Progress on a roll in Kenya

Posted on December 28th, 2010 at 1:35 pm by Oscar Abello
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Regions: Africa | No Comments »

If you’re working in global development and you have just been tasked with increasing toilet usage and improving personal hygiene in East or Central African slums, your new best friend might be one who is deeply motivated to advance your cause: the local toilet paper company.

Family-owned Chandaria Industries Limited (CIL) is the leading tissue, paper, and hygiene products manufacturer in East and Central Africa, according to the African Business Review. Besides fronting some of the cost of water and sewage infrastructure in the Ruaraka neighborhood of Nairobi where CIL’s headquarters is located, Chandaria Group companies have also fought for provision of decent water and sewage infrastructure for all, with an eye toward market expansion for CIL-produced goods, according to the company website. Read the rest of this entry »

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Development without democracy?

Posted on December 28th, 2010 at 11:52 am by Guest
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Regions: Asia | 1 Comment »

Almas Kusherbayev is a Kazakh journalist working in Central Asia.

The debate on whether a market economy can exist without democracy is ongoing, and many think that at least two countries in the world are good examples of how the former can exist without the latter: China and Singapore. The question is whether such systems can be models for development without democracy in other countries. But a closer look at the nature of China’s and Singapore’s economic transformation highlights some important political and social factors as well that hardly make their models universal. Read the rest of this entry »

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In Venezuela, inclement weather dispossesses incoming Assembly

Posted on December 27th, 2010 at 6:33 pm by Jorge Godoy Coy
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Regions: Latin America and the Caribbean | No Comments »

Floods in Venezuela (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Inclement weather conditions throughout December have had a heavy impact on Venezuela. Torrential rains and mudslides have left over 130,000 people homeless and hundreds dead. The rains have also caused extensive damage to infrastructure: 250 roads are notdrivable, dams have been broken, and several bridges have been closed. Governmental response to the crisis included a rather unconventional type of emergency response. President Hugo Chávez asked the outgoing Assembly to grant him special legislative powers for him to be able to deal with the crisis legislating by decree for an 18-month period. The President argued that enabling him to legislate would allow him to correct the environmental damages caused by “capitalism’s irrationality.” In a lame duck session held on December 17, the outgoing Assembly approved the Enabling Law. Read the rest of this entry »

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Celebrate entrepreneurship and small business with a holiday classic

Posted on December 22nd, 2010 at 10:35 am by Eric Hontz
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Regions: Global | No Comments »

The holiday season is once again upon us. Ever since my childhood the season has been marked by several classic films. Once I began to travel I understood that it is common around the world to spend some of the holidays with old classic holiday favorites. In the United States, perhaps the most famous holiday film is It’s A Wonderful Life. The film offers food for thought on morality, faith, community, and small business. Read the rest of this entry »

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Talking informal with emerging association leaders

Posted on December 21st, 2010 at 12:02 pm by Lauren Citrome
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While discussions of informal economies have become a prominent part of today’s debates in international development, perspectives from private sector associations are not pervasive. As conglomerates of formal businesses, however, those groups can provide a unique perspective on the topic.

Youths’ perceptions of informal economies also provide enlightening insight on the future of informal business. Through CIPE’s ChamberL.I.N.K.S. program, CIPE staff recently had the opportunity to sit down with young leaders from private sector associations around the world. While we meant to speak broadly about entrepreneurship in the participants’ home countries of Bangladesh, Brazil, Russia, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania, one topic in particular kept reappearing in our conversation: informal sector businesses (those that provide lawful goods and services without legal registration or license.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Investing without borders

Posted on December 20th, 2010 at 2:47 pm by Oscar Abello
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Regions: Global | No Comments »

Imagine you’re a policymaker in a low-income country seeking to attract more foreign direct investment (FDI).

Perhaps you’ll target run-of-the-mill investment bankers looking for some emerging markets action to boost their performance for the year and get that bonus they’ve been craving. Or there might be a major international IT firm or a manufacturing conglomerate looking to break into a new market or tap into a new supply chain. You might even seek out impact investors looking for pro-poor business models with explicit social goals as well as economic.

No matter what kind of investor you want to attract, there are many institutional factors that affect all foreign direct investment just the same, and many of these factors are now captured in the World Bank’s new Investing Across Borders (IAB) indicators. Read the rest of this entry »

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Accountants: SMEs’ Best Friends

Posted on December 18th, 2010 at 8:23 am by Hammad Siddiqui
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Regions: South Asia | 1 Comment »

CIPE Pakistan office director Moin Fudda, left, speaking at the forum discussion co-hosted with the Pakistan chapter of the Association of Chartered and Certified Accountants. (Photo: CIPE)

Generally, the media focuses on corruption and bribery scandals related to government, public corporations and large private companies. Not many consider that corruption is also a large burden on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Often with their limited resources, when survival remains the key objective, most SMEs get sucked in to the spiral of corruption and bribery. One of the key reasons for getting into this is their inability to keep their financial records in order. Read the rest of this entry »

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Business takes center stage in Thailand’s fight against corruption

Posted on December 17th, 2010 at 9:30 am by John Morrell
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Regions: Asia | No Comments »

Twenty-seven Thai CEOs at the November 2010 signing of the Collective Action Coalition pledge to fight corruption in Thailand, on the eve of the 14th International Anti-Corruption Conference. (Photo: CIPE)

When the military overthrew a democratically elected Thai government in 2006 and when the Supreme Court disbanded a democratically elected government in 2008 – corruption was the principal justification. Corruption has become a part of daily life here – allegations of corruption contribute to the competing claims of Thailand’s color-coded protest groups that successive governments have lacked legitimacy. Uncertainty in the political environment is beginning to affect business; and uncertainty within the business community affects everyone. Businesses have started to come together to fight back. Read the rest of this entry »

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Governance spillovers: the ultimate social impact?

