{"id":11964,"date":"2015-09-07T14:15:41","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T19:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11964"},"modified":"2015-09-07T14:15:41","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T19:15:41","slug":"mede-jean-not-medellin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11964","title":{"rendered":"Mede-Jean, Not Medellin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mede-Jean, Not Medellin<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Driving the back streets of Medellin a few weeks ago I found it interesting to see the various little pockets to the city. In the poor parts of town I noticed on a couple of occasions taxi drives running their vehicles on empty. I\u2019ve seen this before in countries where there is a lack of sufficient working capital to be able to keep the tank full. Disposable income is low or non-existent\u2026<\/p>\n

There are, however, pockets where we found the burgeoning middle class which give credence to the statistical numbers. Here there are delightful tree lined neighborhoods, boutique art stores, restaurants, coffee shops and Land Cruisers beginning to cramp up the streets of Medellin. Colombia has indeed a rising and growing middle class, though there still exists a large disparity in wealth.<\/p>\n

\"View<\/p>\n

One measure used by economists to determine this ratio of rich to poor is the Gini coefficient. A Gini\u00a0score of 0 would mean a perfect distribution of income and expenditure in a society and a number of 100 represents absolute inequality. This has important ramifications as often there exists a higher propensity for civil unrest as the number gets higher. Conversely the lower this number, the more equal and oftentimes stable a country. Colombia, according to the World Bank, sport a score of 53.5, though this is taken from 2012. I suspect this figure is actually lower today \u2013 it\u2019s been falling each year since early 2000s.<\/p>\n

The trend appears to be going in the right direction\u2026<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve had our eye on Colombia for some time. One reason we haven\u2019t jumped in earlier is that we\u2019ve been cognizant that it\u2019s a resource economy and when we first began taking notes we were already a decade into the resource bull market. Not optimum!<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mede-Jean, Not Medellin Driving the back streets of Medellin a few weeks ago I found it interesting to see the various little pockets to the city. In the poor parts of town I noticed on a couple of occasions taxi drives running their vehicles on empty. I\u2019ve seen this before in countries where there is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[103,1861,8785,8782,8787,951,8786,8784,8783,588,888],"class_list":["post-11964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-canada","tag-canadian-dollar","tag-capitalist-exploits","tag-columbia","tag-columbian-peso","tag-currency","tag-diversified-economy","tag-gini-coefficient","tag-medellin","tag-oil","tag-world-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11964"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11965,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11964\/revisions\/11965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}