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Casas Bahia’s Latest Deal: The $3600 Plasma TV
On this blog, Casas Bahias, Brazil?s largest retailer, which has garnered its financial success by extending affordable credit to low income consumers, has been championed as a successful BOP business model. Strictly in terms of the bottom line, I agree. However, there is reason to believe...
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A Watch That Detects Malaria
In a New York Times article published in June, Business Joins African Effort to Cut Malaria, Sharon LaFraniere writes about the international mining company Billiton and its six year effort fighting malaria in Mozambique.? When more than one third of its staff fell ill with malaria and the...
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Banking on Wal-Mart
In one of his most famous and eloquent passages, Karl Marx expresses awe at the transformative power of capitalism, writing that, ?All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.?? In the last two decades, Wal-Mart, the embodiment of global capital, has almost single...
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In South Africa, Cars Run On Vegetable Oil
Ah, wouldn?t it be nice to be Venezuelan?? Not only are Venezuelans governed by a coffee guzzling fiend who, at one point, drank twenty-six cups of espresso a day (now, he is down to only sixteen cups), but they also enjoy the lowest gasoline prices in the world.? At 12 cents per gallon, a...
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Hot Topic: Mobile Phones and Africa
Mobile phones? impact in Africa has been a hot topic of late, on NextBillion and around the blogosphere. The Washington Post recently got into the game with an excellent article, ?In War-Torn Congo, Going Wireless to Reach Home,? that received front-page status in the well-read Sunday...
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Green Fuel Has a Dirty Little Secret
Thanks to President Bush, there is nothing more patriotic these days than looking for ways to end America?s oil addiction. So when I came across this article, Tapping the Latent Power in What’s Left Around the Barnyard, while perusing the New York Times on the 4th of July, I knew I had...
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Consumer Credit Hits Brazil
For someone like Marcia Regina da Cruz, a Brazilian janitor who earns just over $150 per month, grocery shopping is a painfully difficult task.? What this mother of three can buy to feed her children is almost always determined by the amount of spare change she can muster on a given day.? So...
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It’s Hard Out Here For a Shrimp
Organic aquaculture is admittedly not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of hot sectors, but the work being done by Primar is not about the latest IT trend or fashionable stock pick, it’s about slowly but decisively attempting to change the way an industry functions. Much...
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