TIDBIT

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rbanisation - Half of all Africans are under 20, and are rapidly moving to cities: more than 40% of Africans now live in urban areas.

Source: EIU Growing African Cities Report 2013

Will Housing Bloom Again This Spring?

Nick Timiraos

US

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he housing market is off to a sluggish start as the spring sales season arrives. In Monday’s WSJ, I wrote about an unexpected culprit: rising home prices.

That rising home prices are the latest trial for U.S. housing markets might sound a little odd. After all, policy makers have spent much of the last six years trying to break a vicious downdraft in prices, and few predicted that home prices would rise as rapidly as they have once they hit bottom.

Home prices turned up beginning two years ago as more buyers chased a shrinking supply of homes. Falling mortgage rates initially allowed Americans to swallow rising prices because their monthly ownership cost was mostly unchanged.

But that ended last summer, when mortgage rates shot up by a full percentage point. Now, buyers faced a one-two hit of higher rates on top of higher prices. Investors, meanwhile, pulled back because higher prices meant there were fewer bargains.

TIDBIT

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y December 2014, the dust will have settled on infrastructure built for the year’s big sporting events, but a mighty new construction project will just be starting in Nicaragua. So, at least insists HKND Group, the Hong Kong company with a 50-year concession to build and run the Nicaragua canal. This would serve as a link between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, with a supposed price tag of $40billion (a rough guess, really). A backlash is already evident. Opposition politicians object on constitutional grounds. Others say there is already a serviceable link between the Pacific and Atlantic shipping routes, the Panama Canal, which is one third the length. Environmentalists have their own concerns. Results of a feasibility study are still pending. None of these seems to bother the mysterious Chinese company behind the project. Those who fret about China’s growing influence in America’s back yard may recall that a century ago the United States flirted with building a canal across Nicaragua. It opted for Panama instead.

TIDBIT

To become a country’s richest man is challenging, all the more so when you have 1.3 billion compatriots. China’s Wang Jianlin, the son of a Red Army veteran and chairman of Dalian Wanda group, a property and leisure conglomerate he built from scratch, managed just that after amassing a fortune put at $14.1billion by Forbes. This is a story bound for Hollywood in more ways than one. Bold foreign acquisitions have turned Wanda into the world’s biggest cinema operator, as well as swelling a portfolio of shopping plazas and hotels. Mr Wang recently unveiled an $8.2billion cultural-tourism city in Wuxi. Western entertainment firms should prepare for competition from a big fish called Wanda.

GREAT BORES OF TOMORROW

Peter Collins

Record lengths of tunnels will be dug in 2014

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ore than half the world now lives in towns; by 2030 the urban population will be close to 5 billion. Cities are running out of space, many are building upwards, with ever-taller skyscrapers. But they are also digging downwards, encouraged by the increasing sophistication of tunnel-boring machines.

In 2014, record lengths of tunnel will be bored - perhaps around 1000km (620 miles) in all. Boring machines will burrow beneath traffic-choked cities in China, India, the Middle East and Latin America to bring new or expanded subway systems. Add the massive water sewerage and other projects underway and the amount of tunneling in 2014 will be perhaps double that of five years earlier, reckons Lok Home, the boss of Robbins, an American maker of bores

BEYOND BORING