From Reuters: Nigeria’s central bank plans to diversify its $33 billion in foreign exchange reserves away from the dollar by switching a tenth of the stockpile into yuan, underlining the momentum behind China’s drive to internationalise its currency. “We are looking at anything to start with from 5 to 10 percent of our reserves,” central… Read More »
Islamic finance in Nigeria – BusinessDay Why mobile money arrived in Africa before the UK – BBC What DSK’s fall says about transatlantic differences in attitudes to sex, power and the law – The Economist A new freight train route connects Antwerp in Belgium to the western Chinese city of Chongqing, 11,000 kilometers away –… Read More »
The National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, recently trippled its exhibition place in a renovation and expansion that lasted about three and a half year. This makes it the largest museum in the world – it beats New York’s Metropolitan Museum, formerly the largest museum in the world, by about 20,000 square feet.… Read More »
… in Newsweek. Which undermines the argument that one should pay attention to the message and not the messenger. As if the two could ever really be separated.
Gideon Rachman of FT writes: It is ironic that the democratic movements in the Arab world broke out just as autocracy seemed to be coming back into fashion. Francis Fukuyama, whose “end of history” thesis epitomised the democratic triumphalism of 1989, recently wrote an article for this newspaper that lauded China’s ability to “make large… Read More »
FT’s Gideon Rachman thinks that the answer to that question might be Yes: The backlash against immigration is particularly visible in Europe. In Britain, the new coalition government has promised to reduce the number of immigrants from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands. International banks and multinational companies are already complaining that their businesses are… Read More »
The Economist talks to China Europe Business School’s Africa Programme Director, Kwaku Atuahene-Gima, about the reason the Chinese business school decided to establish a branch in Ghana: CEIBS has been instrumental in developing the business talent that has helped China develop,…. The Europeans and Americans were the colonisers of Africa, but there was not much… Read More »
The Chinese market in fake European classical art is growing. Steadily. Something they bring to it? Industrial efficiency. The village of Dafen in southern China has become the centre of a big industry, with about 8,000 artists responsible for creating 60 per cent of the world’s oil paintings.
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 »
1. Is China a developing country? 2. Swedish think tank wants to clean up relief deliveries with a new ethical aid tool 3. Why cycling in Berlin is a dream 4. The corrupt reign of Emperor Silvio 5. Don’t cry for Wall Street 6. Towards a new world economy 7. Why some Egyptians are becoming… Read More »