whythawk ratings: measuring effective development

1.
(Comments)

... Enron was only different in that they stole more money than they could afford, if it had some bigger cash cows, it would still be business as usual. I mentioned elsewhere a Gadget that displaye...

2.
(Comments)

...with SAA\'s cross-subsidised Mango service. Budget operators are amongst the only airlines making real cash internationally (think Ryanair, easyJet, Southwest Airlines, etc.). Without SAA\'s anticom...

3. After Conceit: Recovering from the Credit Crunch
(Analysis/Analysis)

...the promissory notes -- that you incurred. You, through your behaviour, have brought new value and new cash into the world. Only with this ability to borrow money that does not yet exist can we ove...

4. Possession of state assets has become an end in itself
(Analysis/Analysis)

...sidise the cost of services for low-income families, there are numerous ways to do so. They could give cash directly to beneficiaries as a grant, or directly to service providers to reduce prices. O...

5. The Remarkable Power of Remarkable People
(Analysis/Analysis)

...what they want. On the other end, though, if we tax the wealthy too much, they could simply take their cash and go elsewhere, as tax exiles. Or, they may decide not to produce any more wealth than t...

6. South Ossetia: Russia and Georgia's dangerous game
(Analysis/Analysis)

...Poland. They have supported dictators in as many countries as they can find. Oil money gives them the cash they need to afford influence. And the US moral stature has been severely compromised by t...

7. No way out; ducking the Eskom bullet
(Analysis/Analysis)

...covered through debt and shareholder investment. MTN, Cell C and Vodacom have invested vast amounts of cash in creating infrastructure to offer their services. They had to do this up-front and with ...

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

...ing 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 quotas. You pay inte...

9. Funding departments instead of people cheats everyone
(Analysis/Analysis)

...uld achieve far more if it simply offered appropriate education vouchers to parents and allowed them to cash them in at their favourite private schools. Government services have increased money suppl...

10. Of Capitalism, Socialist Greed, Poverty and Remaining Silent
(Analysis/Analysis)

...the opposite. Zimbabwe, North Korea, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iraq all have lots of politics, but very little cash to spend. If anything, it appears that politics, like mildew in bathroom corners, is robus...

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

...order to best fulfil their ambition. When you sell a pocket calculator you exchange it for the highest cash offer you can get. If you can get a better offer for it by moving it to another place then...

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

...ast decade started with the ability to raise capital against the value of an asset and then invest that cash in the improvement of that asset. A factory owner who is unable to put his factory up as c...

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

...million of their capital into a government scheme. Instead of capital being used to its best value the cash "windfall" received by people who haven't earned it gets spent. This increas...

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

...next three years. In other words, the US$20 billion per year is as much as the US spends giving direct cash subsidies to their cotton farmers. This is important, but it takes attention away from wha...

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

...t people living in a country choose to opt out of being governed, either by migrating or by maintaining cash links only with the informal sector then the state has no resources. It can maintain itsel...

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

...e purpose of trade and exchange. Sellers bring their goods, buyers bring their money. The bulk of that cash arises from donations from exiled Zimbabweans supporting loved-ones at home. There is no pr...

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

...e-market lobby. He nationalised large commercial farms and gave them to the landless poor. He printed cash and gave it to veterans and the rural destitute. He fixed prices on essential products at ...

18. People, Planet and Profits: the complexities of corporate governance
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ed. But maybe that's getting ahead too. When the original entrepreneur either retires, decides to cash in his investment, or needs to raise a tremendous amount of capital for further expansion, ...

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

...demand aid to support their diseased, illiterate, and infrastructurally barren nations. They take this cash. Perhaps it even gets spent. A year later they're back for the same thing. At the sa...

20. Islam, Shari'ah Law, and Cultural Capitalism
(Analysis/Analysis)

...by keeping their money in a bank account but still wants a safe place to keep it.  People who have cashed in their pensions are ideal clients for these types of funds. In South Africa there are n...

21. One Laptop Per Child, now costing 75% more ...
(Analysis/Analysis)

... failed economic and political experiments; the rest of the world will feel sorry for them and stump up cash to allow them to proclaim that they are “doing something for the people”. What ...

