A recent NBER working paper by Diego Comin caught my attention. The paper explores the tourism industry in Tanzania and tries to answer a few questions. The results should be taken with a grain of salt, as the methodology appears to be less watertight than in your usual NBER working paper.

Recently the Georgian government started a campaign for attracting foreign capital to the country. A whole page ad (pictured above) runs on one of the first pages in the print edition of The Economist for already a month.

We all know how inventive (and sometimes devious) the human mind can be in inventing different kinds of mediums of exchange – which we simply call money. Everybody has heard of cigarettes or cowrie shells, used by people in different economic situations as a replacement for all so familiar gold coins or Ben Franklin portraits in green.