Via The New York Times, a report on the latest battle of global and regional bulls over Afghanistan’s potential oil and gas riches. The country’s Ministry of Mines recently announced eight finalists to bid for an estimated 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent in northern Afghanistan. ExxonMobil has been pitted against companies from bitter regional […]
Read more »Courtesy of STRATFOR (subscription required), some very interesting analysis of what Libya’s upcoming elections may mean for international investors: Libya’s citizens will head to the polls July 7 in the first national elections since the October 2011 ousting of former leader Moammar Gadhafi. The upcoming election will select a prime minister, Cabinet and a constituent authority that […]
Read more »Via The Globe and Mail, an article examining Mongolia’s commodity boom: In much of the developing world, natural resources seem to offer a handy way out of poverty. But they also present a curse. Mongolia, where the centre-right Democratic Party led last week’s elections on a wave of resource nationalism, would be wise to avoid […]
Read more »Via the Harvard Business Review, an interesting commentary on the potential for mobile-enabled growth in Africa: The United States economy is nine times the size of Africa’s, but Africa has twice as many mobile phones. This tantalizing statistic would seem to indicate that, in the mobile era, Africa’s time has come. But the mobile subscriber […]
Read more »Courtesy of The Financial Times, a report that Sonangol, the Angolan state oil group that has amassed assets from Iraq to Cuba, is aiming to raise fivefold its production as an operator. As the article notes: “…Manuel Vicente, whose promotion to minister of state for economic co-ordination in January ended his 12 years at the […]
Read more »Two articles of interest on Argentina. The first, via Foreign Policy, looks at investor worries emanating from recent policy shifts: Argentina is once again rattling the nerves of foreign investors. The country that has been struggling to move on after its 2001 default and checkered economic history has recently nationalized the country’s largest private company, […]
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