whythawk ratings: measuring effective development

1.
(Comments)

... decade, taken 300 million people out of poverty. That is quite an astonishing number. The reason the dollar is losing its importance, the reason the US economy is looking less dominant is NOT bec...

2.
(Comments)

...d by a very small minority of it\'s people. This is the problem. If you look at the performance of the dollar, you\'ll see the US is not doing so well. The reason they dominate is because they have...

3. Netscape, the Internet and Creative Destruction
(Analysis/Analysis)

... Netscape for $4.2 billion in a stock swap. The froth of Dot Com frenzy wasn't to last. Billions of dollars were being spent on companies that could never justify their expectations. During 200...

4. Simba the Saviour?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...e had promised him unconditional support. His first act was to call for the devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar. Mugabe, including many of his soon to be old-age-home roommates were not impressed by...

5. 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

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

...was complex. Gold was fixed at $35 / ounce and all other currencies were pegged to that price via the US dollar.  The US became the reserve currency of the world. The problems for the US began ...

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

..., declared that land ownership amongst the currently impoverished has the capacity to unlock trillions of dollars of "hidden capital". De Soto has visited South Africa on several occasions ...

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

... the time I said, "No." Was I wrong? The situation three weeks ago was this: The Zimbabwe dollar was worth less than the paper it's printed on Zimbabwe is short of everything an...

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

...sely what market-economists, such as myself, have said would happen. Agriculture collapsed, the Zimbabwe Dollar is entirely debased, essential products are unavailable, and the only real trade takes ...

10. The war of informal markets against central states; a bellwether of support
(Analysis/Analysis)

...as a solid, negotiable value. Each wave of remittances acts to further deflate the value of the Zimbabwe Dollar. During the Second World War both the Allies and the Axis powers would distribute fake...

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

...agencies are still somewhat embarrassed at how much money they got to deal with the tsunami. Billions of dollars was needlessly wasted. No-one talks about Bam. And now we have Pakistan awash in wat...

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

...reaming, all the noise, all the stone throwing. Despite "Make Poverty History" and billions of Dollars in aid and opposition to capitalism. Poverty will end. The foundations for that post...

13. Nigeria, or the idiots guide to stealing an election
(Analysis/Analysis)

...2 Rodrigo Borgia, a Spanish cardinal, is said to have bribed all his rivals the equivalent of millions of dollars in order to become Alexander VI, the 215th Catholic Pope. In comparison to Nigerian e...

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

... an emerging market.  You have to factor in that the Rand fell by 12 - 18% in the past year, so your Dollar-denominated returns would be about 15%.  This is still quite good if you're us...

15. The US$ 5 trillion market at the bottom of the pyramid
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ort-messages on their cell phones?  Who would have thought that this would stimulate a multi-billion Dollar industry? C K Prahalad, speaking in Johannesburg at a conference organised by Global L...

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

...al game.  The players are heroes but without the financial glamour of footballers.  Billions of Dollars are bet on matches and bookies like to skew the odds in their favour.  Nothing ca...

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

... wine-flavoured beverage. Poor people have no money.  The measure of poverty is defined in terms of dollars-a-day earned.  So we hear about “the number of people living below US$ 1 a ...

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

...uch maligned, has tripled their development aid to $ 9 billion.  There are now more than 50 billion-Dollar foundations in the US alone. Many of these foundations are having trouble giving away...

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

...ive the money to and how to go about it. Gifter.org, an online charity project, has launched the Million Dollar Blog Post as an initiative to raise funds for charity.  Without in any way dispara...

20. Guide To Volunteering
(Analysis/Donation Tips)

...able giving decisions? I doubt you'd feel confident sending a charity a check for close to a thousand dollars without doing some investigating into the charity's endeavors first. So shouldn...

21. 1 Why are development ratings necessary?
(FAQs/Rating FAQs)

Trillions of Dollars of development aid are spent every year across the world. Millions of people are still in poverty. The number of people living on less than $ 1 a day in Africa remains obstanately