My colleague actually runs a side business, of which she is the manager. She and her ex-boyfriend (whom she was going to marry until he cheated on her and physically hit her) started a business in money lending. The business model is that they focus mainly on government employees, who have a stable salary. The clients need to have a bank account and an ATM card. The client comes into the office, hands over their ATM card and PIN and […]
The politics and economics behind urban agriculture (specifically land tenure and zoning issues) are so complicated that it’s getting me really excited. Well, it actually makes my job a bit harder, but then if it was an easy issue to be solved, it would have been solved already. One day, when I learn a little bit more, I will write a post about these complicated dynamics between individuals, organizations, and the physical environment.
Our economic models (or any kind of models for that matter) are based on the perceptions of the world, therefore they can never be complete. The models also have to change with time and conditions, or else they become a generalization because of blind belief, not true evidence/data input. The problem comes when proponents of a certain model (whether Keynes or free market) take those models made for a specific instance to be an economic “law” (where in the world […]
Tiffany Tong March 19th, 2008 Which Country Made the Better Choice? China and India, the two Asian powerhouses where 37% of the world population lives, have become the miracles of economic development of the modern world (Current World Population (ranked), 2007). China and India have sustained GDP growth, unmatched by any other country in the history of human kind, of 9.4% and 7% average respectively for over a decade (Dahlman, 2007). The proportion of Indians living in extreme poverty (on […]
The Chinese Mercantilists Tiffany Tong November 15th, 2007 China has been growing in GDP at rates that the world has never seen before. It took China less than 10 years to double its GDP, while it took Britain 58 years, the USA 47 years, and Japan 34 years (Hou & Hou, 2002). Countries that started market reforms at the same time as China have all seen less growth (Remmer, 1998). There are many speculated reasons for this apparent disparity: in […]
