Brazil’s widening wealth gap

Gillian Lacey-Solymar, Business correspondent for BBC Newsnight has a piece on tonight’s show about the rising inequality in Brazil as her economy continues to experience breakneck growth. Expect an excellent video clip to be available from the BBC web site immediately after the Newsnight programme has aired. Excellent for highlighting the links between growth and income and wealth distributio, especially with a tax system that appears to have regressive effects on the lowest income earners.

The external costs of food waste

Over 4 million apples and over a million and a half bananas are thrown away in Britain every day. This video from Newsnight is excellent on the external costs of the food we throw away - estimated by some to be worth around £8 billion a year. Should we actively encourage food scavengers? What are the strategies we should be adopting to reduce the amount of food thrown away? This is a good topic to use to teach evaluation skills for AS microeconomics.

Unsustainable world

BBC’s Newsnight has been running an excellent series of programmes - Unsustainable World” - here is the link to the relevant web site