Loomnie

Remember this story about the Nigerian central bank taking over five Nigerian banks? Well, it seems that a result of that has been a sort of credit crunch in the country. From the BBC:

Lagos-based manufacturing firm, supplying cables to Nigeria’s fledgling national grid.
With more than 500 skilled staff, it is exactly the kind of business that trade experts say Nigeria needs if it is to diversify away from oil production and create a more mixed economy.
Using borrowed cash, the firm moved to bigger premises in August, but just three weeks later received some devastating news from its two banks about its loan facility.
“The bank just told us pretty much, ‘Look, we have to put a hold on this at least till next month, or the month after or until things die down,’” says David Onefowoken, director of Coleman Wires and Cables.
“The second one might slash [the loan] by half.
“A lot of these banks that were stopping these loans had actually helped us out before, to get up and running.”
The reason?
A banking crisis entirely divorced from the global credit crunch. Continue reading.

From Financial Times.

Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute is getting worried about methodological individualism:

I’m getting worried about methodological individualism. Yes, I know that ‘society’ has no life or will or organizing mind of its own, as Marx seemed to assume, and that it is just the aggregation of individuals’ decisions and actions. I know that the ‘price level’ does not affect ‘aggregate supply’ or ‘aggregate demand’, and that these are mere statistics, summing individuals’ reactions to particular prices. And I don’t fall the the scientist guff that ‘we can predict the behaviour of a piece of a gas, even though we don’t know what any particular molecule is doing’, because I know that the ‘molecules’ that social science deals with are individuals who are themselves so complex that their behaviour would fry the brain of the average chemist. And yet…

Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously (or infamously) told Women’s Own magazine that “there is no such thing as society”, and yes, I see her point. But she went on to say: “There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Aye, there’s the rub. Are we methodological individualists (the term was, I think, coined by Schumpeter, who I wrote about here recently) obliged to insist that everything comes down to the minds, thoughts, values, and actions of individuals alone? Or can we admit that relationships between individuals, like family ties, are pretty basic too? And what about culture, or history, or religion, or even class? These all shape and constrain our individual thoughts and actions. But to admit them as significant is the thin end of the methodological wedge, because these are social phenomena.

An analogy, if I may. A physicist could describe a football match in terms of kinetic energy, friction, and the forces on the ball that sent it in this direction or that. It would be a perfectly correct description, but a pretty dull one: most of us would prefer to hear the commentator talking about the skill of the players, the positioning of the teams, the tactics and strategy, the chances taken and the goals scored. The physicist’s account might be the right way to talk about the workings of the Large Hadron Collider, but it’s not much good for a ball game. Likewise, an individualist account of economic or social phenomena may be true in a trivial sense; but to understand what’s going on, you do need to know that culture, or history, or religion do in fact shape how people act.

And again, if we do detect statistical relationships between social phenomena like a price index and a money supply figure, isn’t that actually rather useful, even if only up to a point? Yes, I know that unless we refer to the individuals, we will make mistakes. A Martian observer may note that every Monday to Friday morning, Grand Central Station becomes packed with Earthlings, and predict this as a scientific law. Except that, one Monday, no Earthlings show up at all. The Martian’s ‘law’ did not account for the fact it was a public holiday. But then, this is how science works – we make a hypothesis, then have to revise it when the unexpected happens. Sure, if we understand the motives of the actors, our predictions will be better. But just because we can’t do that very easily, do we still have to throw out statistics that seem to work?

The current issue of The Economist has this in a leader about mobile money in Africa:

ONCE the toys of rich yuppies, mobile phones have evolved in a few short years to become tools of economic empowerment for the world’s poorest people. These phones compensate for inadequate infrastructure, such as bad roads and slow postal services, allowing information to move more freely, making markets more efficient and unleashing entrepreneurship. All this has a direct impact on economic growth: an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts GDP growth by 0.8 percentage points, according to the World Bank. More than 4 billion handsets are now in use worldwide, three-quarters of them in the developing world (see our special report). Even in Africa, four in ten people now have a mobile phone.

With such phones now so commonplace, a new opportunity beckons: mobile money, which allows cash to travel as quickly as a text message. Across the developing world, corner shops are where people buy vouchers to top up their calling credit. Mobile-money services allow these small retailers to act rather like bank branches. They can take your cash, and (by sending a special kind of text message) credit it to your mobile-money account. You can then transfer money (again, via text message) to other registered users, who can withdraw it by visiting their own local corner shops. You can even send money to people who are not registered users; they receive a text message with a code that can be redeemed for cash.ve a text message with a code that can be redeemed for cash.

Also check out their special report on mobiles in Africa

Krugman speaking on Finland: Speaking at a forum on Finland’s economic development organised by the Finnish Innovation Fund, Sitra, Krugman said that technically the global economy began to rebound at the end of the summer. He added, however, that unemployment could worsen for up to a year and a half, despite growth.

“Prospects for slow growth–maybe even some quarters of negative growth are really quite strong. The forces of recovery now are largely temporary factors. We don’t have very much reason to think we’ve got a solid recovery on tap,” said Krugman.

While Krugman sees some bright spots, he added that the recession in Finland could last for quite some time. The effects of the government’s stimulus efforts are wearing off and exports offer little remedy in global markets still gripped by the downturn.

“From the general grounds that Finland is a manufacturing, exporting economy, I would expect GDP growth to turn positive quite soon because we’re seeing a worldwide bounce back in manufacturing–but that’s a long way from full recovery,” Krugman explained.

For now, Krugman says Finland’s best bet is to stick to its stimulus efforts to protect jobs.

“There are times when it’s good to run deficits and this is one of them, so don’t try to balance the budget right now,” advised Krugman.

I visited the German parliament about a month ago, and even managed to get to the press gallery while the Bundestag, the parliament, was discussing the treaty of Lisbon. After that I decided to find out more about how the parliament works. While I may still write a post about it on this blog, this report from The Economist does a good job of explaining how the German electoral system works. By the way, elections to the Bundestag is today.

From New York Times: Exporting waste illegally to poor countries has become a vast and growing international business, as companies try to minimize the costs of new environmental laws, like those here, that tax waste or require that it be recycled or otherwise disposed of in an environmentally responsible way.

Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa. There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European law may be simply burned or left to rot, polluting air and water and releasing the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. Continue reading.

I wrote a column about it some weeks ago.

Yesterday I announced my brother’s blog. I just noticed that I got the link wrong. The blog is Square One.

Loomnie’s younger brother, medical doctor and graduate student at the George Institute for International Health, University of Sydney, now blogs at Square One. Check it out.

Nneoma of Pyoowata writes in a review of Nigerian bloggers’ response to ‘District 9′ for NigeriansTalk.org:

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Neill Blomkamp states that the small population of Nigerians in South Africa is indeed responsible for the majority of crime in his country. In keeping with his bias against Nigerians, District 9 features prominently, a Nigerian criminal gang that engages in dubious business deals and pimps out its women to this largely male alien species. Nigerians are also the center of the films occultic elements, unrelated to Nigerian traditional religion and medicine (despite ill-informed documentaries citing otherwise). In purporting District 9 to be a social commentary against xenophobic hatred and then opening the movie with lurid Nigerian characters, ??contradict[s] himself as soon as he started writing the script,? according to blogger MellowYel of Stuff Nigerians Love/Hate. Nigerian American science fiction author, Nnedi, also vents her frustration with the film on her blog and makes the point that beyond this, black South Africans served as a ?mere setting,? for the film. Sugabelly, known for her biting frankness, goes on to suggest that ??if you squinted your eyes just a little bit you might not even notice the movie was set in Africa.? District 9 was hardly a triumph for African film industry and definitely was not worth disparaging Nigerians in South Africa.

A comment on the same movie by a reader of New York Press (HT Sean):

?As a young Afrikaans South African with a fondness for interspecies-conflict-based fiction, I enjoyed D9, and still I agree with [Armond] White [New York Press film critic] on a few levels. As a purely fictional sci-fi movie, D9 is excellent. During the first 15 minutes of the movie, the entire audience around me was laughing at how the South-African public?s nuances were portrayed? But White is right about the whole analogy thing. The similarities between Apartheid and Human- Prawn segregation is non-existent, except for the fact that in both cases the segregated party resided in crappy shacks.There is a lot more to South Africa?s history than what the general international public realizes, and Peter Jackson?s cash-in on it seems like pure publicity hunting to me.What?s worse to me is the hundreds of critics appraising the analogy in D9, while they themselves don?t know shit about what apartheid is really about. The Nigerian thing is also way overdone, and I feel it is insensitive seeing that there is already a general xenophobia in SA toward Nigerians.?

From my column of this Tuesday:

I have not yet seen the movie but from what I have read from reviews, the movie seems to have borrowed the worst from Nollywood movies. I consider tapping into an existing body of work fair game, but I think that taking snatches and omitting the context is an extreme form of laziness. But then, when one thinks about it, was this kind of misrepresentation not something waiting to happen?

I would like to see a level of outcry similar to the one that has followed the movie directed towards Nollywood movies that portray Nigerians as people who make money from human body parts. Or is that belief so entrenched in the minds of Nigerians that it cannot be questioned? On the part of Nollywood producers, I hope that this makes them realise that they are making movies for the whole of Africa. Indeed, many Africans think that ritual killing, along with some form of cannibalism, is prevalent in Nigeria.

I find the references to Nigeria and the depiction of Nigerians in the movie highly distasteful, in case you are curious.

And from CNN:

Some Nigerians said the movie feeds off stereotypes associated with the country.

“Everyone has this image of Nigeria,” Umeano said. “A lot of people have given Nigeria a bad name, but that does not mean the whole country is bad.”

While Clement Nyirenda believes the director should have used a fictional country, he said the outcry is much ado about nothing.

After all, he said, the Nigerian movie industry, Nollywood, is filled with the same characterizations.

“The (Nollywood) movies show Nigerians as witch doctors, corrupt, a lot worse,” Nyirenda said. “Nigeria is mostly known for 419 scams … the government officials should focus on cleaning the image.”

The term “419 scams” refers to spam e-mails that ask for money and bank information.

Akunyili said the country is trying to “rebrand itself away from such images.” The Nollywood industry is undergoing a makeover, too, she added.