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Business Weekly Archive: Trouble and strife

20/03/2010

Trouble and strife

BBC World Service - Business Weekly Archive, Trouble and strife

Trouble in Spain. Trouble in Africa. But is there a silver lining in the Middle east?

The troubles of the Spanish economy, the troubles of African corruption.  And the troubles of the Middle East - except that the Palestinian stock market is booming.  What's going on?

The higher they fly the harder they fall.  Just before the great crash, Spain could do no wrong.  Money was flowing in and in the five years to 2005, more than half the new jobs in the whole of the European Union were in Spain as construction boomed. Then the boom went bust big time.  Property prices collapsed.  Unemployment is now a staggering twenty per cent of the workforce. Lesley Curwen has been to Spain's Costa Blanca to find out what went wrong.

If you think Spain's economy has problems, imagine those of the Palestinians, both on the Gaza Strip along the Mediterranean, and on the West Bank of the Jordan. They are in a state of perpetual conflict with Israel so you might imagine the opportunities to make money there are slim.  But a stock market does exist, in Nablus. Hear Samir Hulilehm, chief executive of the Palestine Development and Investment Company tell us how you can make money.

And one of the big African problems is remoteness from markets - and the internet shrinks those distances. To get a flavour of its growing use, our East Africa correspondent, Will Ross, went to meet Zack Matere who grows crops and keeps cattle in Kenya's Rift Valley.

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