The World Tonight 5/1/12

From 21:50 listen to The World Tonight to find out more about Brazil's economy, report by Justin Rowlatt.  For those who also do A Level geography, type 'Justin Rowlatt bbc' into Google to watch his previous BBC documentaries. Key points:

Growth has been falling from an average of 7% per year to 3.5% now

Brazil's economic growth has been fueled by China's demand for Brazil's beef, soya and raw materials

The world's second largest soya producer, first coffee, sugar cane, orange juice and beef producer.

Brazil's relationship with China

Growth in 2012

This chart here shows the predictions for growth worldwide along with the reasons for it. Read it to learn more case study examples and improve your knowledge of the world economy, ready for 2012!

Top 10 Posts This Year

Today is a very special day, not just because it is New Year's Eve eve, but because it is the blog's five month anniversary with my first post being on purchasing power parity! Below I have compiled a list of the top 10 posts so far. If these are popular, I am assuming they have been most helpful to you guys, so please have a look at all 10, and good luck with your revision.

10. Trade Unions posted on 16th November

9. Oligopoly Case Study  posted on 16th October. Although it was a few months ago, the case study can still be used as an example.

8. Word of the Day: Economic Growth on a PPF posted on 3rd August

7. Notes on Supply Side Economics and Crowding Out posted on 16th October

6. Word of the Day: Backward Bending Supply Curve  posted on 25th August

5. Negative Externalities posted on 16th September

4. Monopoly posted on 23rd August

3. Word of the Day: Elasticity posted on 13th August

2. Perfect Competition Long Run Equilibrium posted on 11th August

1. Perfect Competition Short Run Equilibrium posted on 10th August

It seems perfect competition is the most popular, not surprising because even I had difficulties with this one.

Keep looking out for more revision notes to come soon!

The World Tonight on Boxing Day!

Merry Christmas to everyone!!! Hope that you all got what you wished for, but also that you've have been busy revising for January exams!

The World Tonight had a special report on the global economy and the free market. Listen here from 7 minutes  30 seconds. Listen out for case studies and recent news to back up your arguments in the exam.

LSE video - The Crisis in Greece

The LSE interviewed Dr Daphne Halikiopoulou - research at the LSE- regarding the crisis in the eurozone. Watch the video here, for an insight into Greece and their economy.

BBC Radio 4 - The World Tonight

'The World Tonight', a BBC Radio 4 programme, yesterday, touched on the UK economy, discussing the following:

• Slowing growth and rising unemployment
• The importance of moving the economy from services to manufacturing
• Case Study: Starbucks: increasing training opportunities, education in management, job creation and career pathing 
• Vicious circle: 
• Manufacturing declines à Training and development of people to go into this sector declines à Manufacturing declines further
• Euro sovereign debt crisis
• The look into the future in 2012

Listen from 0:11:40 to 0:28:00 for the programme on 20/12/11 on this link: BBC R4 The World Tonight

Recent inflation figures!

Once again, the new inflation figures have come out for November and the CPI has fallen 0.2% from the previous month. The RPI also fell from 5.4% to 5.2%.
Reasons for the slight fall in inflation include:

• Supermarket food prices (bread and vegetables) - price war
• Transport costs - fuel prices fell

However, the rate at which prices are rising is still twice that of the rate of increase of wages, making society worse off. Wage rises are not keeping up with inflation, thus in real terms, salaries are falling.