Wednesday Linkblogging

• Counter Intelligence blog quotes a New York Magazine article interviewing New York women chefs on why they don't get the money to open their own restaurants:

RC: Also, I’ve found that landlords will listen politely and then lease their space to a man with a track record. I had a long track record at the time I started Pearl Oyster Bar—twenty years as a chef, but not as a business owner. And that was the kind of track record they were looking for. I was lucky to find the guy that I found.

• If you want to talk to business owners like yourself: A yahoo group for Latina small business owners.
• The French foreign minister thinks that a microcredit fund in Myanmar (Burma), could help the cause of (capitalist) democracy. He doesn't propose where the money is to come from, though.
• A plea for Chinese microcredit aimed at rural people with HIV could well apply to any microcredit program anywhere in the world.

Up to three-quarters of China's estimated 650,000 people living with HIV/AIDS are rural poor, concentrated in Yunnan, Guangxi, Henan and Xinjiang. Microfinance can be an impressive tool for the social and economic empowerment of thousands of women, men and children living with HIV/AIDS, and their families. Measures must also be taken to counter discrimination against such people in microcredit programmes generally.

• And finally, an interesting article from the federal government's US Info site discusses a World Bank report on international reforms to encourage women in business.

In its recently released Doing Business 2008 report, the World Bank says countries ranked highest on its “ease of doing business” scale “are associated with higher percentages of women among entrepreneurs and employees.” The bank ranked 178 countries in such policy areas as paying taxes and entrepreneurs’ ease in obtaining licenses, registering property and getting credit. It also ranked countries’ investor protections, contract enforcement and cross-border trade laws.

The top reformers are Egypt, Croatia, Ghana, Macedonia, Georgia, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, China and Bulgaria.