migrants, such as the risk… Read More »
Considering that Rwanda witnessed one of the most appalling waves of barbarity in history just 16 years ago, when around 800,000 people were hacked to death in three months, the efficiency is extraordinary. So much has gone admirably right in terms of development. But a lot is going depressingly wrong in politics. Mr Kagame has… Read More »
OK, we knew that already. But the point was brought home particularly well with regards to the education sector in developing countries by Professor Emeritus Pai Obanya of Ibadan University in a podcast interview with the London International Development Centre (LDIC). Professor Emeritus Lalage Brown of Glasgow University was also on the podcast. On the… Read More »
The Economist discusses conditional cash transfer schemes here.