Ms Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s former minister for finance, and currently a managing director of the World Bank: intra regional trade in Africa remains low and accounts for less than 10% of total trade . Between 1999 and 2006, for example, intra-African trade increased by an average of just 14 per cent per year, while trade… Read More »
Check out this brilliant post by Ryan Anderson, an anthropology grad student.
The clothes are being produced in a “green” factory in Sri Lanka – the first in the world to be awarded a gold rating for environmental responsiblity by LEED, the international green building certification system. And they are: made from end of line Tesco stock which would otherwise end up in landfill…. Full article.
Nigeria’s debt profile at the end of last year stands at $3.97 billion, the Minister of Finance, Mansur Mukhtar said yesterday at the beginning of a two-day public hearing on the loans and debt collected by federal and state governments organised by an ad-hoc committee of the House of Representatives in Abuja. Mr Mukhtar said… Read More »
While the Nigerian Civil War devastated Igbo business activities across Nigeria, and precipitated a mass return of Igbo migrants to their home area, it also laid the foundation for a consolidation and rapid development of Igbo informal enterprise, which has had integrative rather than divisive social and economic consequences for Nigeria as a whole. Operating… Read More »
I was just thinking of writing a column on the new term limit imposed by the Central Bank of Nigeria on bank CEOs when I saw this thoughtful Next editorial: Is the CBN too powerful? In the national confusion over our president who has vanished into thin air, a significant but little remarked event occurred… Read More »
The Nigerian government has decided to implement a common year-end for Nigerian banks. The point is that, because banks have had different fiscal cycles they could move money around amongst each other to inflate the value of their total assets. Which was part of what contributed to the banking crisis of ’09. The immediate reaction:… Read More »
Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution blogger and George Mason University economics professor, writes in New York Times of January 2: Putting aside the United States, which ranks third, the four most populous countries are China, India, Indonesia andBrazil, accounting for more than 40 percent of the world’s people. And all four have made great strides. Indonesia had solid economic growth… Read More »
Niall Ferguson, in Financial Times, ascribes the rise of the West in the past 500 years to “six killer apps”: the capitalist enterprise, the scientific method, a legal and political system based on private property rights and individual freedom, traditional imperialism, the consumer society and what Weber probably misnamed the “Protestant” ethic of work and… Read More »
From the ASA blog, by Keith Hart: For Marcel Mauss, the years 1920-25 were packed and fruitful. His political party and the Left in general had a real shot at winning power in France and did so in 1924. Two-thirds of his occasional political pieces (Écrits politiques) were written in this period. He was able… Read More »