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Cashew nuts are the solution, because currently it represents in its cheapest form more than 90% of the country’s exports and because economic development leads to poverty reduction. Watch on YouTube: Cashew harvest reaps small bounty for Guinea-Bissau
Drug trafficking is the problem, because it makes political stability harder to achieve thus keeping most foreign investment away. Watch on YouTube: Tiny Guinea-Bissau a big player in drug trade
The current best solution to poverty reduction in Guinea-Bissau http://www.flickr.com/photos/jelle/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The Economist.com puts it simply:
“…in some ways, Brazil outclasses the other BRICs. Unlike China, it is a democracy. Unlike India, it has no insurgents, no ethnic and religious conflicts nor hostile neighbours. Unlike Russia, it exports more than oil and arms, and treats foreign investors with respect. Under the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade-union leader born in poverty, its government has moved to reduce the searing inequalities that have long disfigured it. Indeed, when it comes to smart social policy and boosting consumption at home, the developing world has much more to learn from Brazil than from China. In short, Brazil suddenly seems to have made an entrance onto the world stage.”
Este estudo procura analisar a actual importância e a dinâmica das relações entre Portugal e cada um dos cinco PALOP. Dada a limitação do presente relatório a um máximo de dez páginas, a forma escolhida para ir de encontro ao objectivo do estudo foi identificar e explorar uma questão pertinente para cada um dos PALOP nas relações com Portugal.
QUESTÕES:
Angola: Qual o potencial da cooperação entre Portugal e Angola no sector das energias renováveis?
Moçambique: Quais as implicações da adesão de Moçambique à Commonwealth para a Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa e para as relações com Portugal em geral?
Guiné-Bissau: Qual o potencial da indústria de caju e que papel pode Portugal ou a UE assumir na sua implementação e desenvolvimento?
Cabo Verde: Quais os efeitos do estreitamento de relações entre Cabo Verde e a UE, e qual o impacto nas as relações bilaterais com Portugal?
São Tomé e Príncipe: Qual a relevância, eficácia, eficiência, impacto e sustentabilidade da Ajuda Pública ao Desenvolvimento (APD ou cooperação) de Portugal a São Tomé e Príncipe?
Relatório completo: Relatório de Estudo: Portugal e os PALOP
Seu Jorge: Musician/part-time policy advisor
The recurrent case study for International Business and Development Studies scholars – Brazil - is analysed differently by the country’s Samba-rap musicians. The well performing clusters, such as the footwear cluster of Sinos Valley, was analysed by Humphrey and Schmitz (2002) regarding its functional upgrading triggered by US’ demand and value chain governance on one hand and by China’s competition on the other hand. The brazilian rapper De Leve describes - amid the well blended sound of drums, reco-reco, pandeiro and cavaco - “Trabalho em multinacional, escravidão high-tech” (I work for a multinational, high-tech slavery).
Brazil is, with no doubts, an interesting case study. Few arguments convince: a large economy 6 times bigger than the one of its former european colonizer, Portugal, and as great as that of the entire Scandinavian region; its market is wide - more than 170 million people – and its working force counts with more than 100 million souls; furthermore, despite being a funny-speaking nation (Portuguese) for the rest of Latin America, Brazil is the continent’s most influential nation (you can watch a series of video reports exploring the relations between Brazil and each one of its neighbours: BBC Brasil – Brazil in the eyes of Latin America - unfortunately only in Portuguese). Its growth rate allows it to score greatly on the fight against poverty, but “the problem is not the economy” as Marcelo D2 clarifies with a rhyme, “the problem is the corruption”.
Seu Jorge, Marcelo D2, De Leve (Voltair) and many others are not published in the International Business academic periodicals but they reach many millions with argumentation that is as empirical as it can be. The topic is similar for rappers all over the world. They align the timbre of the socio-economic troubles of their own country or city, but Brazilians rhyme it specially well; my guess: the dazing amount of such problems, afecting in general the whole Latin America, provides limitless inspiration that is skilfully blended with the joyful nature of their music, that only Brazilians can do.
Seu Jorge says melodiously: “North America will samba again, beautiful american with those blue eyes, come and move with me South America. You can shake your pigtail, but do not overheat, the night is just starting…”
References:
De Leve e Voltair “Quer dançar”
Marcelo D2 “Carta ao Presidente”
Seu Jorge “América do Norte”
It is a strange question to ask. Regardless of what ‘development’ really means, most people would say Portugal is undoubtedly a developed country. After all, the small western European republic is part of the EU since 1986. However it is not what it looks like after visiting the website of the country’s Business Development Agency (AICEP), a key institutions for captation of (relevant?) foreign investment within the country’s Ministry of Economy and Innovation. On their website one doesn’t take long to notice that the agency is erroneously promoting the Portuguese workforce as the cheapest of EU. Wasn’t that a policy of developing countries? A strategy that helped many countries, most notably the East Asian tigers, hook up with the developed world, learn from it and upgrade? The current reality tells us a different story. The days when cheap labour was a competitive advantage are gone, even for developing countries.
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A website is extremely important, there’s no need to explain that. So why does AICEP’s website seem abandoned? If a student, an investor, a public servant, let’s say anyone who wants to know about the institution visits the website will find, among many others, the following situations:
a) The website claims “Portugal has the lowest labor costs in the EU…” and ‘proves’ it by showing a graph from 2005 including countries such as Poland, Slovakia or Latvia, among others, with lower labour costs. Weren’t they part of the EU in 2005? Yes, they were.
b) One of the four main sections of the same website is the ‘newsroom’. This section has three “news”, and the first is related to the start of the agency under the new administration on the 1st of July, 2007! Furthermore, the sorting system of these ‘news’ is quite peculiar since the oldest of the three comes in the middle!
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Evans (2005) in his article entitled “The Challenges of the Institutional Turn” brings up some ideas on institutions:
“The possibility of institutions that are disadvantageous to long-run development emerging for idiosyncratic reasons that have little to do with any kind of overall “efficiency” or “social return” and then getting “locked-in” is all too plausible.”
“Once institutions take hold, they are likely to endure even if they have a long-run negative effect on development, crowding out the possibility for the emergence of more efficacious institutions.”
“If existing institutions provide differential returns to some portion of society, which consequently has a special vested interest in their maintenance, then the problem gets worse. If that segment is also differentially powerful, which is highly likely if not axiomatic, the problem is even more intractable.”
Let us hope it’s not the case of AICEP.
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