Category Archives: globalization

Xenia Dormandy

Vice President Joseph Biden has accused Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of being rooted in a “cold war mentality”, yet the current US government and its military, as well as those of its Asian-Pacific partners, are guilty of focusing far too much on the past and not looking at future threats. With these more likely to manifest as cyber-attacks, natural resource hoarding, and economic strangulation as opposed to traditional combat on the ground, the American response seems at best incomplete and at worst anachronistic.

グローバル標準に近づく

常ニ國憲ヲ重シ國法ニ遵ヒ一旦緩急アレハ義勇公ニ奉シ以テ天壤無窮ノ皇運ヲ扶翼スヘシ」の頃からなにも変わっていない日本という国家がある。国家が栄え、会社が栄え、国民や社員は国家や会社のために奴隷のよう生きる。

日本という国家は日本人のためにあるべきなのに、実際には日本人は日本という国家のためにいる。社員は会社のためにいる。日本人ひとりひとりが幸せになるのであれば、日本という国家などどうなってもいい。株主のためだけにある会社など、潰れたって構わない。

日本人が賢ければ、たとえ国家が滅びたとしても、国は残る。山河はもちろん、言葉も文化も残る。賢くないから国家だけが栄え、山河も言葉も文化も荒廃してしまう。ひとりひとりがまともなら、会社がなにをしようともみんな幸せに暮らすことができる。まともでないから過労で死ぬ。

全体主義のなかでは人は無知だ。誰も世界の潮流を知らない。知ろうともしない。死刑廃止も男女同権も世界の潮流なのに、それを認めようともしない。グローバル・スタンダードをアメリカン・スタンダードと勘違いし、アメリカの猿真似だけをする。

世界のどこかで事故が起これば日本人の安否だけを気遣い、ワールド・カップでは日本の試合だけに一喜一憂する。世界中の人たちがなにを見ているのか、なにを考えているのか、そんなことにはお構いなしに、日本のことだけを気にする

日本人とか、どこそこの社員とか言う前に、地球上のひとりの人間、世界の一員だって、思えないのだろうか。日本の学校だけが学ぶところではないし、日本の会社だけが働く場所ではない。日本から出ていけば、きっと、もっと幸せになれる。

今、日本で起きていることは、不況なんかではない。グローバリゼーションのなかで、日本は普通の国になり、経済も他の国並みになっていく。その過程が不況に見えるだけなのだ。もっと言ってしまえば、日本が世界で第2位になる必然性など、初めからなかったのだ。

グローバリゼーションなかでは、特に優れているわけでもない日本人が、特に劣っているわけでもない他の国の人たちより、より良い暮らしをするというわけにはいかない。日本での競争から、世界での競争になった時、いったいどれだけの日本人が良い暮らしを保っていけるのだろう。

グローバル・スタンダードを知り、それに近づく努力をしたものだけが、グローバリゼーションのなかでもやっていける。そういうことを切実に考え、現実を受け入れるべきなのだ。滅びの美学に酔い、自ら進んで落ちこぼれていく必要など、どこにもない。

明治維新の時に「藩のためでなく、日本のため」と言った人たちが今生きていれば、きっと「日本のためでなく、世界のため」と言うに違いない。会社のことだけを考えていれば、儲けのことしか考えられない。日本の危機だけを見ていれは、地球の危機は見えてこない。

グローバリゼーションには反対だとか、グローバル・スタンダードに近づくのがチャンスにつながるとか、みんないろいろなことを言う。でも現実は避けて通れない。グローバリゼーションはそこにある。グローバル・スタンダードに近づかなければ置いていかれてしまう。

和久井祥平

2007 年 4 月、三井物産が国内初となる船舶投資ファンドを設立した。「Akebono
Capital」と名付けられたこのファンドは、シンガポール政府が船舶ファイナンスの振
興を目的として実施している優遇税制“Maritime Finance Incentive(MFI)”を利用し、
シンガポールに設立された。
続く 6 月には不動産ファンド運営の GCM が「GS イーグルファンド」という船舶投資
ファンドを設立すると報じられた。また、それらに先立つ 2007 年 1 月には、みずほ証
券が1,000億円規模の船舶投資ファンドを設立すると発表している。
海外に目を向けると、シンガポール取引所に3つの船舶投資ファンドが上場している。
また、先のMFIは、昨年施行されて以来、「Akebono Capital」を含む4ファンドが適用
を受けている。

International Labour Office

The global youth unemployment rate has proved sticky, and remained close to its crisis peak. At 12.6 per cent in 2011 and projected at 12.7 per cent in 2012, the global youth unemployment rate remains at least a full percentage point above its level in 2007. Nearly 75 million youth are unemployed around the world, an increase of more than 4 million since 2007.

