whythawk ratings: measuring effective development

1.
(Comments)

All very valid points and sentiment though I\\\'d like a distinction to be made between informal traders and car guards. It\\\'s a blurry line I know, but for me there is justification through at leas

2.
(Comments)

... why it exists. All the laws that you mention are expensive and the very barriers to entry that attract traders into the informal market. Consumers who support street traders know that they offer no...

3.
(Comments)

...ave designated areas on pavements for controlled trading, where hawkers with the appropriate license can trade legitimately. Car guards by comparison provide a service even if you don\'t request it...

4. Electricity Redux - Electricity Quotas Will Work About As Well As Race Quotas
(Analysis/Analysis)

...d to stop manufacturing and retrench employees. Quotas lead to opportunities for corruption as insiders trade contacts and cash for larger allocations. Money supply and loans are not controlled by q...

5. The Speculator: Pricing in the Future
(Analysis/Analysis)

...nd fill your tank on the night before a petrol price increase? Congratulations, you're a hedge-fund trader. Depending on the circumstances, you could also be called a profiteer, hoarder, specula...

6. Exports and parliamentary laziness
(Analysis/Analysis)

... Value-added manufactures are also more valuable in terms of exports, something that Deputy Director of Trade and Industry, Iqbal Sharma, is keen to promote. He has a funny way of doing so. Selling...

7. Podcast: China's expansion in Africa offers risk and opportunities
(Podcasts/Emerging Market Risk)

China is rapidly becoming Africa's largest investor.  They require little in the way of good governance and are aggressively creating new infrastructure in their drive to secure resources for

8. Podcast: The US dollar's decline effects aid and trade in Africa
(Podcasts/Emerging Market Risk)

Aid and trade are essential to Africa's further development.  The US dollar declined by 30% during 2007. This has an effect both on the real value of aid and on the world economy. Download th

9. Searching for objective measures of value
(Analysis/Analysis)

...a massive deficit.  And, while the currencies had to maintain their pegged rates, gold was freely traded.  To ensure that continued price of $35 / ounce was extremely expensive and, ultim...

10. Trevor Manuel and the "Plunder of Skills"
(Analysis/Analysis)

...offer for it by moving it to another place then you might do so. A person's skills are their own to trade for the best value they can get. Only a fool offers their best in exchange for the leas...

11. Slaves to land, the policies of Land Affairs
(Analysis/Analysis)

... form, either by farming it or building a home on it. Neither the improvement or the land are theirs to trade. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, declared that land ownership amongst the curr...

12. The Miracle of Investment
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ated. Residents are developing a talent for selling as they offer goods from their front-doors. Street traders are appearing on the thoroughfares. Hundreds of jobs have been created. Billions of r...

13. Killing the Golden Goose, a lesson in Economic Freedom
(Analysis/Analysis)

...majority could, for instance, vote to ban hunting and so disadvantage the few who enjoy it. Free market trades, by comparison, are win-win transactions since people only trade with each other for mut...

14. Africa, China and Investment
(Analysis/Analysis)

... infrastructure they never had before. The disadvantage is that China is negotiating some pretty severe trade terms. China, itself a nation with limited property rights, knows how the influence game...

15. China, Toys And The Tragedy of Xenophobia
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ufacturers in China. EU and US politicians promptly suggested unilateral bans on Chinese-made goods and trade restrictions at all levels. Zhang Shuhong, the head of Lida and one of the biggest Matte...

16. Black Economic Empowerment, like charity, is not investment
(Analysis/Analysis)

...rs rather than simply begging. There are significant opportunities in the informal sector.  Chinese traders have already seen this and, unencumbered by any legislative overhead, they are ploughin...

17. Black Swans, Cost Overruns and Industrial Tariffs
(Analysis/Analysis)

...otection of our cosseted motor industry. All the noise and stone-throwing about the Doha round of World Trade talks has been about how rich nations should cut their agricultural subsidies to allow po...

18. Ending poverty means abandoning charity and accepting reality
(Analysis/Analysis)

...is really a fragmented localised market where only people who trust one another directly are prepared to trade with each other. Any central state wanting to represent the interests of its people shou...

19. Atlas Shrugged at 50
(Analysis/Analysis)

... In words that could have been said by Wesley Mouch, Atlas Shrug's Economic Dictator, Zimbabwe's Trade Minister Obert Mpofu has stated, "Once we take over a company, we retain all the sta...

20. Department of inJustice: the corruption of high office
(Analysis/Analysis)

... his friend had not been appointed. The Minister was informed that his friend had missed out because the trade union which had backed him had not properly completed the relevant forms. Again, Tshisho...

21. Zimbabwe: the Hollow State
(Analysis/Analysis)

...business Import duties on imported goods have been increased with a view to stopping the cross-border trade with South Africa (and favour China) Mugabe announced yesterday that he intends rem...

22. Science gone wrong: when self-delusion leads to death
(Analysis/Analysis)

...t is not the norm. If it were stock markets would not be at their highest valuations around the world. Traders would be certain that their investments would be stolen; they'd be pulling out, not...

23. Zimbabwe: recovering the irrecoverable
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ollapsed, the Zimbabwe Dollar is entirely debased, essential products are unavailable, and the only real trade takes place in the informal market – now 80% of the economy. The measure of failed ...

24. South Africa's two tiers
(Analysis/Analysis)

...9;t want to create a two-tiered society." That sounds like the sort of answer regularly heard from trade protectionists in the developed world. These are the Americans who demand that Mexican c...

25. The Trouble with Paradise, or why Pakistan Sucks
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ou, some people will give. But nowhere near the epic proportions of the Indonesian tsunami. There is a trade-off in the community of nations. If you choose to go it alone - if you choose to shun th...

