He attributes the strong Latin American showing to the region's financial boom and a groundswell of activity by artists and collectors there.

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But today the city that has the feel of a modern boom town as savvy investors have understood that the Kurdish region is way more stable than the rest of Iraq which in turn is still sadly struggling to throw off its reputation for sectarian violence and political instability.

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Mr. Modi has presided over an economic boom in his region as chief minister of India's western Gujarat state, and is popular with investors.

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Like a once-quiet neighborhood cut up by an expressway and laced with off ramps, northeastern forests are changing because of the pipelines crisscrossing them amid the region's gas drilling boom, experts say.

WSJ: Northeast drilling boom threatens forest wildlife

Because of a baby boom in the 1970s and 1980s, the region has a demographic bulge, ( see charts), with lots of young and educated people entering the labor market--but finding no work.

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Equatorial Guinea, which has been issuing lots of prospecting licenses and is seeing its speck of an economy grow at breakneck speed on the back of an oil-exploration boom, could emerge as the region's third-largest producer, with 740, 000 barrels a day by then.

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But now, with this proof of concept, Oil Creek Valley and the surrounding region erupted in the first oil boom.

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If you go higher than that, there are other tipping points, especially the release of carbon in the tundra and the things frozen in the tundra region, and that tipping point means it becomes very nonlinear and all of a sudden--boom!

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With the deregulation of its financial market in the mid-1990s and subsequent stock market boom, Iceland had transformed itself from the poor cousin in Europe to one of the region's wealthiest countries.

NPR: Iceland Shivers From Financial Crisis