Deborah Brautigam thinks so. And she should know, since she recently wrote a book on China in Africa, titled The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. She said this in an interview with the Aid Watch blog: As a donor, China’s way has several advantages. Take the way they operate. They rarely “poach”… Read More »
Part of the anxiety over China’s presence in Africa comes from the challenge they pose to traditional ideas about aid. The Chinese operate with low costs compared to Western aid projects that pay high salaries to foreign experts and put them up in fancy hotels. A 2008 Oxfam study, for example, estimated that donors to… Read More »
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 »
Our hunch is that its place [culture in development] has already shifted since we wrote Seeing Culture Everywhere. On the one hand, there is China and David Brooks. On the other, there is a new trend in “development thinking” around the World Bank and elsewhere (like Narayan. Pritchett and Kapoor’s Moving out of Poverty and Jessica… Read More »
is the title of a Reuters report on Africa. Read this excerpt: The International Monetary Fund believes growth in sub-Saharan Africa will be 1 percentage point above the global average, and puts eight African countries in its top 20 fastest-expanding economies in 2010. Oil-rich Angola and Congo Republic will lead the charge with growth rates… Read More »
How exactly do Chinese loans to African countries work? [China’s] current experiment in Africa mixes a hard-nosed but clear-eyed self-interest with the lessons of China’s own successful development and of decades of its failed aid projects in Africa. The first prong of Beijing’s efforts is to offer African states resource-backed development loans, an initiative inspired… Read More »
is China. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, China overtook Germany in 2009: China took over the mantle of the world’s top merchandise exporter from Germany in 2009, according to the latest figures, aided by a global economic crisis that has taken a greater toll on other trading powers. China exported $957… 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 »
From NYTimes: TRUNG SON, Vietnam — It seemed as if this village in northern Vietnam had struck gold when a Chinese and a Japanese company arrived to jointly build a coal-fired power plant. Thousands of jobs would start flowing in, or so the residents hoped. Four years later, the Haiphong Thermal Power Plant is nearing… Read More »
NYTimes A Balanced Global Diet: Global imbalances — roughly defined, the different emphasis the world’s leading economies place on savings, spending and debt — is a phrase much used and little acted upon. Well before the current financial crisis began, world leaders pledged to address this disconnect. At an International Monetary Fund meeting in 2007,… Read More »