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India’s American Dream
In its latest issue, Business Week published an interesting article on the Ramanujan School of Mathematics, a preparatory academy that trains low-income students in the art of test taking: ?Every April, some 230,000 Indian youths sharpen their pencils and sit for the intensely competitive...
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Cuba: From Red to Green?
In 2001, during one of his excessively long speeches, Fidel Castro passed out at the lectern, an event which fueled serious speculation about the Cuban leader?s health. Three years later, after giving another drawn out speech, Castro tripped and fell, breaking his arm and shattering his knee...
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Mobile Banking Hits Colombia
In an article published in last week?s La Republica, the Colombian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, Jorge Barrios reports that Bancolombia, Colombia?s largest bank, is poised to launch a mobile banking service, which will allow the bank?s clients to make payments, money transfers,...
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Summer Reading Series: A Swing Through Amazon
Yesterday, I recommended a back issue of IDBAmerica; today, I?m piggybacking on conventional wisdom to determine my book recommendations. I am an infrequent Amazon.com user, but I am sold on their community-driven recommendation feature. You know what I?m talking about ? if you click on a...
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Will Bureaucrats Ruin Microfinance?
A column in today?s New York Times suggests Indian microfinance institutions might soon be subject to regulations, such as interest rate caps, that would force them to dramatically reduce or even halt operations. Why must governments see the private sector only as a threat, and never as a...
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Consumer Culture in Latin America
To paraphrase Nestor Canclini, Argentina?s celebrated cultural critic, what happens when an anthropologist reads the Harvard Business Review and the McKinsey Quarterly, two publications that advocate selling to the poor?? From what I can tell, there are three common reactions.? The first...
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Summer Reading Series: IDB America
I don?t know how I managed it, but I burned through my summer reading list in record time earlier this month.? Perhaps it was a week spent on vacation in Northern Michigan; maybe the heat has kept me inside more than usual.? In any case, I figure folks might be wrapping up their own summer...
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Part II: Rwanda Finds Hope in Coffee
Part I of this series described Rwanda?s burgeoning cooperative movement and its thriving coffee industry, which have combined to alleviate crippling poverty and ethnic tensions in this country. Part II of this series places the current success of Rwanda?s coffee industry in a broader...
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