Thomas Friedman’s bestseller The World Is Flat highlights the strong forces pushing the world towards a single economic platform. The technology-fueled globalization in the provision of services, and the widespread organization of production processes as global value chains are part of his narrative.
The Ouagadougou-Accra-Tema corridor, a road stretching from Ouagadougou in West Africa’s Burkina Faso through Ghana’s bustling capital city Accra and onto the country’s port city Tema, is one of Africa’s most well-known corridors. In October, we joined Albert, a 50-year-old driver from Burkina Faso, on a 750 kilometer journey to highlight the high economic costs faced by landlocked countries and the cumbersome border crossings that impede trade.
The journey, which should have taken seven hours by car, took us 17 hours, 1 border crossing and 20 checkpoints.
Mobile Affordability Gap in Peru
With the increase in geographic coverage and the adoption of prepaid phones, penetration in Latin America has increased dramatically. Wireless Intelligence estimates that mobile penetration in the Americas is approximately 88% as of March, 2010.
Soaring food prices have suddenly become a major concern for policy makers in East Asia. The price of rice - which provides one third of the region's caloric intake - is a particular worry. Rice prices have been moving higher since around 2004, although this was from very depressed levels in the early years of the decade. Prices surpassed $300 a ton in early 2006 for the first time since the late 1990s, kept moving higher, and then took off at an accelerating pace from late 2007: up 11 percent in the the fourth quarter, then 56 percent in the first quarter of 2008 an
