But nobody reports the GOOD news about Iraq, we're building SCHOOLS and stuff!

[Drake Tungsten]

Go ahead. The World Bank still predicts 4% GDP growth, which is quite good. The Newsweek story says the same thing even if you choose to ignore the Global Insight numbers...

[Sandman]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

Take away Anbar/Baghdad and Iraq is a pretty peaceful place...

Relatively peaceful, i.e. not at all.

Do you agree with article that low income tax and high corruption is good for the Iraqi economy? It's the sort of deranged pronouncement one expects from Ned.

There's even a positive spin to be put on corruption. Money stolen from government coffers or siphoned from U.S. aid projects does not just disappear. Again, says Farid Abolfathi, a Global Insight analyst, it's the "trickledown" effect. Such "underground activity" is the most dynamic part of Iraq's economy, he says. "It might not be viewed as respectable. But in reality, that's what puts money in the hands of the little people."

You hear this, saps? Corruption puts money in the hands of the little people! Trickledown! Stealing from the government is the most dynamic part of Iraq's economy!

[Impaler[WrG]]

QFT

I find it hard to believe, too. That's why it's good news.

Drake you just admited you have no BS detector, when a rational person is told something hard to belive which is very likly to be politicaly motivated they dont just swallow it hook like and sinker.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Go ahead. The World Bank still predicts 4% GDP growth, which is quite good. The Newsweek story says the same thing even if you choose to ignore the Global Insight numbers...

4% is not that good when you start as low as Iraq was thanks to the sanctions regime and then count the huge influx of money into the country.

Plus the whole 30-50% unemployment bit is far more indicative of the economic reality for your every day Iraqi. I fail to imagine that the third to a half of the public who is out of works is thrilled that heck, at least the overall economy grew 4%! Yeah me....

[Drake Tungsten]

Drake you just admited you have no BS detector, when a rational person is told something hard to belive which is very likly to be politicaly motivated they dont just swallow it hook like and sinker.

You'd have to be a moron to think that Newsweek has a political motivation that would cause it to print fake good news about Iraq.

4% is not that good when you start as low as Iraq was thanks to the sanctions regime and then count the huge influx of money into the country.

There's plenty of desperately poor countries who never saw growth rates anywhere near 4% in spite of large amounts of international aid. It's good news no matter how much you nattering nabobs try to dismiss it...

[Dinner]

The desperately poor countries which haven't seen 4% growth are mainly lagging due to political corruption. I believe the article you linked was trying to say political corruption was a mildly good thing. Most people would not agree.

[MORON]

Iraqi economy sounds like the twilight zone of insanity that happens inside an active war.

If you seriously think about how GDP is calculated, than you'd realized that those numbers are pretty useless when we have a shooting war going on.

GDP is calculated by the amount of value added trades in a economy. It does not measure the actual amount of wealth used or consumed.

Consider this: Your house got blown up three times in a year and you rebuild it. Now you've just increased the GDP by the cost it takes to build three houses, but in the end you only have one house. In a peaceful country, a house last 40 years and the yearly GDP from construction is 1/120 of someone whose house gets blown up 3 times in a year, but people still live in one house.

It is a real life example of the old economist joke on how we can solve unemployment by paying people to dig holes in the ground and paying them to fill them up again. Yes doing that would indeed lower unemployment and increase GDP, but it is plain meaninglessness.

The purpose of the economy is to serve real human needs, not numbers games. However this is a numbers game in this case thanks to war.