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DW.com looks at the elections in Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa and Namibia, with active civil society, and development efforts in Senegal, efforts to restore the popularity of the ANC in South Africa with new plans for land reform.  

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What is the one thing experts say is most beneficial for health? Improving our minds by building self-awareness. Understanding your feelings, motivations and behaviours in more depth, enables us to make better choices. To do this try journaling, meditating, practicing mindfulness or simply making time for self-reflection at the end of the day.

In doing this also pay attention to diversity in eating plant based foods for as many as 30 plant based foods, incorporating different exercize routines that get you motivated and happy, and get a good seven or eight hours of sleep, say these experts in health and nutrition.

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South Korea with 2069 hours year has the longest working hours of any developed country, according to the OECD,  and only Mexico exceeds this of all countries. In an effort to increase productivity and boost a dropping birthrate the National Assembly in South Korea reduced the maximum number of working hours from 68 hours a week to 52 hours- starting July 2018 and  initially for large companies. In Japan there is actually a word for working to death called "karoshi." The period of rapid industrialization in the fifties and sixties was a period of long working hours for most Japanese men. Today the working hours have dropped to average of 1713 a year. Africa shows the greatest number of countries in which one third of the labor force works more than 48 hours per week. Asia is the region with the longest working hours with 30% of the countries with thresholds of 60 hours or more.The U.S. is one of the countries where there is no limit- most other developed countries in Europe consider work-life balance important and have maximum limits without sacrificing productivity. ...

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Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina wins a third consecutive term in office, winning 288 seats in parliament. Sheikh Hasina's Awami League was challenged in this election by a coalition of parties after her main opponent Khaleda Zia was jailed earlier in 2018 for corruption and was barred from running in the election. Hasina is the daughter of independence leader Mujibur Rahman. Khaleda Zia is the widow of a military commander who founded the BNP party. Both have alternated in office- with Hasina in office for the last decade having run Bangladesh focusing on development and economic growth that was about 6% each year over the decade.

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Shale oil producer spending in the U.S. is forecast to drop by 3%, but this will still add one million barrels a day of additional shale oil production. Prices are now at about $45 a barrel and shale producers are cutting back on production rigs in operation with the 40% decline in oil prices. The EIA expects oil production to reach an average of 12.1 million barrels daily in 2019 from an average of 10.9 barrels a day in 2018. This suggests there will be additional supplies and continued downward pressure on oil prices. The situation is favorable for the U.S. and countries such as India which benefit from lower oil prices.

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A Trump ally, Senator Graham says president Trump is going to slow the withdrawal from Syria that was planned. He says the president learned from his trip to Iraq first hand about conditions in the region. He is now consulting allies about how best to accomplish the withdrawal gradually without the risks involved for the Kurds, Turkey and problems in Syria and Iraq that the U.S. has experienced.

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In a new first China's Chang'e-4 probe is about to touch down Jan 3rd on the dark side of the moon, and dispatch a rover in a vast crater to explore the moon. China is using this as the first step in setting up a planned lunar base by 2030. This happens as president Trump revives the U.S. space program after it languished under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations restricting to unmanned space exploration.

China National Space Administration is the best funded space agency in the world after U.S.'s NASA. Some experts say NASA has lost its focus falling victim to shifting political agendas. An earlier funded program to return astronauts to the moon by NASA was cancelled in 2010 during the Obama administration. This is now jolting the Trump administration into action to revive the programs whose goals are now harder to achieve for the moon program dates in 2023.

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A potato farmer in the Himalyan foothills is able to buy his first refrigerator using his Jio smartphone, even though he lives in a remote part of  India with no paved roads or indoor plumbing. Jio is the company founded by Reliance Industries head Mukesh Ambani, that is changing the way India shops and how it accesses the internet. Jio brings 4G technology to India and dramatically brings down data prices. To do this Reliance used its past success in executing big projects. It was designed to be a network that reached 18,000 cities and towns, and 200,000 villages, some lacking electricity, requiring 200,000 cell towers and 150,000 miles of high tech fiber optic cable. The project is now essentially completed, according to the company. This may be the biggest one it has tackled. Starting in polyester yarn and textile business, and in oil refineries, the company sought to diversify into digital platforms to compete with the likes of Google and Netflix. Ambani sees Jio not as a telecom business but as a digital platform and plans to use it to sell advertising, sell content, and financial services, also selling high speed broadband services. Ambani's project was designed to give India the opportunity to leapfrog into 4G and high speed internet and do this along with expanding the access through lower prices in the market to reach millions of people in remote regions of India including rural areas. Low cost access to data helps level the playing field between the rich and the poor. There are about 390 million internet users in India, penetration of 28%. This is now changing rapidly as prices drop - the potato farmer who bought his first fridge did this on his phone, connecting online with Jio which built a tower nearby that beamed nearly unlimited 4G data for about $2.10 a month. Jio has now signed up 215 million subscribers with its low cost service. Bharti Airtel and Vodafone are larger competitors but it is Jio that has revolutionized the market in India, and which now enables companies like Amazon to use the new 4G services to build its retail online business.   ...

