Category Archives: economist

Africa is “the dark continent”

The Economist has this article about Africa’s electricity shortages.

Basically, Africa can’t produce enough electricity to keep up with good growth and increasing urbanisation.

From the article:

With nearly 1 billion people, Africa accounts for almost a sixth of the world’s population, but generates only 4% of global electricity.
By some counts, only 17 of Nigeria’s 79 power stations are still working.
Kenya’s power utility estimates that it adds 12,000 households a month to the national grid.

Costs of cocaine around the world

The Economist has an interesting graph and brief article about the cost of cocaine around the world.

The farther away a country from the main producers in South and Central America, and the more isolated it is, the higher the cost to traffick there.

Cheapest in Colombia, the world’s biggest producer of coca: at $2, a gram costs less than a Big Mac

In far-flung New Zealand, a gram costs a wallet-busting $714.30

Some entertaining reading on Mugabeland

The nutty dictator One of the Economist journalists is keeping a journal after sneaking back into Zim to check things out. He had previously been thrown out for being “a spy masquerading as a tourist” and was pretty frightened on his way in, especially after learning that “the man from Time spent an uncomfortable five days in the jug, without food”.

His first entry is about trying to sneak in without being noticed. He talks about having used “tennis rackets, bird-watching guides and enormous paintings” in the past to get in as a tourist. He was mightily relieved to find that although the government had boasted of a computerised list of banned journalists, they didn’t have any computers at the airport!

Hi second entry talks about how both Mugabe and the country he rules are strange combinations of wonderful and terrible. He describes how Mugabe is such a strange character:

“There’s something about the president, those Elton John glasses, the camp flicking of his wrists, the moustache that recalls both Chaplin and Hitler, that makes him as much a caricature as a real man”
“He is smart, agile, hard-working, yoga-exercising, frugal and he cracks a crude joke or two (Australians are “genetically modified criminals”; Tony Blair is a “boy in shorts” who leads a “government of gay gangsters”)”
“But he is a charmer with fingers dipped in blood.” Lately he has brutalised opposition supporters and “worst of all, in the early 1980s as he established his control, Mr Mugabe directed the murder of many thousand opponents in the country’s south.”

Economist article on the South African economy

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There is an interesting article on the South African economy in a recent edition of the Economist:

Basically, it says that the South African economy is going very well. However, some people (e.g. trade unions) feel that this growth is not benefiting the poor enough and that the government should be taking more drastic steps.

In this kind of argument I always think of the Kennedy quote: “A rising tide lifts all boats”. I suppose their problem is that not all boats are lifted equally…

Here are some of the interesting excerpts from the article:

“When South Africa’s apartheid regime conceded power in 1994, it also bequeathed an economic shambles. The government’s budget was in the red, interest rates were uncomfortably high, and the country’s economy was as distorted as its society. But this fiscal year, for the first time, the government is running a surplus.”
South Africa’s economy “has grown by more than 4% in each of the past three years.”
“About half the population falls below the poverty line, according to some estimates. And although the economy creates 500,000 jobs a year, unemployment remains stubbornly high.”
“Local governments (municipalities) struggle to hire managers and engineers, leaving many essential posts unfilled”