Vuk Vukovic

The debate on austerity v stimulus is again the main focus of attention. Particularly due to the recent results of the Greek and French elections where opposition to European “redistributive austerity” is gaining strength. Even though they don’t refer to it as redistributive austerity, but as “painful cuts that are hurting growth”. Even in the very phrasing of the debate as ‘austerity v growth’, it is obvious that people don’t really understand what austerity is, and even less what their governments are doing.
… governments sometimes do tend to use tax hikes to lower the deficit. But essentially the very definition of austerity primarily implies cutting spending and cutting entitlements in order to create more scope for the private sector to grow on its own, i.e. to remove the dependency mentality from people and from businesses.

Tim Harford

Black-Scholes was first written down in the early 1970s but its story starts earlier than that, in the Dojima Rice Exchange in 17th Century Japan where futures contracts were written for rice traders. A simple futures contract says that I will agree to buy rice from you in one year’s time, at a price that we agree right now.
By the 20th Century the Chicago Board of Trade was providing a marketplace for traders to deal not only in futures but in options contracts. An example of an option is a contract where we agree that I can buy rice from you at any time over the next year, at a price that we agree right now – but I don’t have to if I don’t want to.

Ian Stewart

It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial contract when it still had time to run. It was like buying or selling a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming into a gigantic global industry. But when the sub-prime mortgage market turned sour, the darling of the financial markets became the Black Hole equation, sucking money out of the universe in an unending stream. …
The equation itself wasn’t the real problem. It was useful, it was precise, and its limitations were clearly stated. It provided an industry-standard method to assess the likely value of a financial derivative. So derivatives could be traded before they matured. The formula was fine if you used it sensibly and abandoned it when market conditions weren’t appropriate. The trouble was its potential for abuse. It allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.

山本 一郎

日本という小さい市場の中で、企業が群雄割拠して、少ない利益を奪い合っている状況というのは日本にとって困難以外の何物でもない。誰もが「日本は少子化が進み、今後は飛躍的な経済成長を遂げることはむつかしい」ことを知っている。
だが、日本は世界を相手に商売し、利益を上げ続けなければ、資源が乏しく、国際経済の中で埋没していく運命にあることも知っている。隣には中国が13億という巨大な人口を喰わせていくためにあらゆる手段を使って国際経済、貿易体制に挑んでおり、経済大国の地位を中国と争うべき日本は、その役割を見失いつつある。
戦後の奇跡的な経済復興、高度成長の経験もいつしか過去のものとなり、なおかつ現在に至るまで、日本が培った経済力に見合う外交力や軍事力を持ち合わせることはついになかった。

Vincent Mosco

No matter where we turn, whether in the news media, popular culture, or simple conversation, we seem increasingly preoccupied with the notion that computers and communication technology are dramatically transforming society and culture. Advocates typically claim we’re going through a period as significant as the development of agriculture—which transformed us from a nomadic hunting and gathering way of life about ten thousand years ago. Or they claim it’s as significant as the development of industry—which made manufacturing rather than farming central to modern economic and social life beginning about three hundred years ago.

Rethinking Capitalism

… If such contracts had value, then it would seem that producing them created value. There could thus be a financial “industry” that produced financial products, the volume of which is apparently unconstrained by the scarcity of anything in particular. Advances in financial valuation could thus be considered a type of advancing technology that drives economic events as much as any patentable piece of engineering. Thus conceived, the model for valuing derivatives has become a new way of understanding capitalism as a production of new property (a commodity) by means of contract alone.
Rethinking Capitalism is concerned with examining this phenomenon in the context of the broader claims that are made for it as both resolving and accelerating inherent problems in market economies as such. …

Timothy Mitchell

During the second half of the twentieth century, economics established its claim to be the true political science. The idea of “the economy” provided a mode of seeing and a way of organizing the world that could diagnose a country’s fundamental condition, frame the terms of its public debate, picture its collective growth or decline, and propose remedies for its improvement, all in terms of what seemed a legible series of measurements, goals, and comparisons. In the closing decade of the century, after the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the authority of economic science seemed stronger than ever. Employing the language and authority of neoclassical economics, the programs of economic reform and structural adjustment advocated in Washington by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United States government could judge the condition of a nation and its collective well-being by simply measuring its monetary and fiscal balance sheets.

