Chris Blattman

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Bono’s investment advice: short USA, buy Africa

Any remaining capital out there couldn’t find a better long-term bet than the African subcontinent, that’s my tip for the week.

That’s Bono blogging the Millennium Development Goals conference on FT.com.

It’s a wonderful sentiment. And I wish it were true. But power is spotty, roads are craterish, productivity is unproductive, and more nations than not could see a coup or a war in the coming decades. Goodbye business profits. Foreign investment: smell ya later.

Ironically, not one of the MDG goals that Bono is pushing will help solve any of these problems. They are laudable aims, but they would be more rightly called the Millennium Humanitarian Goals.

Unfortunately, the Millennium Industrialization Goals do not stir the soul (or the UN) so much as starving babies. But the difference between an Africa that saves its own babies and one where it continues to fall to others is simple: a tax-paying industrial sector. How about just one such goal?

8 Responses

  1. Africa can use some help in any form possible. With this in mind i suggest you write a post about UNICEF’s effort to donate water to Ethiopia. Through http://www.drink1give10.com you will see that UNICEF donates 10 liters to Africa for every 1 liter bought in the United States.

  2. Each megaproject announced by China’s government creates collateral economies and population monuments, like the ripples of a stone skimmed across a lake.

    ———–

    brianna

    FSBO

  3. A tax paying Industrial sector i can’t understand what African government is really thinking about it. It could well make the Industrial sector to downfall as it could effect more than from the Tax. So please watch for another source for income purpose..
    ————–
    Jack

    for more information….

    sale by owner

  4. To get taxpayers you need busineses. To ge businesses you have to start small. One business at a time. To get small businesses going one by one you don’t write or talk too much.
    ==================================
    Andrew

    MLS

  5. You know, there’s a reason why Africa doesn’t industrialize, which is that the governments there don’t need to. Industrialization mostly happens when moderately rich men who also happen to form the local government of an area see a way to get quite staggeringly rich by making things, as per Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

    In Africa, there is a very different situation in place at present. If you are an African nation which is slowly hauling its self out of the mire of corruption and poverty that most languish in, you will be improving the lot of most of your people just to improve the quality of workers and give them an incentive to work. This will move said population out of grinding poverty, and thus out of the sights of muppets like Bono and his scabby ilk.

    If you do not do this but keep your population dirt poor, starving regularly and miserable as sin, then by magic people will give you stuff; generators, water treatment kit, food aid and donations of money. You the Government don’t have to lift a finger; just make sure the people you represent stay photogenically poor and starving. Inviting those nice people from the Catholic Church in is a good idea; they oppose condoms and family planning, so your population gets AIDS and dies young (takes the wise old heads out of the population) yet still breeds fast enough to grow in size. Until the next famine, that is.

    Put simply, as long as we the Western, so-called civilised nations keep on pissing money at the African nations, they won’t grow up and industrialize but will stay dirt-poor basket cases with political elites living the life of Riley off our coin.

  6. To get taxpayers you need busineses. To ge businesses you have to start small. One business at a time. To get small businesses going one by one you don’t write or talk too much. You simply invest small cash. Better loose it with a guy (or a girl for that matter) really trying to get a business going in Africa than with a US investment banker who tries to top up his bonus.
    See for p2p (global) platforms like MYC4 and Kiva:

    http://vanstokkom.blogspot.com/2008/09/p2p-global-platforms.html

  7. Oz, exactly why is that the case? Why do we always claim Africa is the exception to the world? Because it keeps us all employed? :)

    Chris is dead on about the UN Development Goals being a means to a specific end, but not one that most of us think as being “development.”

  8. a tax-paying industrial sector – I will go short on that. Africa will have to come up with a totally different model.

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