22. Jobs are from Mars, Business is from Venus
(Analysis/Analysis)

...whatever Sheryl Crow thinks). The question from business is: well, ok, so they have needs; do they have cash? The World Bank’s Global Monitoring Report is very exciting reading.  South East...

23. Internet Bubble 2.0: the future of dotcom depends on the mobile phone
(Analysis/Analysis)

... that it happened:  vastly overvalued stocks in companies that didn’t sell anything and lost cash in truckloads; massive oversupply of advertising space; and the relative naiveté of ...

24. Hedging and bundling; improving the efficiency of microlending
(Analysis/Analysis)

...l activities a microfinance bank will approach them and offer to lend them an ever-escalating amount of cash which they will use to buy the things they need (usually personal expenditure, like treats,...

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

...bsp; Nothing can be simpler than to have a quiet chat with a few key players in a team; throw them some cash and ensure a result. Steven Levitt, in his wry Freakonomics, convincingly demonstrated &n...

26. Development organisations need to engage with ratings agencies
(Analysis/Analysis)

... universally mistrusted.  Even worse is that those trusted organisations would be overwhelmed with cash that they wouldn’t have the capacity to invest wisely but would certainly still spend...

27. Aggregation and collaboration: a guide to making money and doing good in poor nations
(Analysis/Analysis)

... distances to the nearest formal bank, over poor roads, and with a high chance of being robbed of their cash.  Prepaid water and electricity meters allow the poorest to budget and buy when they n...

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

...d the money they were supposed to be managing. The Living Hands Trust invested R 1.47 bn with Fidentia, cash needed to fund monthly payments to widows of deceased miners.  All of it is missing. ...

29. The redistribution of poverty
(Analysis/Analysis)

...y and assets should give some of these to the poor.  They believe that it is merely the absence of cash that makes poor people poor.  They are wrong. Just as a runny nose, sore muscles and ...

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

...f development but developmental organisations consider capitalists to be unworthy unless as a source of cash. Developmentalists frequently make the assumption that the more developed parts of the wor...

31. So how exactly do you invest in the Fortune At The Bottom Of The Pyramid?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...nd evaluations and metrics to be generated. No matter the good intentions, and before a whole bunch of cash is thrown away, it is essential that contextual, impartial analysis be developed with the i...

32. Government rewards the worst schools for poor performance
(Analysis/Analysis)

...y graduates at all. The current system results in perverse incentives where the worst schools get extra cash to assist them out of their difficulties.  This results in the ((moral hazard)) situat...

33. Does the new Apple iPhone cause poverty?
(Analysis/Analysis)

... where it is completely uneconomical to offer formal ((banking)) services.  Dangerous places where cash can easily be stolen.  The ready availability of cellular technology has allowed sophi...

34. 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

35. School vouchers offer the poorest an opportunity to learn at better schools
(Analysis/Analysis)

...portunities of youngsters. If the government intends on spending money subsidising education then that cash can be issued directly to learners as a voucher to take to any accredited school to pay the...

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

...verwhelm business sense.  The Sunday Tribune has accused the Ithala Development Bank of providing cash to local politicians and bigwigs without clear business incentives to do so.   Which ...

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

...ossess.  If they value it less than any amount of money then they will trade their effort for that cash.  The economic thinking behind ending slavery was that slaves should enjoy the right t...

38. Guide To Volunteering
(Analysis/Donation Tips)

...sation that went bankrupt, opposed to another charity that was pursuing the same mission and had enough cash flow to sustain its work well into the future? A well-informed volunteer is not only more l...

39. Guide to Donating
(Analysis/Donation Tips)

...eck that they're real charities Don't drop money into cans at the checkout counter or hand over cash to solicitors outside the supermarket. Situations like these are irresistible to scam artis...

40. Senescence, the death of development
(Analysis/Analysis)

...f development but developmental organisations consider capitalists to be unworthy unless as a source of cash. This creates an awful divide between countries and communities that develop on their own, ...

41. Vouchers and Individual Choice
(Analysis/Analysis)

...nts now get to choose the schools they feel best serve their interests. That vouchers take the place of cash is to avoid the moral hazard of parents spending their money on themselves instead of their...