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Brazil and the limits of the possible
Meet Marina Silva. A former senator and minister of the environment for the ruling party, PT (the Brazilian Workers Party), in 2009 she left to joing the PV, Brazil’s small green party. Next year she finished third in the presidential race, with almost 20 million votes – an astonishing feat […]
Read all posts for ‘economic growth’
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The Cost of Economic Growth in the Dominican Republic
(Para una versión en español de este artículo, entrar aquí). Nina needed a place to put her trash. The rusty garbage bin near her house, like the bin down the street, was filled to the brim just days after the town’s garbage collectors made their weekly visit to Nina’s street […]
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Fat Cat Politicians: The madness of the wages of Nigerian Lawmakers
When I started my first job after graduation in 2008 at a federal owned radio and television station in Abuja, Nigeria, I was paid 40, 000 Naira a month; that’s roughly about US$250. I lived with family at the time, drove a car I really didn’t have to fuel, […]
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Brazil: Free Trade for Countries That Can’t Be Bothered to Do It*
Free trade in Brazil has an inglorious past and an uncertain future. World Bank data shows that as of 2011the country lies at the very bottom of a ranking of merchandise trade (the sum of exports and imports) as a fraction of GDP: less than 20 percent of Brazil’s annual domestic […]
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How bad governance unites both ends of the Mediterranean
South of Ciudad Real in Central Spain lies a brand new airport with one of the longest runways in Europe, state of the art facilities and a capacity of 10 million passengers a year. Its only problem is that it is closed. The airport ceased operations in April 2012, less […]