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Amazon is tackling the Indian market by addressing the need of rural shoppers in all parts of India- home to nearly 800 million people. Here WSJ shows how this works with a customer in Dhowachal, in the northeastern state of Assam, who had no access to stores except by travelling for hours to the nearest town.  The customer is a teacher who received an Amazon delivery of pairs of jeans, socks, curtains, glasses and other items. Rural shoppers in India spent about $400 billion in 2017. Barclays estimates Amazon had $7 billion in gross merchandise sales volume in India in 2017, about 2% of what it does worldwide. More than 80% of customers in 2018 are from outside India's largest cities.  To do this Amazon has changed its app to work on cheaper smartphones and patchy cellular networks, added hundreds of thousands of Indian language descriptions of products and videos. It has also opened physical Amazon stores to teach people how to order online. Tens of thousands of distributors were added to deliver packages and take cash or digital payment. Amazon is spending $5 billion in India to set up a logistics network and warehouses, including staff and content development for Amazon Prime. In doing this Amazon has learned from China where Alibaba and other online retailers have grown seven fold by reaching rural areas. Amazon could not compete with Alibaba in China. In India Amazon has no strong local competitors like Alibaba. It is learning how to operate in India. The app offer tips on how to order, no email is needed, only a phone number, machine learning translates all descriptions into Hindi. Icons work well. A digital wallet lets customers without bank accounts or cards to pay or get money back. Amazon is investing aggressively using an advertising campaign and discounts to pass Flipkart which WalMart bought for $16 billion in 2018. Amazon is trying new ideas in India's situation where small stores often closet sized sell a limited number of products often going through multiple middlemen resulting in high prices. Amazon is now enlisting these small stores as package depots in its own unique distribution network. The small store gets an 8-10% commission on sales for helping guide shoppers make a purchase. In Amazon's unique "I Have Space" program 20,000 mom and pop stores in remote areas of India offer to take packages and deliver in neighborhoods for a commission. They get a uniform, a bag and a week of training. Many of these store owners know the addresses in their neighborhood having lived there a long time. The entire effort shows Amazon has adapted its delivery effort, logistics and payment systems to Indian conditions in a well planned way. Compare this to the failed effort by Apple in India, with high management turnover and lack of understanding of Indian conditions and pricing, and no real plan to tackle the Indian market.     ...

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With about 390 million users smartphone user penetration in India is the second highest after China. WalMart, Amazon are looking for new online customers with large investments. New tech rules from the government require these companies and Google to store data in India. This means companies that store data in servers located all over the world such as Google have to change the way they store Indian data. Under the new regulations in draft form data created by users in India from online sellers, search engines and social media must be stored exclusively in India, with government granted access.

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Priceline surged in a tech boom of two decades ago before coming down. It has regenerated itself through its 2005 acquisition of Amsterdam based portal Booking.com, followed by acquiring booking site Agoda and travel search engine Kayak. This has helped the stock rise in the last decade. Over 90% of its revenue comes from outside the U.S., even though its original model of naming a price for a booking is gone.  Booking.com is making an attempt to penetrate the Chinese travel market with a series of acquisitions starting with online travel agency Ctrip.com. Ctrip.com is established but recent acquisitions are burning cash. There is skepticism about these acquisitions as Chinese company share prices are seen as inflated similar to the stock booms that went bust in the U.S. Booking.com invested heavily in online advertising primarily through Google. Yet though western customers use search engines to find and book travel, in China customers go directly to Ctrip or apps like Meituan to book trips. To get people to book Chinese travel companies offer large discounts, a model that may not be right for Booking.com. The effort is to add to Ctrip customer base the middle to lower income customers from Didi ride sharing app and the Meituan app, through its partnerships with these companies. The experience of other travel sites such as Expedia in the Chinese market is poor, with price wars and Expedia selling its majority stake to Didi Chuxing. Expedia's CEO at the time calls it "the wild, wild east" because of the intense competition. About 130 million Chinese travelled overseas in 2017, up 7%, and spending $115 billion. ...

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This editorial in the Hindu and the related article in the NYT point out the impressive record of the Awami League party government of prime minister Sheikh Hasina in growth- tripling electricity in a decade, and in social indicators, such as gender parity and education, improvements in infrastructure. A related report from Germany also showed the positive sense of the changes in Bangladesh including the first long bridge over the Ganges river near Dhaka connecting different parts of the country.

This sense of progress is marred by what is seen as increasing authoritarianism of the government. 

