growth?

South Africa lost 13,097 jobs this past month--an amount almost offset by the 11,009 jobs created in System D. Meantime, 3.9 million workers--representing almost 1/3 of total workers in the country--have temp jobs. Iafrica has details.

Can we please stop denying that System D is the realm of growth.

"The enthralling swarm in the souk...So this was the city: a never-ending frenzy, clashing images, sharp noises, overlapping and fusing colors....He had nothing to sell and was simply going along to get to know the world, the real one...The souk was already a huge magic theater where people were meeting and crowding each other."
--Tahar Djaout

In Tehran, steel gates or the street economy

Iran raised taxes by 30 percent last year and the government has proposed another 38 percent increase this year. In response, many merchants in Tehran's Grand Bazaar have rolled down their steel gates and closed their businesses. Money quote, from Hossein, a merchant who spoke with the Financial Times: "These days you can rely on your mobile phone like street dealers who pay no taxes for buying and selling dollars. But if I sit in my shop then I have to pay tax" In some sections of the Bazaar, only 14 percent of the stores are still open.

informalizing the formal

For the past dozen years, Mexico has pushed homeownership for the poor. Instead of squatter communities, the government arranged for the state-run mortgage agency to provide loans to people buying into massive cookie-cutter neighborhoods built by favored construction companies. Today, two of the big-three homebuilders are near bankruptcy, and the third is headed that way. Shares of all three have dropped 60 percent since the beginning of 2013.

But this is not simply a business story about a government subsidized bubble. It's also a story of ingenuity in the face of adversity.

Aldo Ortiz, one of the 2 million Mexicans who took a chance on a mortgage and a dream of a suburban home--his in a community calle Parque del Cipres outside Mexico City--wound up quitting his job in an electronics company because of the impossibly long commute (3 hours a day, round trip) and opening Miscelaneo "el Cipres", a System D mini-mart, in his living room. There, he sells beer, water, tortillas, snacks, canned goods, detergent, etc.


The Wall Street Journal has the details.

rolling stores, and other tales of System D

Next City has the your size.

5.7 percent

That's how many Congolese are using the country's banks, according to BusinessWeek.

Money quote: "The proportion of Congolese using the banking system almost tripled to 5.7 percent of the population last year, compared with 2 percent in 2011."

staggering statistics on Africa's food deficit

courtesy of This is Africa:

The value of agricultural exports from Thailand, which has less than 10 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population, is now greater than for the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa.

No country better exemplifies Africa's agricultural decline than Nigeria. In the 1960s, before the oil bonanza, this was one of the most promising food producers in the world, beating the likes of Malaysia and Indonesia in palm oil, and the US and Argentina in groundnuts. It provided 18 percent of global cocoa production, a figure down to 8 percent today. And while it produces 65 percent of tomatoes in western central Africa, it is now the largest importer of tomato paste (from China and Italy).

In an interview with This is Africa at the World Economic Forum in Cape Town last week, the minister for agriculture, Akinwumi Adesina, reeled off these statistics with regret. "Nigeria has transited from being a self-sufficient country in food to being a net importing country, spending $11bn importing rice and fish and sugar and so on. It just makes absolutely no sense to me at all”.
While Nigeria is second in the world in citrus production and Africa’s biggest pineapple producer, its supermarkets are stocked with concentrated, imported products of both. “The only local content is water from Nigeria,” the minister complains. Multinationals testify to the challenges of agricultural import-dependence in their local operations. “We have thirteen factories in Africa that use products like soft oils, tomatoes or starch-based compounds on a daily basis, but much of this is imported, wasting foreign exchange and increasing our carbon footprint,” says Marc Engel, chief procurement officer at Unilever. The company owns the largest soap factory in Africa, but have to import palm oil from Asia to keep it running, and they import sorbitol from China for their local oral care products, when cassava would do the job.

In Glasgow, money buys legislation

Glasgow's new criminal, with her weapon

Oh no, Glasgow.

Seeking to "protect the character and integrity of the Commonwealth Games," and to "control activity" around sporting venues, the Scottish government has proposed punitive new rules banning buskers, ambush marketers, and street traders during the games, which will be held in the city next year.

Street performers and merchants who violate the rules--which will impact 17 zones around the city--will face fines of up to £20,000.

The BBC and Evening Times lay out the plans for Scotland's most dangerous criminals.

Money quote from lawyer Jamie Watt: "Sponsorship revenue is an essential part of any major modern sporting event. Events simply can't happen without this income, that's why regulations are required – to protect investment."