Word: dollarized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Michael Cullen is being a scrooge on fiscal policy, stacking up Budget surpluses when there's a good case for tax relief. But Cullen has no room to move. A current account deficit heading toward a "Banana republic" rate of 10% of gdp puts enormous pressure on the Kiwi dollar. A place that boasts the lowest jobless rate among rich nations can neither hold on to its best people nor save enough to fund its lifestyle. Sometimes the lights go out in Auckland...
...clan, numbering about 300,000, was granted access to piped gas from the Sui fields on their land only a few years ago even though the gas had been pumping for decades and had already been flowing to major cities and towns. The government is also building a multimillion-dollar port, Gwadar, off Baluchistan's southern coast, which Musharraf hopes will one day rival Dubai in the nearby Gulf. The Baluch fear, however, that Gwadar will draw so many settlers from Pakistan's other provinces that they will become an underclass minority in their own land...
There is none--but one may soon be needed. That's because India, which virtually invented offshore outsourcing, is becoming a victim of its own success. Such companies as Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) grew into billion-dollar behemoths by tapping armies of quick-coding, English-speaking, low-wage techies to do the software programming and back-office tasks that U.S. companies used to perform in-house. But Indian salaries are rising--the median annual wage for a software engineer jumped 11%, from $6,313 in 2004 to $7,010 in 2005, according to India's National Association...
...corruption and crime--converge in Bombay. Although India boasts more billionaires than China, 81% of its population lives on $2 a day or less, compared with 47% of Chinese, according to the 2005 U.N. Population Reference Bureau Report. That class divide is starkest in cities like Bombay, where million-dollar apartments overlook million-population slums. For all its glitz, Bombay remains a temple to inefficiency. In 2003 it had one bus for every 1,300 people, two public parking spots for every 1,000 cars, 17 public toilets for every million people and one civic hospital for 7.2 million people...
...piece Croesus Treasures still missing. But one of the men arrested in the plot is the same man who was hailed in 1993 as a hero for bringing back the collection (dating from 560 to 546 B.C.) from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art after a lengthy, multimillion-dollar legal battle. Turkish curator Kazim Akbiyikoglu, along with six others, was arrested for stealing the famous Croesus gold brooch (shaped like a seahorse) and several coins and replacing them with well-crafted fakes...