From WSJ: Foreign consumer-goods companies including Coca-Cola Co., Nestlé SA and Unilever PLC have been in Africa for decades without much competition from local players. Now, home-grown companies are expanding aggressively across the continent, eager to accommodate a growing middle-class among the billion-person population. Examples? Among the most prominent of these consumer upstarts: African retailers… Read More »
… more oil is spilled from the [Niger] delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP‘s Deepwater Horizon rig last… Read More »
A new book by Milford Bateman, who is described as “a freelance consultant specialising in local economic development policy, particularly in relation to the Western Balkans,” is described in the following terms on the publisher’s website: Over the last thirty years or so, microfinance has risen to become one of the most high-profile policies to… Read More »
The idea is that standard economics is often too simplistic: But in most economic analysis, the decision makers’ point of view is quite narrow. It starts with what people like and don’t like. People may have a taste for oranges or bananas, or a preference for enjoying life today instead of saving for the future.… Read More »
Listen to this Planet Money podcast.
Thinking Allowed: “Capital is the lifeblood that flows through the body politic of all those societies we call capitalist, spreading out, sometimes as a trickle and other times as a flood, into every nook and cranny of the inhabited world”, writes David Harvey, the world’s most cited academic geographer. He gives Laurie a radical critique… Read More »
1. Charitable giving and volunteering decline in England 2. Amartya Sen on the great misreading of Adam Smith 3. More Amartya Sen on Adam Smith (Planet Money podcast) 4. China’s first black news anchor 5. Angola’s biggest bank opens an office in Johannesburg
If consumers begin to be fearful and conserve the government takes action to overcome this mental condition. How? Expand credit. If consumers then become to euphoric and spend to much the government takes action to overcome this mental condition. How? Restrict credit. Consumers spend very little time in the middle. Mathematics should be left to… Read More »
Reuters: Nigeria’s Senate approved a 4.608 trillion naira budget proposal for 2010 on Thursday, up from an initial 4.079 trillion naira spending plan proposed by the presidency. The budget assumes an average oil price of $67 per barrel and oil production of 2.35 million barrels per day. It also pegs the exchange rate at 150 naira… Read More »
Reuters: The bank expects economic expansion of 4.6 percent in 2011 and estimates the region grew by between 1.0 and 1.1 percent in 2009, said Andrew Burns, the bank’s manager of global macro economic trends.