Posted on December 16th, 2010 at 3:00 pm by Oscar Abello
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Regions: Global | No Comments »

A new JP Morgan report dubbed Impact Investments as a new asset class.

Impact investing has grown much in the past ten years, to the point where JP Morgan declared it a new asset class on November 29. To paraphrase JP Morgan, impact investments refer to debt or equity investment for small yet scalable businesses with an explicit social intent–mainly to include the poor as contracted suppliers, employees, or final consumers and to account for environmental and ethical responsibility. As impact investors continue to further define and standardize what ‘impact’ means exactly, and how to measure it, at least one outcome matters dearly to strengthening democracy: impact investments disperse economic power, and in so doing  intentionally or unintentionally disperse political power. Read the rest of this entry »

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Laying the groundwork for policy advocacy in Ukraine

Posted on December 16th, 2010 at 8:07 am by Frank Brown
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Regions: Eurasia | No Comments »

A discussion board illustrating what business association members need. Is it also the foundation for successful association-based advocacy for economic reform in Ukraine?(Photo: CIPE)

Before dawn on Dec. 3 in the center of Kyiv, riot police and municipal workers dismantled a small tent city that had been erected two weeks earlier by entrepreneurs. The small- and medium-sized business owners, backed by tens of thousands of protesting entrepreneurs elsewhere in Ukraine, had been fighting proposed legislation that would have substantially raised their taxes. The entrepreneurs left peacefully that morning, having won a pledge from the government earlier in the week for inclusion in future talks on tax reform.

It was a dramatic conclusion to a showdown between the ruling coalition of president Viktor Yanukovych and a part of society – small business – that had sat out previous political battles. From CIPE’s point of view, the timing couldn’t have been better. Read the rest of this entry »

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Freedom making a comeback in Latin America?

Posted on December 15th, 2010 at 4:14 pm by Julia Kindle
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Regions: Latin America and the Caribbean | No Comments »

(Image: The Economist)

Support for democracy has risen in Latin America, according to a new poll from Latinobarómetro. In Peru, for example, support for democracy has peaked at 61 percent, after a low of 40 percent in 2005. In Uruguay, nearly 80 percent of respondents are satisfied with the way democracy works in their country. And in Venezuela, 84 percent believe that democracy is preferable to any other form of government.

Equally promising (but not surprising) is the corresponding rise in support for free market institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

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Being rational in Afghanistan’s irrational world

Posted on December 15th, 2010 at 8:00 am by Gregg Willhauck
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Regions: South Asia | No Comments »

Much has been written over the past 9 years – and a heck of a lot more has been spent! – about improving economic development in Afghanistan. However, sometimes what is required is to have someone to come in with a fresh perspective – and without an agenda or unyielding preconceptions – to survey the situation and to give you a straight read on what they see. That’s just what two former U.S. military officers did with a new paper on entrepreneurship and private sector development in Afghanistan. They are Jake Cusack and Erik Malmstrom, who are both currently enrolled in the joint masters’ program at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School. Read the rest of this entry »

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Calling all accountants: the developing world wants YOU!

Posted on December 14th, 2010 at 8:09 am by Lauren Citrome
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Regions: Africa, Global | 1 Comment »

(Image: Flickr user nsgoh)

The private sector plays an important role in sustainable democratic and economic development. By creating jobs and opportunities, providing necessary goods and services, and thus improving people’s living standards, private enterprise in a market economy offers citizens the ability to prosper independently of state-provided goods and services. That, in turn, gives citizens the necessary leverage to hold their government accountable because public officials rely citizens for support, not the other way around.

An accountable and efficient public sector is still a necessary part of development, though, and governments and private businesses must work together in this regard. Usually that entails efforts to ensure a sound business environment for the private sector to thrive, and an important part of any country’s business environment is the structure of the tax system. Read the rest of this entry »

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Whither transparency in government corporations?

Posted on December 13th, 2010 at 3:57 pm by Aleksandr Shkolnikov
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Regions: Eurasia | 1 Comment »

New power plant construction site in Kalinigrad Region, Russia. Photo: http://www.rosatom.ru/

I feel like we’ve been writing a bit too much about corruption recently. Perhaps there is a reason for it, since a new BBC poll has just found that corruption is the most talked about global problem. One thing you discover in highly corrupt countries is that there is unlikely to be an area or a sector of the economy that corruption doesn’t touch. Some of those you don’t frequently think about.

The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is currently capturing much of the attention devoted to the Russian nuclear complex. Yet, while the debate is raging on the reduction of nuclear weapons, inspections and compliance, limitations of the new treaty, and whether it should be signed or re-negotiated, one important feature of the Russian nuclear industry is not getting the attention it deserves.

In a new report, two Russian civil society organizations, Transparency International (TI)-Russia and Ecodefense, attempt to lift the veil off the Russian nuclear industry and see to what extent corruption, the problem that has plagued every sector of the Russian economy, has affected it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Recognizing the value of education…and educators

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 11:43 am by Caroline Scullin
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Regions: South Asia | No Comments »

Afghan high school students undertaking the Tashabos course. (Photo: CIPE)

For the last four days I have been a delegate to the second World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) hosted by the Qatar Foundation.  The 1200 delegates, presenters, and laureates of the WISE Awards for Education Innovation represent a phenomenal range of talent and devotion to education around the globe – from Jeffrey Sachs, speaking about the Millennium Development Goals for Education, to CIPE partner Martin Burt of Fundacion Paraguaya to an educator from Guatemala working with indigenous peoples to maintain their education traditions. Read the rest of this entry »

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