Red Tape, etc.

Interesting things I have come across while studying for Development midterm tomorrow:

Red Tape: how difficult it is to get things done.
Red tape is often a problem in lower income countries because if a government official's wage is very low, there is an incentive for that person to try to receive bribes.

From Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto:

Peru: took 6 years and 11 months to obtain legal authorization to build a house on state owned land.
the Philippines: takes 168 steps and about 13-25 years to build a home on state-owned land.
Egypt: to legally register a lot on state-owned desert land takes 77 procedures with 31 agencies and takes 5-14 years.
Haiti: takes 65 steps and about 2 years to lease land for 5 years.

The term "BRIC" was first used by Goldman Sachs. [Brazil, Russia, India, China]

Prior to 1990, only about a million doses of malarial pills were made, but there were about 330 million cases of malaria annually.

Although Latin American may have a similar malaria ecology as Africa, the mosquitoes in Africa prefer human blood to animal blood, making malaria more prevalent in Africa.

From Bloom and Canning's paper:
The working age population grew 4 times as fast as the dependent population in East Asia from 1965 to 1990 [demographic dividend!]

Ireland legalized contraception in 1979

Polio had been successfully eradicated in all countries but Nigeria. However, because of propaganda in Nigeria that the vaccine was meant to give certain ethnic groups AIDS, polio is now present in 15 countries. [see frustrations from previous Jonny Steinberg post.]