Praia, Cape Verde, 17 June – The quality of life of Cape Verdeans has improved but there are still big disparities between rural and urban areas, according to figures issued Monday in Praia by the Cape Verdean National Statistics Institute (INE).
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GENEVA (AFP) — The northern African island nation of Cape Verde, one of the world’s poorest states, is to become the 153rd member of the World Trade Organisation in July, the WTO said.
Praia, Cape Verde, 27 Nov – Cape Verdean company IFH (Imobiliária, Fundiária e Habitat) Wednesday issued 420,000 bonds to fund its real estate project, Palmarejo Grande.
Over a dozen companies from Brazil active in sectors like handicraft, food, civil construction, garment manufacturing, equipment for the processing of water, cosmetics and information technology participated in a trade mission to Cape Verde, off the western coast of the African continent.
Gaborone – Angola is very close to macroeconomic convergence aimed at accomplishing the Economic and Monetary Union at the level of the member countries of the Southern Africa Development Countries (SADC), according to a note from the Angolan Embassy in Botswana.
Claims by some donor groups and international lenders notwithstanding, African countries have made negligible progress liberalising their economies in recent years. To close the gap with high- and middle-income countries, they must do more.
ELEVEN people, including five children, were shot dead in Guyana last weekend when unidentified gunmen went on the rampage in the village of Lusignan. A couple clung to their 11-year-old grand-daughter as bullets were pumped into them; a little boy clutched his mother’s night-dress as she tried to crawl under her bed. Furious villagers later set up barricades, demanding protection and justice.
November 17, 2008 – When it comes to hallmark urban transport programs in the LAC region, busways and bus rapid transit (BRT) such as Curitiba in Brazil from the 1970s and the Transmilenio in Colombia from the last decade hold exalted status.
Luanda, September 26, 2008 – Although social funds have generally been created as short term institutions, some have been in existence for over a decade due to their effectiveness on the one hand and to their complementarities to Government efforts towards poverty alleviation on the other. The Angola Social Fund (FAS) is such a case.
Investment-grade status, which was awarded to Brazil’s foreign-currency-denominated debt on April 30th by Standard & Poor’s, one of the main US credit rating agencies, is an acknowledgment of the important progress achieved in macroeconomic management and of a substantial improvement in external solvency ratios. Indeed, with reserves close to US$200bn, Brazil has become a net external creditor. Nevertheless, weaknesses persist, as the government has confirmed its intention to keep increasing public spending as part of its state-led development policies.
IF BRAZIL’S commodities-fuelled boom had a face, it would belong to Eike Batista. On June 13th the entrepreneur floated some of the stock in OGX, an oil company he created last year. It has yet to start drilling and therefore has no proven reserves. It has fewer than 100 employees. And yet the initial public offering raised $3.6 billion, giving the company a similar market value to Google when it floated in 2004.
WHEN John McCain laid out his plans for reducing America’s dependence on oil to an audience in California on June 23rd, the candidate’s keenest listeners were 6,000 miles away in São Paulo. Mr McCain argued that the tariff on imported ethanol of 54 cents per gallon should be scrapped. Others in the Senate (though not Barack Obama) are pushing for it to be reduced. Either way, the case against the tariff has been strengthened by high oil prices and by the June floods that damaged the mid-western corn (maize) crop. That sent corn prices soaring and made subsidising corn to produce ethanol look like an even worse idea than it did before, given the greener, cheaper ethanol that the United States could buy from Brazil instead.
IT IS not hard to discover what is wrong with Rio de Janeiro. Walk along the main shopping street of the Complexo de Alemão, a large shanty town that has been surrounded by police gunmen for months, and after about 20 metres the stalls selling fruit, vegetables and pirated DVDs give way to one selling wraps of cocaine and marijuana. It is run by boys with machineguns slung over their shoulders. Other shoppers try hard to pretend that this is normal, but they avoid looking the gunmen and their hangers-on in the eye, just in case. From time to time more machineguns pass by on motorbikes, their riders off to collect drugs, kill a rival or enforce their own version of the law.
SEEN from the dock at Angra dos Reis, the port south of Rio de Janeiro where it is moored, Petrobras’s P-51 oil rig looks like a chemistry set the size of several apartment blocks. Once on board it is easy to get lost among all the tubes at its dark and claustrophobic centre. This being Brazil, however, space has been made for a football pitch. From the top deck the view is vertiginous; in the heat of a Rio winter the indigo water far below is inviting. In a few months this $830m piece of kit, one of the world’s mightiest oil rigs, will be towed 175km (110 miles) from shore and anchored to the sea bed, where it will begin sucking up oil and gas—and with it, creating a chunk of Brazil’s economic future.
Contrary to expectations, the extraordinary general assembly of fuel distribution company Enacol turned out to be a rather uneventful and calm, with all of the points on the order of the day approved, except for several alterations in the company’s statutes. The tranquility of the meeting was apparently due to the unquestionable domination of Portuguese shareholder Galp Energia, which now owns 43.7% of Enacol’s stock.
Luanda – Angola might become in 2010 one of the three greatest diamond producers, considering the new investments and mining contracts, says a study by the KPMG consulting firm, issued in Luanda.
Luanda – Angola’s “Banco de Negócios Internacional” (BNI) expects to reach Usd 85 million of proper funds by the end of 2008.
Huambo, – Angolan Finance minister, Severim de Morais, in central Huambo, spoke of the need for a strong private sector in the country, capable of meeting the society’s demands for goods and services.