Dragons' Den is back

The BBC has confirmed that the new series of Dragons’ Den will start on Wednesday 15th July at 9.00 p.m. on BBC2.

Economics on the TV tonight (Monday)

For those interested in development economics, this should be worth watching. Over the last 50 years Western governments have paid out more than £400bn of tax payers' money in aid to Africa, but according to figures released by the World Bank this year, half of sub-Saharan Africans still live in extreme poverty, a figure which has not changed since 1981.

Panorama
BBC 1 NI (Sky Digital Ch.141)
Monday 24th November 2008
8:30 pm to 9:00 pm

Addicted to Aid:
Reporter Sorious Samura visits Uganda and his home country of Sierra Leone to reveal how aid money is lost, stolen and frittered away. He stops at a showpiece hospital, run by a well-funded health department, that looks like a warzone - yet in the nearby car park of the Ministry of Health there are dozens of new 4x4s for ministry staff. He questions a former minister accused of stealing funds and offers his vision of how Africans can take control of their own destiny.

Further details on the show (plus a trailer)

Economics on the TV tonight (Friday)

Credit Crash Britain: Property: The End of the Affair?

BBC 2 NI (Sky Digital Ch. 142)
Friday 14th November
Time: 7 p.m.
The Money Programme's Max Flint investigates the property market and asks if renting is the answer for people buffeted by its troubles. For a decade, millions of us have used the seemingly unstoppable rise in property prices to fund a consumer spending boom, but the credit crunch and global slump has put a stop to that. Max Flint meets the people who are hanging on to the dream of home ownership and those who are convinced that long-term renting makes more financial sense. Also with exclusive research, it reveals if we would have been better off all along renting rather than buying.

Economics on the TV tonight (Tuesday)

Crunch Time: The Great Property Crash
TV3 (Sky Digital: Ch.103)
Tuesday 11th November 2008, 10 p.m.

We, in Ireland, waited a long time for an economic boom. When the ladder of success was eventually put in place, we wasted no time in leaping on the first rung and climbing up as high and as fast as we could. Forget pensions, forget savings, forget safe and solid jobs - property was a fast track stairway to heaven a gateway to good times. It couldn't last and it hasn't. This programme will sift through the debris of the crash. We will talk to the people who can't afford to pay their mortgages, the people who can't sell their properties, the people who are living in empty housing estates. We will ask why the banks and building societies threw money at anyone who wanted it. Why did no-one shout stop? Where did it all go wrong?

Economics on the TV this Friday

Credit Crash Britain:
Money for Nothing

BBC 2 NI (Sky Digital Ch.142)
Friday 7th November, 7pm to 8pm
Examining the impact of the credit crunch. The Money Programme's Max Flint investigates how Britain's borrowing boom came to a swift and painful end. A decade of cheap borrowing, overseen by the Bank of England, is over and millions of us are now feeling the pinch. We chart how the global credit crunch is now having an impact on the streets of Britain. With contributions from people who are now in deep financial trouble, we ask how the country will adapt to life without easily available credit. Read more on the programme here.

Alistair Cooke's America
BBC 4*, Friday 7th November, 9pm to 9:50pm

The Promised Fulfilled and The Promise Broken:

Alistair Cooke's personal examination of the history of the United States continues with a look at prosperity and politics in the 1920s. However, by the end of the decade the prosperity had vanished and had been replaced by economic depression.

People's Century
BBC 4*, Friday 7th November, 9pm to 9:45pm
The story of 'the hungry thirties' told by men and women who suffered in the worldwide depression that followed the Wall Street Crash. In Chicago, the unemployed ripped wooden paving blocks from the city streets, while in Belgium, laid-off miners broke into their own pits to scavenge for waste coal. Sweden was the first democracy to fight the depression, and America's President Roosevelt offered the country a new deal.

* BBC4 can be added to Sky Digital with the following details:
Frequency: 10.773
Horizontal Polarisation.
Symbol Rate: 22.0
FEC 5/6