Posts Tagged ‘Latin America

This is my latest comment from Fund Strategy. Brazil’s imposition of capital controls last week has a broader significance than is generally appreciated. Not only does it show the destabilising consequences of slow growth in the West, it also illustrates how marginal free market economics has become. Economic atrophy in the West has created a […]

President of change unwilling to tackle US oil addiction, Der Spiegel, by Gregor Peter Schmitz. A leading German publication endorses the bizarre notion that the world is “addicted” to oil rather than needing it to fuel prosperity. New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rainforests, New York Times, By Elisabeth Rosenthal. Declining Latin American inequality, Vox, […]

Book monitor

In: Uncategorized

6 Jun 2010

Unfortunately I do not have time to read nearly as many books as I would like.  However, I have decided it might be worth me occasionally listing books that look interesting even if I may not get round to reading them. * William Rosen’s The Most Powerful Idea in the World (Random House) is a […]

Rob Killick explains on his blog how economic development could have hugely reduced the human impact of the earthquake in Haiti. Rich countries are far better able to cope with such events than poor ones.

Even Latin America seems to be getting in on the happiness obsession. A study by the Inter-American Development Bank says – if you can believe the headlines – that fast economic growth damages life satisfaction. Usually the results of such surveys, once they are subject to close scrutiny, are not as straightforward as they appear.

Jeffrey Sachs writes in an article for Project Syndicate on the spread of mobile phones in the world’s poorer countries: “market penetration in poor countries is rising sharply. India has around 300 million subscribers, with subscriptions rising by a stunning eight million or more per month. Brazil now has more than 130 million subscribers, and […]

In this climate of gloom and low expectations it is fantastically refreshing to come across anyone with a positive “can do” spirit. This is certainly the case in relation to Brazilian agriculture which, according to an article on BBC online, has enjoyed a productivity surge in recent years. As a result it has grown from […]

Martin Wolf has a characteristically astute piece on global inequality in today’s Financial Times. He makes a distinction between a capitalism where wealth is generated on the back of political connections combined with resistance to competition and the normal operation of the market. Carlos Slim, a Mexican who is the richest man in the world […]

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has published a special report on inequality in Asia. It argues that general trend has been for inequality to widen but overall living standards have improved too.: “The overall pattern that therefore emerges is one where a majority of developing Asian countries have seen increases in inequality …. By and […]

Branko Milanovic, lead economist in the research unit in the World Bank, is sceptical about the growth of a global middle class. In an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail he says that even the recent years of strong economic growth will not automatically lead to a larger middle class. In Latin America or […]