Starting in September, my income, such as it were, is basically in C$. Stephen Gordon explains, with graphics, why that has been such a bad trade. The scariest part: The 2002-2008 expansion provided significant real income gains, and more than half of those gains were due to the improvement in Canada’s terms of trade. So […]

by Ken Houghton My article for Institutional Investor on the investment opportunities available in Emerging Markets Infrastructure, most especially in water and sanitation, is available on their website (subscribers only, it appears). UPDATE: For those looking for discussions of water and sanitation that are not gated, angrybear frequently discusses the subjects.

by Ken Houghton Via Glenn Greenwald, a riff that is going around (see orchidgrrl nyc for the faux-Fafblog version), has become reality—in India: Corporate India is in shock after a mob of sacked workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who had dismissed them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi. The punchline, as […]

The most interesting presentation I saw at the AEA last January was Maccini and Yang’s discussion of the effect of rainfall on the health and growth of Indonesian babies.* It was subsequently discussed as an NBER working paper** by Jason Shafrin, and the thing that made it most interesting is that Maccini and Yang found […]

The Healthcare Economist notes that you are more likely to die in a New York hospital than one in London or Paris. But London is less safe for “avoidable” mortality. (I believe the English translation of that is “Dying when you shouldn’t have had to do so.) Unfortunately, there is no solution to the problems […]

One of the hardest things in the world is to value that which is not otherwise measured. The old observation that a man who marries his housekeeper reduces GDP is both sexist and accurate. Still (via Erin), the salary.com estimate that being an at-home parent is worth $117,000 p.a. seems a bit high. And we […]

An article on Che Guevara becomes surreal: For many Argentines, he evokes painful memories of the bloody 1970s, when young Che-wannabes took up arms in the name of revolution. The ensuing turmoil gave rise to a brutal right-wing military dictatorship. Yes, the families of the “desaparecidos” all consider Che the reason their family tree is […]