Welcome back!
I owe the title of this piece to John Hempton, an Australian who writes the excellent Bronte Capital blog , who told me that the number of visits to his site increased a hundredfold when in 2008 he published a piece with the title “Hookers that cost too much, flash German cars and insolvent banks: an introduction to Swedbank’s Baltic homeland.” It was a long and complex analysis of sovereign risk and bank insolvency in the Baltic States, and ultimately fascinating, but he probably wouldn’t have snagged more than 50 readers without that title. Let’s see if it works for me.
Several years ago I was talking business with a Frenchman in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and the topic turned to the very visible Chinese presence in the city, where they were building a soccer stadium, among other projects. He was one of those expatriates who has lived in a place for years and years, and knows everyone and everything. The Malagasy people were getting fed up, he said, with the Chinese taking over every economic activity in sight. Even the local bar girls – and Madagascar has some stunningly beautiful women – were now facing stiff competition from Chinese hookers. I didn’t undertake my own investigation, but I am not surprised. The Chinese, and, to a lesser degree, other Asians, are everywhere on the continent, and the people are not happy about it. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Africa,
Angola,
Botswana,
China,
chinese,
Don Corleone,
Madagascar,
Malaysia,
Mozambique,
Nigeria,
prostitutes,
Sierra Leone,
South Korea,
stadium,
Sudan,
sugar,
Taiwan,
The Godfather,
the scramble for Africa
For years the news media have been full of shocking reports on the abuse of women, largely though not exclusively, in Muslim countries. Sentences of flogging and death by stoning for accused adulteresses in Nigeria and Iran, and forced marriage, the burqa and the niqab, female genital mutilation, flogging and prison sentences for “immodest” attire, and “honor” killings, not just in Somalia and Afghanistan, but also in the suburbs of Paris and Birmingham. It’s a pretty grim picture.
But now comes a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, the research arm of The Economist magazine, which has devised a new index that ranks economic opportunity for women in 113 countries. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Afghanistan,
burqa,
Economist Intelligence Unit,
Egypt,
EIU,
hijan,
honor killing,
Indonesia,
Iran,
Nigeria,
niqab,
Somalia,
stoning,
Tunisia,
Turkey,
women,
women's economic opportunity
It’s amazing how quickly things can return to normal. You wouldn’t know it from watching CNN, but big segments of life in Haiti, including in the capital, Port au Prince, which suffered the greatest damage, have returned to what would have been considered normal in the days and months before the quake. There is plenty of destruction still evident, and tens or even hundreds of thousands of people living in tents or under blue plastic tarpaulins throughout the city and surrounding areas. But shops and restaurants and gas stations are open, petty street commerce has resumed, and children in clean, if faded, uniforms walk to and from school. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
charity,
Clinton Foundation,
earthquake,
garment,
Haiti,
IDB,
IMF,
infrastructure,
Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission,
Paul Collier,
textile,
World Bank
I present here a few paragraphs on wages and benefits, an excerpt from Human Action, a work by the famed Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who is the intellectual godfather of F.A. von Hayek, among other notables. I find it especially relevant because I have been working in Haiti for the past couple of weeks, my firm having won a contract to conduct a pre-feasibility study for an industrial park in the northern part of the country, which will accommodate garment manufacturers. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
benefits,
garment,
Haiti,
Hayek,
informal sector,
remuneration,
sweatshop,
textile,
von Mises,
wages
In Iceland, where I have spent the past week, it is illegal to name your son Dweezil or River or your daughter Moon Unit or Fifi Trixabelle. The Government has long maintained a list of legal first names, all of which come from the Norse (Thorgil, Gunnar, Guðrún) or Biblical (Jón, Margret, Kristjana) traditions. There is also a list of middle names, many of which refer to places. For most of Iceland’s history, people had only one name, sometimes with a nickname (Eirik Raud, or Erik the Red) or a patronymic (Leifur Eiriksson, meaning Leif, son of Eirik). [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Bhutan,
culture,
Gross National Happiness,
Iceland,
icelandic names,
language,
liberty,
McDonald's,
pursuit of happiness,
rotten shark,
Taco Bell,
whale meat,
whaling
