Pyongyang Glitters, But Rest of North Korea Still Dark
April 28th, 2013
Via Time magazine, an interesting look at North Korea: The heart of this city, once famous for its Dickensian darkness, now pulsates with neon. Glossy construction downtown has altered the Pyongyang skyline. Inside supermarkets where shopgirls wear French designer labels, people with money can buy Italian wine, Swiss chocolates, kiwifruit imported from New Zealand and […]
Read more »Frontier Capitalism: A Bet On Peace For War-Torn Somalia
April 28th, 2013
Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, an interesting article on Somalia: Michael Stock sees things that others don’t. “Imagine this,” he says one recent afternoon, standing on the sunny second-floor deck of his new oceanside hotel in Somalia’s war-battered capital. “There are banana trees where there’s desert now, and there’s this view.” The banana trees […]
Read more »Calling Mr. Kim: Mobile Phones Boom In North Korea
April 26th, 2013
Via Quartz, an interesting report on the adoption of mobile telephony in North Korea: Just a few of the 2 million. North Korea’s only mobile operator, Koryolink, is about to hit 2 million subscribers, its CEO Ezzeldin Heikal told diplomats and NGO workers in Pyongyang this week. Koryolink launched services in North Korea in 2008 and took […]
Read more »Silicon Kush
April 25th, 2013
Via Inc., an interesting article on how bill-payment kiosks are transforming consumers’ economic lives in Central Asia: On our first morning in Dushanbe, the Tajik police stop our car. We had been driving less than three minutes before hearing the siren squawk. Behind us, a police officer emerges from his compact Soviet-era Lada wearing a […]
Read more »Meteoric Mongolia
April 24th, 2013
Courtesy of Foreign Affairs, a look at Mongolia’s mining industry and overall economy: Mongolia is mining’s last frontier. The country is one of a small handful of places left in the world with major untouched mineral deposits. Its best — and perhaps its only — hope for broad-based economic development lies in recruiting foreign miners […]
Read more »Africa’s Economic Boom
April 24th, 2013
Via Foreign Affairs (subscription required), a very interesting analysis of Africa’s economic growth and trajectory: Talk to experts, academics, or businesspeople about the economies of sub-Saharan Africa and you are likely to hear one of two narratives. The first is optimistic: Africa’s moment is just around the corner, or has already arrived. Reasons for hope […]
Read more »Focusing primarily on The New Seven Sisters - the largely state owned petroleum companies from the emerging world that have become key players in the oil & gas industry as identified by Carola Hoyos, Chief Energy Correspondent for The Financial Times - but spanning other nascent opportunities around the globe that may hold potential in the years ahead, Wildcats & Black Sheep is a place for the adventurous to contemplate & evaluate the emerging markets of tomorrow.