India is a country with extraordinary problems due to the size of its population. At the same time, it has extraordinary potential which may be realized if it can implement some major changes best identified in a paper released by Goldman Sachs in 2008 (PDF). According to the study, there are ten key areas where reform is needed:
I believe the only controversial item in the list above may be number six, given the disastrous effects that financial market deregulation had in the US in recent years. Nevertheless, the nine other recommendations are still highly relevant and fundamentally sound. Do you agree?
We recently came across the results of a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. According to the survey, the top problems in Mexico as reported by Mexican citizens are:
Do you agree with the ranking above? Are there any problems that you believe are more important?
As the political situation in Greece continues to deteriorate, we decided to take a look at the income distribution statistics we have for the country. Take a look at the graph we created based on World Bank numbers:
The graph shows the income share for each quintile of the population. The top 20% has a 41.49% share of income, while the bottom 20% has a 6.74% share.
Note that all income share numbers are from the year 2000. We have not been able to locate more recent data, although the CIA World Factbook publishes GINI index numbers which are more recent.
It will be interesting to see how the distribution of income in Greece changes once the effect of the current crisis is quantified.
I thought it would be interesting to share a snapshot of our traffic graphs to show how Internet access to our site has been affected during the uprisings in the Middle East. Let’s start with a graph showing visits from Tripoli, the capital of Libya.
The graph above shows that access to the Internet in Tripoli has been virtually non-existent since February. It will be interesting to see how fast traffic recovers once it gets restored.
Contrast the graph above to the traffic chart for Cairo (Egypt):
As shown above, visits from Cairo dipped considerably for a few days at the end of January / beginning of February, but it recovered fairly quickly once Mubarak stepped down.
The final graph I wanted to share is for Tunis, the capital of Tunisia:
It is remarkable that visits from Tunis were largely unaffected despite the turmoil that started in December 2010 and continued until the ouster of President Ben Ali on January 14th, 2011.