The current issue of The Economist has this in a leader about mobile money in Africa: ONCE the toys of rich yuppies, mobile phones have evolved in a few short years to become tools of economic empowerment for the world’s poorest people. These phones compensate for inadequate infrastructure, such as bad roads and slow postal… Read More »
Krugman speaking on Finland: Speaking at a forum on Finland’s economic development organised by the Finnish Innovation Fund, Sitra, Krugman said that technically the global economy began to rebound at the end of the summer. He added, however, that unemployment could worsen for up to a year and a half, despite growth. “Prospects for slow… Read More »
It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in… Read More »
From Foreign Policy: Imagine a tiny country flush with oil money, where the wealth per person is on par with that of Spain or Italy. Now picture a place quite the opposite, where nearly two-thirds of the population lives in extreme poverty and infant and child mortality rates are on par with those of the… Read More »
Moisés Naím, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy writes in Financial Times: Oil is a curse. Natural gas, copper and diamonds are also bad for a country’s health. Hence, an insight that is as powerful as it is counterintuitive: poor but resource-rich countries tend to be underdeveloped not despite their hydrocarbon and mineral riches but because of… Read More »
is here.
Mr. Lamido Sanusi, Nigeria’s not-so-long-ago-appointed Central Bank Governor, a risk-management person, is at it. From Financial Times: “A few Nigerian banks, mainly due to huge concentrations in their exposure to certain sectors … but [also] due to a general weakness in risk management and corporate governance, have continued to display signs of failure,” Mr Sanusi… Read More »
Happy 2009!! I promise that this year will see me doing more on this blog. I am just getting home after a few days away. Things seem to be firing up in my brain, and tomorrow I will find out how really fired up the brain is. Before I left I read a post on… Read More »
From a post written by Kerim Friedman at Savage Minds, I learnt that Paul Krugman, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, had reposted an autobiographical piece he wrote in 1992 on his blog. I went over there and got the piece. After reading it many things came to mind, a lot of… Read More »