The paradox of Tunisian water policy

Tunisia’s moderate-Islamist Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali will dissolve the country’s Islamist-led coalition and replace it with a government of non-partisan technocrats. This move comes after a opposition leader critical of the government was gunned down Wednesday. Chokri Belaid was gunned down as he left home in the first assassination in post-revolutionary Tunisia, setting off anti-government riots that left downtown Tunis choked with tear gas and patrolled by armoured vehicles.

LAST week, Project Syndicate published a column by economist Dani Rodrik, in which he argued that the age of the "growth miracle" was over. Industrialisation, long the engine of economic development, is becoming less able to support catch-up growth, he suggested, thanks to the falling labour-intensity of manufacturing, Chinese competition, and a rising mercantilist tide across the rich world.

Article written by Prieur du Plessis, editor of the Investment Postcards from Cape Town blog.The report below comes courtesy of Nouriel Roubini’s team of analysts at RGE.

Guest blog post by Robert M. Groves, Director, U.S. Census BureauCross-posted on the Census Director's blogLast week I was pleased to speak to the Rural Philanthropy Conference. They are a set of private and community foundations that identify problems and issues facing rural America and seek to improve the areas through foundation investments. They want to do good works and see the lives of rural peoples improve.  There was discussion about what “rural” really means. It is fair to say that rurality as a concept has for years been derived from first identifying various types of urban areas. In that sense, rural areas are residual to urban areas; everything that’s not urban is rural.For example, looking at the area around Peoria, Illinois, illustrates the problem (see graphic). If we use the city limits of Peoria as the urban unit, then we deduce more land as rural adjacent to it. If we identify land use patterns, then we bring into a Peoria urban area more space, mainly suburban ring areas. If we use commuting patterns and other data to describe a cohesive economic center, then the rural fringe shrinks even more. So, “urbanicity” (and thus “rurality”) is currently defined by various combinations of civil jurisdictions, population density, land use and economic notions.

The author is Dani Rodrik and the subtitle is Democracy and the Future of the World Economy and it is due out early next year.

Brian Beutler’s item wherein Jay Rockefeller disses Kent Conrad is pretty funny. Conrad raised some objections to the idea of letting people aged 55-65 to buy into Medicare, and then:

Guest blog post by Steve Landefeld, Director of Commerces Bureau of Econmic Analysis.Off the top of your head, it probably seems obvious that the economies of America’s major cities differ structurally and behaviorally from our nation’s nonmetropolitan and rural areas, right? You are correct, indeed! But the really interesting question is, What can you learn about this from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis?  BEA measures our regional economies in several ways, including GDP by State, GDP by Metropolitan Area, State Personal Income, Metropolitan Area Personal Income and County Personal Income (AKA: Local Area Personal Income). To understand the differences between the big, metropolitan areas and the rural parts of the country, your best bet is to turn to BEA’s Local Area Personal Income which details earnings in all 3,143 counties in the U.S. Technically speaking, nonmetropolitan counties are those that are not part of a metropolitan statistical area, or MSA, as defined by the Office of Management and Budget.  Population in these counties is generally less than 50,000 people. There are 2,032 nonmetropolitan counties in the U.S., almost twice the number of metropolitan counties.  Of course, not all nonmetropolitan areas are rural, nor are all rural areas excluded from official designated metropolitan areas.  Another important consideration is commuting patterns, certainly plenty of Americans live in areas which may be rural, but drive into MSAs to work which intertwines these economies. (What, you thought we’d make it that easy?)