The price of doing business in Zimbabwean gold — the country’s latest currency — is too steep for many retailers, who can’t compete with an informal market still churning on U.S. dollars.
Tag: black market
The quiet return of maternity fees and the black-market sale of essential documents put extra burdens on mothers as they struggle to navigate a broken system.
With Israel blocking aid from entering Gaza, some are either resorting to force to get aid to feed their children or turning to a new black market where merchants and war profiteers exploit people’s needs.
Of 823 delivery riders checked in a recent police blitz, 92 were using accounts that belonged to someone else, rented to them for exorbitant rates. The investigation reveals widespread exploitation of these gig workers, who are often vulnerable, undocumented immigrants.
Criminals of the 21st century do not have to go to clubs to sell their drugs or drive across the border to buy their weapons. They only have to smuggle malware onto someone’s computer or sell their goods at the black market of the digital underground.
-OpEd- BOGOTA — When I hear about people now selling marijuana legally in the United States, I think of all our fellow Colombians who have died over the years fighting America’s absurd war on drugs. I think of Luis Carlos Galán and Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, two politicians gunned down by drug traffickers, and I imagine […]
TURIN — How many times have you shopped at a market and found yourself admiring a bag or wallet, wondering whether it was really made by the famous brand displayed on its label? Thanks to the camera on your smartphone and a forthcoming app, it soon will be possible to verify, in real time, whether […]
CUCUTA — It’s 2 p.m., and the borderland between Colombia and Venezuela is sizzling in the afternoon heat. Sweat is the permanent companion of all those crossing the Simón Bolívar bridge linking Venezuela with the Colombian border city of Cúcuta. Mariela* has been sitting for two hours in an endless line of cars, returning from […]
The “black market” accounts for a quarter of Mexico’s GDP and employs more than half its workforce. The numbers illustrate a failure of public policy and raise a red flag for the future.
TURIN — There are journeys even more awful than the perilous crossings in rickety boats made by would-be immigrants trying to reach European shores. In these trips instead – made to Pakistan, Iran, Egypt or certain Eastern European countries – people sell a part of themselves: a journey of transplants, to places where the human […]
SCHILTIGHEIM — We didn’t see the big grey sedan coming, before it had stopped in the middle of the parking lot in the downtown shopping center. There are a dozen little boys killing time between the parked cars, drinking soda and talking football. Welcome to the Marais housing project in Schiltigheim, on the outskirts of […]
ROME — Way back in 1998, Bill Clinton bet on the young Assad. He was to be his father’s successor, and the United States believed that the young Bashar al-Assad, once he reached power, would be the person to bring Syria back into the fold among the civilized nations of the world. And so Clinton’s […]
In most countries black-market work is not an exception, but the norm. A recent study comissioned by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) revealed that the shadow economy was booming. Illicit economic activities constitutes between 20 to 30% of GDP in many southern European countries. An estimated two billion people work for this global black […]