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The Dow Jones Average drops again 300 points on Dec 27, after a record 1000 point gain on Dec 26, 2018. All S&P sectors are no in the red for the year after losses for the quarter. Investor anxiety stems from the Fed winding down easy money policy, interest  rate increases, the trade war with China, and slower economic growth,

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The South China Morning Post, SCMP, looks at China at the 40th year of the great economic experiment  that changed China. This started with the Deng reforms by the then Chinese leader that opened up the economy in 1978. As this report points out in 1978 Deng Xiaoping's efforts at loosening the state control of the economy and business was actually a way to get out from the effects of the Cultural Revolution and prevent another Cultural Revolution. Deng was removed from office during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of unquestioned acceptance of Mao the new criterion was "Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth." In economic and business matters this was followed so that if it worked then the experiment was expanded, gradually giving life to the Chinese model of state capitalism, economic expansion under the state with the state supporting state corporations that operate in a market economy.  This means the Communist Party was to continue its control but with experimentation away from the planned economy in the coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, and then into Shanghai. Experts close to Jiang Zemin, the next leader after Deng, say China's Communist state would not have survived without the changes started by premier Deng. Farmers still did not own the land but they were free to plant and own the yields for their efforts.  Deng established the Three Benefits Principle in 1992 trip to Guangdong, whatever helped increase productivity, increased the strength of the country and improved living standards was good, you did not judge it by whether it was socialist or capitalist. Jiang Zemin's work was to follow Deng's ideas and help negotiate the entry into World Trade Organization and set up the new economic regulations. Capitalists were allowed to join the Communist Party for the first time. State and local government ownership of land was turned into an advantage as this provided one of the critical inputs in terms of land for setting up new factories, with capital coming from savings, and other inputs of technology and investment coming from the U.S. after entry into the WTO brought American and European companies to China. A steady supply of labor poured in from the countryside and urbanization became a goal of Chinese development policies. Today India and other countries in Africa, Latin America, can look at the Chinese experience and effort and look for ways to modernize, urbanize and improve living standards, productivity and strength of their economy. One key is to experiment and look for what works that can then be expanded to other locations, and build on the advantages that may open up as the experiment makes progress. Following entry into WTO China was able to take advantage of overseas markets and build an edge in manufacturing, something that was not evident even in 1992.   ...

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China is using inspections, extra bureaucratic hurdles that increase U.S. companies costs. This is closely correlated to the trade war with the U.S.

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U.S. healthcare spending of about $3 trillion comes with poor results. The cost per person is about three times that of countries such as France, Britain, yet the results show U.S. doing extremely poorly. The author points out that less spending on healthcare and more on social services in areas such as education, nutrition, housing and other services would improve the outcomes and results. It is this missing factor that is helping other countries in Europe, Japan and China achieve better outcomes and returns per dollar spent.  Social spending can affect such things as nutrition, exercize levels, lifestyles, housing and result in dramatic improvements in obesity levels for instance, or inflammation levels in the population that play a role in many diseases. The idea is prevention. This is not happening because higher health dollar spending has lobbies to support it. Social spending also is a dollar expense that shows up immediately whereas results are spread out into the future as a longer term benefit with healthier populations that need to consume less healthcare and treatment. Elizabeth Bradley, president of Vassar College is an expert on this subject. She says social services spending gives more bang for buck  in health outcomes.  The point is relevant also for countries in South Asia and Africa that have taken some on some aspects of the U.S. health system resulting in health care spending that does not deliver the most for the dollar spent, and ignores the critical role of prevention.  The solution lies in moving these health care dollars out of the health care spending and into education for health outcomes, lifestyles, exercize habits education, and into social services that enable prevention and better health. ...

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Members of the U.S. Congress lead a lousy life with life split between the capital and their home state location, most are weekend dads or moms. This makes them less likely to grasp the issues of work-life balance and the issues of parenting faced by average working families or couples with both parents working, says this essay in Politico magazine. This is true also of understanding issues facing women and mothers. Hard to believe but this report points out that Congress in the U.S. does not have a family friendly leave policy and no restroom for women till 2011 on the floor of the House. Similar issues face women in Japan and other countries for women in parliament. Former Speaker Ryan says he is tired of being a "weekend Dad." Senator Biden, former vice president says of his commute from Delaware to Washington D.C., he realized that "a child has a thought he wants to share and 12-18 hours later its gone, gone, gone." ...

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This report in WSJ points out that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu faces a real challenge in 2019 snap elections- with the economic difficulties in Israel, the tense situation in Gaza, and corruption probes he faces. According to OECD figures Israel has one of the highest cost of living in the developed world, and food, electricity prices are expected to increase further in 2019. A  number of challengers for a centre left or centre right combination of military and civilian leaders is emerging and shown here.

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Bangladesh is seen as doing better than India and Pakistan in life expectancy, hunger, fertility rates, and other key development indicators. The new Padma Bridge over the Ganges river operational in 2019 will link different parts of the country and is expected to add 1% to GDP growth. Other infrastructure projects are being planned with $30 billion in projects planned with China including a new port south of Chittagong. The Vision 2021 Plan plans to take Bangladesh out of the poorest nation group by 2021, the 50th anniversary of independence. Germany is the second largest donor and the gender equality in Bangladesh with coeducation in schools is seen by experts as unique among all Muslim countries. The growth of Dhaka and the social and economic change from 5 million garment workers, mostly women and rural could lead to social and cultural change that may be underestimated, says DW.com, providing the view from Germany. DW.com also warns that there are risks for Bangladesh in relying on remittances from Gulf countries, and in not diversifying so that it is not dependent on textile exports alone. Overall German view is that development aid works, and Bangladesh is welcomed from that perspective in Germany. ...