“Vietnam is suffering economically, but less than China,” said Adam McCarty, chief economist at Mekong Economics in Hanoi.
“Schools remain closed, tourists are too few, and workers, maybe 20 per cent, are underemployed due to virus-caused declines in demand and Chinese inputs,” he said.
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Check your budget plans before doing projects in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Did you know it costs about US$8 for 3-minute phone call to PNG? So use skype: Yet even that costs US$1 per minute. It was quite a problem for us implementing a survey of 240 PNG-based enterprises, doing the appointment calls from overseas. We became a skype “frequent flyer”, spending over US$2,000. That was just one of many cost surprises (thanks, it would seem, to Australian cartels dominating the economy).
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After a busy week at the AVPN 2019 Conference, I have learnt a hard lesson: while the 1300 who came to Singapore stated a commitment to achieving social impact, the majority of them are not properly measuring it. Let’s be honest: as impact evaluators, we at Mekong Economics were expecting much more from impact investors.
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Matteo Vidiri, Economist
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