26. How every day on strike left civil servants permanently worse-off
(Analysis/Analysis)

...was the final offer tabled last week by government and rejected by COSATU, the Congress of South African Trades Union, in favour of their revised offer of 9%. The government originally offered 6% tri...

27. Suburbanise! How aid and trade obliterate unique cultures
(Analysis/Analysis)

Poverty will end. Despite all the screaming, all the noise, all the stone throwing. Despite "Make Poverty History" and billions of Dollars in aid and opposition to capitalism. Poverty wil

28. What comes after Capitalism?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ing to be some form of division of labour. Once you have division of labour you automatically introduce trade as you bargain for things you want for the things that you have. If all you have is your...

29. The efficiency of markets and how protectionism leaves the poor behind
(Analysis/Analysis)

There is something magnificent about the way that modern, market-driven businesses get ever more efficient. How they are able to derive ever more from ever less. Agriculture used to be a matter of p

30. When equality becomes unfair: South Africa's two economies
(Analysis/Analysis)

...eir homes.  They are the determined labourers upon whom the growth of the rich depends. But it is a trade-off.  If the poor's wage demands were to become too onerous then rich people wou...

31. Do you hate the poor enough to be charitable?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...g economic place in the world than of their attitude to Chinese worker's rights. A quick look at US trade policy indicates that US politicians (no doubt, with the tacit support of US citizens) pr...

32. Sarkozy's French Election: when elephants fight only the grass gets trampled
(Analysis/Analysis)

...interference designed to put locals out of work. Politicians enjoy nationalism and respond by increasing trade tariffs to exclude the imports. This destroys the viability of foreign firms and increase...

33. Melamine, China, and the peril for emerging markets
(Analysis/Analysis)

...1993 France instituted the European Banana Regime placing quotas on banana imports from outside of their trade preference agreements with Europe's old colonial trading partners, the African, Carib...

34. Have you paid your car guard today?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...n places and pushed back there when not needed. We have tried this before, sweeping the streets clean of traders under the guise of reducing crime.  Instead crime goes up as the criminals take ov...

35. Lawrence Lessig, take note: Digital freedom still needs digital responsibility
(Analysis/Analysis)

...5 years of massive profits, supported the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act in the US to increase their trademark an extra 20 years.  This is disgraceful and shameful.  And Lessig sprang in...

36. What market is worth R 100 billion a year and is growing at 10.9%?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ry and imagine a 25-year-old business graduate having to learn from the 25-year experience of a township trader in order to develop a new market; now imagine ... how will they communicate? For more in...

37. Leveraging your good name; the power of a positive credit rating
(Analysis/Analysis)

... few hundred years is this:  how, given the complexity of financial interactions, is it possible to trade with someone else who you do not know and trust that they will deliver on their promises?...

38. Cricket, corruption and the match-fixing that leads to murder
(Analysis/Analysis)

....  It is still essentially nationalised.  Unlike football, baseball, or rugby, players are not traded between privately-owned teams.  And, unlike cycling or golf, players don’t ga...

39. Lies, damned lies, and curriculum vitae; or why ratings may be the future of education
(Analysis/Analysis)

...periment with a new product from your favourite retailer than purchase the same product from some street-trader.  Simply because you trust your retailer. The future must be different.  You...

40. The best bridge out of poverty is over the future of cash
(Analysis/Analysis)

...financial clout will set the rules that they are happy with.  Nations that want that investment and trade will have to play by those rules. The most developed nations are in the process of getti...

41. We're from Mars and we want to help: four lessons in development
(Analysis/Analysis)

... Martians, resplendent in their latest fashions, meet with our leaders and indicate their willingness to trade with us. We have minerals and resources they need; they make shiny things with buttons t...

42. Coffee, the miracle of poverty, and other wonders
(Analysis/Analysis)

...action.  Oxfam believes the price is too low and demands that consumers pay more through their Fair Trade scheme.  All coffee trades internationally on what is known as the “c” p...

43. The Martians Really Care: four points to govern development
(Analysis/Ideas and Challenges)

...that, having studied us briefly, a sentient race chose to contact the United Nations and offer to become trade partners. A sentient species that was focused on the outside and interested in explorati...

44. The other losing battle: Africa's war on talent
(Analysis/Analysis)

...g integration of markets will make jobs around the world more subject to competitive pressures. "As trade expands and technologies rapidly diffuse to developing countries, unskilled workers aroun...

45. Is the ownership of property at odds with the needs of the poor?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...." Since then a great deal of effort has been put in by communists, socialists, new-economists and trades unions to exercise exactly that. Most recently, Cosatu's secretary in the Western C...

46. Millennium Development Goals and the Measurement of Change
(Analysis/Analysis)

...nsmission and spread Goal 2: provide micronutrients to reduce malnutrition and hunger Goal 3: liberalise trade by reducing subsidies and tariffs Goal 4: control the spread of malaria Goal 5: developme...

47. The poor have never had it so good ... now what?
(Analysis/Analysis)

If poverty was purely a lack of cash then we should end it this year. The World Bank, financier of last resort to bankrupt governments, has a great deal of competition.  The Global Fund has $ 6

48. The danger of wanting to believe in the power of good intentions
(Analysis/Analysis)

...0 million for food sent to NGOs in Ethiopia.  Much of the food and money went to local warlords who traded it for influence.  The vast bulk simply rotted in warehouses for lack of the infras...

49. Ithala and The Corruption Of Development
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ance.  This short-sighted approach can sew the seeds of corruption. Where there is a great deal of trade, finance moves in to fund new business ideas.  As the dotcom era proved: no amount o...

50. What do Richard Branson and Che Guevara have in common?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ism is not a political system;  it is simply a mechanism by which people value things they want and trade for these things from their possessions which they consider of lesser value.  A pers...