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Posts Tagged ‘Africa’

Navigating the Natural Resource Curse

When oil was discovered in 2007 off the shores of small, sturdy Ghana, the country’s government officials called the discovery “perhaps the greatest managerial challenge” the country had faced since independence. John Kufuor, Ghana’s president at the time, warned that “instead of a being a blessing, oil sometimes proves the undoing of many … nations who come by this precious commodity.”
Ghana’s reaction no doubt surprised oil-starved observers in developed countries, but the Ghanaian officials were referring to the “resource curse” that has wreaked havoc in other resource-rich, developing countries. Natural-resource wealth not only increases civil violence but, in a bizarre development paradox, is linked to lower economic growth.


Africa, Plugged In

A website called African Signals, the brainchild of Eric Hersman, launched this week. Its goal is to aggregate information about mobile phone and internet connections across Africa. Hersman is also affiliated with Ushahidi, “a website developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.” You can see Hersman’s TED talk on Ushahidi . . .


Zimbabwe's Novel Currency

Zimbabwe’s currency has been essentially worthless in-country for months. Now the Zimbabwe dollar is officially worth more on eBay, where collectors can snap up a few trillion-dollar notes for less than $25. Technically, a currency exchange would give you 37 million Zimbabwe dollars for every U.S. dollar, but since Zimbabwe’s government recently suspended its currency altogether, you probably shouldn’t bother. . . .


The "Bottom Billion" Economist Answers Your Questions

Paul Collier Last week, we solicited your questions for award-winning Oxford University economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and the just-published Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places. In his answers below, Collier talks about why the impact of colonialism on Africa is exaggerated, how African countries are “too big to be nations, yet too small to . . .


The Cost of Really Bad Government

When does a press pass cost $27 billion? When you’re a local reporter in Zimbabwe working for a foreign news outlet. Foreign Policy‘s Passport Blog reports that the government in Zimbabwe will begin assessing local journalists a fee of between $1,000 and $3,000 U.S. for the right to send news out of the country. Considering the country’s 231 million percent . . .


A License to Print Money

Where can you go to get a $1 billion dinner? Zimbabwe, where runaway inflation has given rise to mulit-million dollar loaves of bread as the country’s currency moves even further into collapse. So could now be the best time to invest in Zimbabwe? Oxford University economist Paul Collier writes in the Boston Review that Tanzania, which suffered a self-imposed economic . . .


FREAK Shots: $1 Billion Dinners and Other African Pricing Problems

Fares for a trip to Goree Island in Senegal (the Communaute Financiere Africaine franc, CFA, is the Senegalese currency) break down like this: Foreigners: Adults- CFA 5,000 (US $13) Children- CFA 2,500 (US $6) Africans: Adults- CFA 2,500 (US $6) Children- CFA 1,500 (US $3.60) Senegalese: Adults- CFA 1,500 (US $3.60) Children- CFA 500 (US $1.20) Johannes Kiess In this . . .


The Consequences of Slavery in Africa

Nathan Nunn, an economist at the University of British Columbia, has written an interesting working paper called “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trade.” His abstract sums it up well: Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct . . .