Blog of the week!
Hopefully a bigger post to come later today, but in the meantime, check this out, a really excellent blog about Zambian economic news. I am pretty sure that there is no blog dealing with UK economics news as clearly or comprehensively; Mark Thoma's blog is probably at about this standard for US economics news but in general, New Zambia is right up there with the best economics blogs on the Web. Also check out the comments section.
Update: Obviously I spotted it a few days ago and now all the posts I liked have been shoved off the front page by headline stuff that's probably less interesting to non-Zambian readers. Dig around though ...
A slightly incoherent question.....
ReplyDelete...a few years ago I was talking with a friend after a football match and he said he'd been reading a book about Africa which alleged that there was not, in fact, a single factory in Tanzania.
Does anybody know:
(a) what I am talking about?
(b) whether this is likely to be true?
Well, Tanzania's a trading nation rather than a manufacturing nation (it's built around Dar-es-Salaam, the big trading centre of Southern Africa), but it does have factories, that's mental.
ReplyDelete...aaah, he might have got confused between Tanzania (the whole country) and Zanzibar (the archipelago of islands of the coast). But even there they must have factories to process spices, which is what they produce.
Well, that's what I thought and of course it's thirdhand (or fourth by the time it gets to you). Mebbe I'll see if my source remembers, but like the chaps mentioned on that Zambian blog, we can't both have been sober during the course of the conversation....
ReplyDeleteHmmm. Is a tea processing plant a factory, I guess it is? Tanzania produces lots of tea. It's fairly basic processing turning picked tea into tea, but it's manufacturing of a sort.
ReplyDeleteHe's something I was told when I was drunk which is probably bollocks. Tea bags are about 95% tea dust and 5% leaf tips, the dust being used as a bulking agent. I was told that African tea processers make as much money from dust as they do from leaf at the Mobassa auctions.
I would not want to die in a ditch for the specific percentages, but I also have heard that there's a lot of dust in there.
ReplyDeleteFrom your frontpage:
ReplyDelete"I am notable [sic] to make media appearances talking about having sex in cars"
A Freudian slip? I think the public should be informed.