Why Africa is treading water.
Trade, not aid, makes the world go round. In Africa, sadly, the reverse is true. But, as Osei Boateng reports, if Africa is to make any real progress economically, the current global trading system presided over by the PWorld Trade Organisation (WTO) must be drastically changed. If not, Africa...

Coffee woes, Congress rescue: the recent resolution by the US Congress to salvage the plummeting price of coffee may have come as a godsend for East Africa. (Around Africa: East Africa).
The falling world market price of coffee has hit hard the economies of African producers dependent on the crop, especially those in East Africa and Central Africa -- Burundi for example where coffee accounts for approximately 80% of export revenues. Other producers hit hard are Ethiopia (54% of export...

Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America.
Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America, by Ann Fabian. New York, Routledge, 1999. xiii, 250 pp. $28.99 Cdn (paper). Here is a question for the moral theorist in our age of dot-com instant millionaires and Wall Street gone berserk: How do you critique gambling...

Copper closes up as giant Chile mine strike continues.
Byline: BARANI KRISHNAN NEW YORK, Aug. 27 (Reuters) -- Copper closed up on Friday, underpinned by the protracted strike at Escondida, the world's largest copper mine, in Chile. Gold also rose as investors hedged against a surge in energy prices. Crude oil, which leads the...

WB cites RP investment recovery.
Byline: EDU H. LOPEZ The Philippines is among the six Asian countries that had shown signs of recovery in domestic and foreign investments, according to a World Bank (WB) report. The other countries showing signs of recovery are China, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand. ...

Downside of free trade.
FREE trade has not done much for the Majority World, a.k.a. Third World, which is dominated by the Minority, or First World. As critics put it, "The world trading system is corrupt and unjust, and free trade is compounding the problem. Centuries of colonialism put...

King Cotton's Advocate: Oscar G. Johnston and the New Deal.
King Cotton's Advocate: Oscar G. Johnston and the New Deal. By Lawrence J. Nelson. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 330. $38.00, ISBN 1-57233-025-2.) Oscar Goodbar Johnston claimed that he "never liked the term `New Deal'" and detested the nation's capital as "a veritable madhouse"...

Mercantile magnificence: this account of Regency houses is not only beautiful: it is an outstanding historical analysis.
The Regency Country House from the Archives of Country Life JOHN MARTIN ROBINSON Aurum Press, 40 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1 84513 0537 The introduction to this dazzlingly beautiful book, which has new facts and apercus on every page, is a brilliant...

Cotton: the huge moral issue.
World cotton prices have dropped to an historic low: the reason being the immoral continuation of EU and US trade subsidies that allow non-competitive and inefficient farming to continue. While the recent WTO meeting in Hong Kong failed to resolve the issue, the livelihoods of West Africa's 12 million...

Egypt: king cotton revives.
The cotton sector is emerging from a depression in Egypt. Once a dominant cash crop in the country, it saw its share of the world market fall drastically in the 1980s. THERE WAS A TIME in the none too distant past when the world looked to Egypt as the...