Word: third world
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...Western financial community for its fiscal discipline. It has earned that positive image among investors in part through slashing its budget deficit by more than two thirds over the past six years - and pouring billions of dollars into the public health system is not exactly fiscally disciplined behavior. Today's economic orthodoxy - embraced as fervently by conservatives (both compassionate and callous), New Democrats, "Third Way" socialists and reconstructed Third World revolutionaries - requires that the state continually slash its spending. And simply keeping poor people alive is not, by any banker's measure, a sound investment...
...switch to the enemy camp? A year ago the entire market was confident that Europe could take on the world in the wireless space. Now a more sober reality has set in. Japan has pulled well ahead of Europe. Prohibitively expensive third-generation mobile licenses have made the entire industry question business models. And delays in the introduction of next-generation services mean that time to revenue is being pushed back, killing many start-ups and opening the door to big and well-funded U.S. companies like Microsoft. Symbian, on last year's list as one of Time Europe...
With the collapse of crony capitalist regimes like the one in Indonesia, and as oligarchic nations like Mexico elect more democratic presidents, De Soto's timing is propitious. His Third World clients hope that property-title reform will especially benefit industries like clothing, auto parts and agriculture--where the foreign-trade potential for extralegal businesses is enormous. Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide wants to slice through medieval red tape and legalize his nation's extralegal assets, which amount to $5.2 billion--four times its legal assets. "We would," he says, "finally put our people in partnership with the system...
...Soto's thesis is simple, registering extralegal property is not. Third World elites, who often control legislatures, tend to eschew reforms that empower workers. But De Soto, a former governor of Peru's central bank, insists the plan showed success while he was ex-President Fujimori's chief of staff in the early 1990s. Some 276,000 underground businesses--including large bus-assembly plants--were legally titled, helping generate $1.2 billion in new tax revenue...
...relevance to the future of the high-tech industry. It's become conventional wisdom that soon more consumers worldwide will access the Internet by mobile phones than by PCs. Well, maybe. But in the U.S., the world's richest market, some of the most popular applications of Internet technology seem singularly unsuited to a mobile phone, even when the much heralded third-generation phones are in common use. A phone's display is never going to be big enough to handle the rich displays of text and graphics of the American news and financial-services sites. And dare...