whythawk ratings: measuring effective development

1. The charity of dumping
(Analysis/Analysis)

...reason was that there was no infrastructure servicing the land at all; no irrigation, no electricity, no roads. Without which his yields would be lower, and it would be astonishingly expensive to get...

2. Prediction Markets for the Poor
(Analysis/Analysis)

...(much as governments try through direct subsidies). You can buy a house, a car, land, a factory, better roads, public transport, infrastructure, security, courts, and, well, a lot of things. But the...

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

...ost the state a cent and they only start paying when benefits are being accrued. Major power stations, roads, or hospitals take years to build and a budget must be raised in advance. The South Afri...

4. Mozambique's Lessons for South Africa
(Analysis/Analysis)

... can take more than four years to get authorisation to start a business. So there's the country: no roads, no infrastructure, no legal rights of ownership, widespread corruption, but growing at 6...

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

...ed leaving shattered infrastructure behind. A mining company investing in Cameroon also has to build railroads and deepwater ports, electricity generators, fresh water pipelines, and import engineerin...

6. Investment cannot happen if the market isn't private
(Analysis/Analysis)

...they may be right. Foreign tourists arriving in South Africa in 2010 will (all going well) see nice new roads and sparkling stadiums overwhelming nearby buildings and clearly very expensive. They wi...

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

Many years of grizzled travelling will give you a cavalier attitude to roadside cuisine and a thick skin to the casual xenophobia which occasionally greets the weary traveller. Most tourists have tro

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

...f customers – they don’t need to travel vast distances to the nearest formal bank, over poor roads, and with a high chance of being robbed of their cash.  Prepaid water and electricit...

9. May I have the bill, please? A lesson in wilful ignorance ...
(Analysis/Analysis)

...n, where staff glare at you for rudely interrupting their analysis of who was sleeping with whom on Crossroads; to India, where wallahs bring you exactly what you didn’t order, cold and an hour ...

10. The carnage on South Africa's roads
(Analysis/Analysis)

...sand who've died in the past year in Iraq.  12 - 14 000 people a year die on South Africa's roads.  Yet our roads are no war-zone; they are filled with people happily going on vacati...