Skip to main content

"Winner Take All" By Dambisa Moyo, A Must Read!

I recently read Dambisa Moyo's Winner Take All: China's Race for Resources and What it Means for the World. The book is a thorough review of the resource landscape - from water to land to energy, and what China's drive to acquire these means for the West and the developing world including Africa. Moyo conducts due diligence on the contentious issue of land grabs of African farmland by states that are seeking to grow crops for food and energy as alternatives to oil.
"This puts food and energy in direct competition, given that the grain required to fill a 25 gallon (95 liter) fuel tank with ethanol could instead feed one person for an entire year."
Given the finite extent of arable land, Moyo, argues that the above means one thing for food prices - they can only go up! The food security picture is even more dire when we consider that of the 1 billion people that go hungry each day, a third live in Africa, yet the latter is home to much of the remaining untilled arable land. I believe Moyo provides a compelling call for action by African leaders when negotiating long term resource deals with other countries.

Moyo dispels as unfounded fears that China's involvement in the developing world, particularly Africa, is akin colonialism. Indeed, when one looks at the way China relates to Africa, it in no way resembles the way the British colonized African countries. Moreover she finds scant evidence that when China sets up shop in an African country it always brings its own labor force. She argues that there could be a negative correlation between available skills and the share of Chinese workers in a Chinese company in Africa. The onus is on Africa to ready its people by investing in skills acquisition! By debunking these myths, I believe the book invites one to look at China in a new, fairer light as a realist country looking out for its own in world of rapidly depleting resources.

Update: Watch Moyo talk about Sino-Africa relations on CNN

Comments

Post a Comment

Constructive feedback is always welcome. Thank you

Popular posts from this blog

Unemployment by state in the USA

Below is a visualization of unemployment rates by county using a powerful Python library called Bokeh . The two maps are for the states of Texas and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As the second largest economy in the United States (10th largest in the world), Texas shows interesting county variation in macroeconomic factors such as unemployment. According to Wikipedia , in 2015, Texas was home to six of the top 50 companies on the Fortune 500 list and 51 overall (third most after New York and California). The northern counties were least affected by the financial crisis of 2008/09. Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington area encompasses 13 counties which constitute the economic and cultural hub of the region commonly called North Texas or North Central Texas. Bokeh Plot The least affected counties in Massachusetts were the southernmost tourist areas of Nantuckett and Dukes County. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Malaysia at a Cross Roads: Diagnosing the Constraints to High Income Status

Malaysia at a Crossroads: Diagnosing Constraints to High-Income Status In 2008, Malaysia was recognized by the Growth Commission – a distinguished panel comprising 2 Nobel Prize Winning Economists and other leading development practitioners – as one of thirteen countries that sustained high growth in the post-war period. The 30-year stretch that caught the attention of the Growth Commission was between 1967 and 1997 when Malaysia grew at an average of 7.3% per year. This long stretch of growth was interrupted by periods of external shocks including the Volcker shock of 1986, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997/8, later the so-called Dot Com Bubble of 2001, and more recently the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Despite these shocks, Malaysia remained resilient - formally earning the title "Upper Middle Income Country" in 1992. (See summary figure that breaks down the country's per capita growth story). As...
2 comments
Read more

Modeling Core PCE inflation: A dual approach

Today's release of the August 2025 Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation data drew widespread media attention, with coverage highlighting both the persistence of inflation and its implications for Federal Reserve policy. Across outlets, analysts pointed to resilient consumer spending and income growth as signs of underlying economic strength, even as inflation remains above the Fed's 2% target. The consensus among media reports is that while inflation is not worsening, its stubbornness continues to challenge policymakers navigating a softening labor market and evolving rate expectations. To provide deeper insights into inflation's trajectory, I've developed a forecasting framework that combines two econometric approaches — ARIMA time series modeling and Phillips Curve analysis—to predict Core PCE inflation. This analysis presents a unique opportunity to validate my forecasting methodology against eight months of 2025 data. ...
Post a Comment
Read more