Blog - Center for International Private Enterprise

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Starting a Business in Africa

African entrepreneurs share their stories on starting a business on the BBC website. There are some very interesting on-the-ground experiences, from good I think Ethiopia must be the best and the easiest place to start a business today. Yes it used to be very hard to start a business in Ethiopia...

Brazil and Argentina Regulate Trade

Last week, two members of Mercosur, Brazil and Argentina, reached a landmark trade agreement, hailed by the governments of both countries. But if you think the agreement is supporting free trade between the two countries - afterall, free trade is what Mercosur is all about - think again. How ab...

Demographic Crisis in Russia

Someone, hit the panic button! Russian population shrunk by nearly 700,000 people in 2005, according to official Russian government statistics, and the life expectancy of a Russian male is now a meager 58 years. In all, since the early 1990s, the Russian population has been declining at a r...

The role of the media in MENA reform

An independent and pluralistic media is a central pillar of democracy. The role of the media in a democratic society is one that informs the public, enhances political participation, and acts as a government watchdog. The media in the Middle East North Africa region is not able to fully perform th...

Palestinian Elections: Revisiting the “Chicken vs. Egg” Conundrum

Recently, National Public Radio conducted an interview with Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The interview was ostensibly about possible outcomes from the recent elections in the Palestinian territories, and thus it adds some additional perspectives to a previous thr...

Googling Change

The big news in the technology pages these days is, surprisingly, not about Steve Jobs' newest toy. Instead, folks are getting steamed up about Google's recent decision to acquiesce to local regulations concerning censorship when starting up its new search engine in China. Google will also refra...

Who Makes People Poor?

Making people poor is not an easy task, and governments have to work hard to do it. Ronald Bailey explores this issue in more detail in his piece on "Economics of Ruin 101" that appears in The African Executive, a weekly magazine published by CIPE's partner the Inter-Region Economic Network (I...

What is there to argue about?

Last Friday (January 27), NPR broadcast a piece about a new study, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, which purports to show that emerging democracies are more likely than other countries to become involved in wars. The study, authored by Professors Edward Mansfield of the Un...

Components of Progress

In this op-ed, Marifeli Perez-Stable of the Inter-American Dialogue links markets, democracies, and progress in a very simple equation - "Democracy+Market Economy=Progress." Despite strong anti-market sentiments in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela, it seems that many other countries in the re...

Economic Implications of Palestinian Elections

Palestinian elections have been making the headlines for the past few days – with most stories focusing on the political consequences of the results. Not too many people at this point, however, are talking about the economic implications of this week’s elections – yet the econom...

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