Coups can be a lucrative business, and although its main export is cashew nuts, Guinea-Bissau offers tempting opportunities.

ECONOMIST: A small country upholds an unfortunate tradition

And the market for bauxite and alumina, its main export goods, has been rockier than for other commodities.

ECONOMIST: Jamaica at 50

Recessions in Brazil and Argentina - its main export markets and sources of tourists - propelled the country into economic crisis in 2002.

BBC: Uruguay profile

There have been persistent concerns about whether Japan's fragile economic recovery will be able to withstand a sharp slowdown in growth in the US, its main export market.

BBC: NEWS | Business | Fresh worries on Japanese economy

It can easily finance the resulting fiscal deficit forecast at 3% of GDP this year because it built up a war chest of public savings when prices for copper, its main export, were high.

ECONOMIST: Politics in Brazil

As long as its main export markets, such as China and the United States, keep growing, its firms should be able to cope with a modest loss of competitiveness in the form of a higher yen.

ECONOMIST: A renewed force in Asia

Its main export is electricity.

WSJ: Lessons in Gross National Happiness

Its main markets are the United States and Japan, and its principal export is electronics.

ECONOMIST: The Philippines: The good earth | The

Recently, for example, I was in Nicaragua visiting a new client, a 700-member farmer cooperative that produces coffee for export and corn for domestic consumption The cooperative sells 300 tons of corn annually to its main buyer, the World Food Programme which is used to produce 6.7 million school lunches a year or one meal per day for 44, 000 children for an entire school year.

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