Day: March 4, 2010

Bloomberg’s Business Week piece http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-09/brazil-to-sanction-u-s-on-goods-intellectual-rights-update1-.html

reports:

· The WTO ruled in August that Brazil has the right to impose $294.7 million annually in sanctions against the US because of subsidies paid to American cotton farmers, the second highest amount ever permitted by the Geneva-based trade arbiter.

· Brazil’s government will take a decision

Through judicious use of biotechnology to create genetically modified crops, farmers could produce greater yields on the same amount of land as conventional agriculture, with less pesticide and fertilizer use per unit of food produced. Unfortunately, government bans and strict regulations threaten to undermine this process based on the

A zero-sum game is one in which the gains of one player are exactly balanced by the losses of another. In India a local non-governmental organisation (NGO) has invented a new sort of zero-sum which, it hopes, will leave everyone better off: the zero-rupee note.

According to The Economist:

The note

The federal government responded aggressively — at a huge cost — to the financial crisis that began in the fall of 2008, says Laurence J. Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University and a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis. But nearly two