You don't have to be a student of geography or cartography to have an interest in the world around you, especially with globalization making our planet seem smaller than ever. Now you can IM someone in Alaska, purchase coffee beans from Timor-Leste, and visit Dubai. But what do we really know about these lands?Who Owns the World presents the results of the first-ever landownership survey of all 197 states and 66 territories of the world, and reveals facts both startling and...

“A lucidly written, shrewdly argued meditation on how democrats and dictators preserve political authority.” —Wall Street JournalBruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith’s canonical book on political science turns conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single proposition: leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest”—or even their subjects—unless they must. As Bueno de Mesquita and Smith show, democrac...

This carefully crafted ebook is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of all final goods and services from a nation in a given year. Countries are sorted by nominal GDP estimates from financial and statistical institutions, which are calculated at market or government official exchange rates. Nominal GDP does not take into account differences in the cost of living in different countries, and the results...

Book Synopsis: This book recounts from the perspective of a Congolese native the five-hundred-year journey of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It analyzes dispassionately the facts of the turbulent history of the country and its continuing impact on the life of the modern-day Congolese. In the book, we set out to begin the search for the Congolese answers to the DR Congos historical paradox of a very rich country living a very poor life in a neighborhood in which it is the b...

The Guyana StoryFrom Earliest Times to Independence traces the countrys history from thousands of years ago when the first Amerindian groups began to settle on the Guyana territory. It examines the period of early European exploration leading to Dutch colonization, the forcible introduction of African slaves to work on cotton and sugar plantations, the effects of European wars, and the final ceding of the territory to the British who ruled it as their colony until they finally granted it i...

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and the world's eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption and an ailing economy. Toyin Falola, a leading historian intimately acquainted with the region, and Matthew Heaton, who has worked extensively on African science and culture, combine their expertise to explain the context to Nigeria's recent troubles through an explor...

The "Wealth of the People" Book SeriesThe task of explaining the causes of the wealth of the people in a society is a complex subject for a single e-book. To facilitate the explanation and the delivery of the material, one e-book will be published in each set of topics.The following are the titles of the book series:Your WealthThe first book looks at the time savings and the wealth gained by a single person increasing his physical and human capital in an isol...

Duncan Clarke was founder and Chairman of the Board, Global Pacific & Partners, a worldwide private advisory firm with vintage of around 40 years, the story told in Three Decades in the Long Grass, 2014. Born in Salisbury, 1948, and raised in Rhodesia, he gained the PhD (Economics) at University of St Andrews, 1975. He has published extensively on Africa and been advisor to governments and companies worldwide, and focused on geo-economics, Africa and world oil, hi...

First published in 1981, The Money Lenders reveals the power, the workings and the personalities of the money men who have made the world go round:The Superbankers – including Chase Manhattan's David Rockefeller, Citibank's Walter Wriston, Lloyds' Sir Jeremy Morse and Robert McNamara.The debt-ridden regimes of Poland and Iran, Brazil and Zaire, Singapore and Pakistan.The wizards of Grand Cayman – the sunny tax haven who had more registered corporations than...

How Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world.An unprecedented land grab is taking place around the world. Fearing future food shortages or eager to profit from them, the world’s wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land around the world. The scale is astounding: parcels the size of small countries are be...

Over the past twenty years more citizens in China and India have raised themselves out of poverty than anywhere else at any time in history. They accomplished this through the local business sector-the leading source of prosperity for all rich countries. In most of Africa and other poor regions the business sector is weak, but foreign aid continues to fund government and NGOs. Switching aid to the local business sector in order to cultivate a middle class is the oldest, surest, and only wa...

What is a Micro Nation?A micro nation can actually be referred to as new country project or a model country. The definition of a micro nation is thus rendered:“An entity that resembles a nation or a state, but which for the most part exists only on paper, on the Internet, or in the mind of its creator.”Also referred to as:“Model countries and new country projects -- are entities that claim to be independent nations or states but which are un...