辻井喬

今度の大震災は非常に困難なタイミングに起きましたね。米国をリーダーとするグローバル経済の先が見えて産業構造が変わらなければならない時期に、経済大国である日本が大きなダメージを受けた。原発問題を含めればもっと事態は深刻。驚いた米国は最も有力な従属国に救いの手を差し伸べざるを得ないわけです。
言えることは、今までの日本の復活はないということです。
小さくて弱いものを抑えつける開発独裁型の政策は一応成功したが、今度の復興には通用しない。もう時代が変わったのです。中央と地域の関係も変化し、さまざまな格差や貧困も広がっている。被災地をどのように自主的な社会と経済にし、国がどう協力するのか。そこでは従来のパラダイム(社会的価値観)を転換する必要があるのです。
「頑張ろう日本、日本は強い国」というコマーシャルがあるでしょ。あれは今の実態を敗戦後の復興と同じようにとらえていて、どうするかという思想がない。どうも政府の考え方が昔のままのようでたいへん不安です。

Transparency International

Transparency International (TI), the global civil society organisation leading the fight against corruption, brings people together in a powerful worldwide coalition to end the devastating impact of corruption on men, women and children around the world.
TI’s mission is to create change towards a world free of corruption.
TI publishes the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) annually ranking countries “by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.” The CPI generally defines corruption as “the misuse of public power for private benefit.” As of 2010, the CPI ranks 178 countries “on a scale from 10 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt).”

Sebastian Mallaby

No reasonable person can doubt that the US must eventually raise taxes. The country is running an unsustainable budget deficit. Its tax take, measured as a share of gross domestic product, is the lowest in the OECD.

Equally, no reasonable person can doubt that the tax system must be used to soften inequality. Some inequality is good: it is a spur to enterprise and effort. But too much is clearly bad: it punctures meritocracy. As gaps in wealth and income have widened, it has become steadily harder for talented poor kids to compete against lavishly tutored rich kids armed with iPhones full of contacts. This is politically corrosive, morally unjust, and a shocking waste of human capital.

日本経済団体連合会 21世紀政策研究所 グローバルJAPAN特別委員会

グローバリゼーションの深化

  • グローバリゼーションの進展により、ヒト・モノ・カネが国境を自由に超える時代に
  • マーケットの拡大、生産性向上、安価な財・サービスの購入など、個人や企業がメリットを享受
  • 国際的相互依存が深まる一方、特定国のショックがグローバルに伝播(例:リーマンショック、東日本大震災によるサプライチェーンへの影響など)
  • TPPをはじめとするグローバルなルールの策定において国際協調が不可欠に
  • 貿易財に関わる製造業の賃金水準が国際的な収斂圧力に晒される

M K Bhadrakumar

The Delhi Declaration makes an undisguised bid for strengthened representation of emerging and developing countries in the institutions of global governance”. This is no vacuous claim. Because, BRICS also has a special experience to share – having “recovered quickly from the global crisis.” The West has not heard this sort of idiom before. This is not the global South asking plaintively for “more”. This is an open demand for “power sharing”.

The West has never been spoken to like this before in all these centuries since the Industrial Revolution. The tides of history are, clearly, turning.

D. Aurobinda Mahapatra

One of the most important achievements of the summit is the agreement among the members to foster trade in local currencies. This shows the rising prowess and assertiveness of member countries. The instability in global economy and vulnerability of hard currencies like dollar pushed these emerging economies to explore prospects of trade in local currencies. Such a development will definitely impact the role of dollar in shaping global economy, and likely shift the global economic centre of power from the West to the East. The BRICS countries have multilateral trade to the tune of $230 billion, which will likely touch $500 billion by 2015. All the countries of the grouping are developing faster despite the constraints posed by the global financial crisis. China has predicted to grow at the 7.5 per cent in the coming year, while India is likely to grow at the rate of 6.9 per cent in the coming year. The trade between these countries in local currencies will likely provide much leverage to the countries particularly in global economic matters.

BRICS Summit

BRICS is a platform for dialogue and cooperation amongst countries that represent 43% of the world’s population, for the promotion of peace, security and development in a multi-polar, inter-dependent and increasingly complex, globalizing world. Coming, as we do, from Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America, the transcontinental dimension of our interaction adds to its value and significance.

We are concerned over the current global economic situation. While the BRICS recovered relatively quickly from the global crisis, growth prospects worldwide have again got dampened by market instability especially in the euro zone. The build-up of sovereign debt and concerns over medium to long-term fiscal adjustment in advanced countries are creating an uncertain environment for global growth. Further, excessive liquidity from the aggressive policy actions taken by central banks to stabilize their domestic economies have been spilling over into emerging market economies, fostering excessive volatility in capital flows and commodity prices. The immediate priority at hand is to restore market confidence and get global growth back on track.

Ha-Joon Chang

Since the rise of neo-liberalism in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, many people in the rich countries, both inside and outside the academia, have come to take the view that the developing countries are what they are only because of their own inabilities and corruption and that the rich countries have no moral obligations to help them. Indeed, there is a growing view that helping the developing countries is actually bad for them because it will only encourage dependency mentality.

Fortunately, the above view is not the mainstream view in all rich countries. Most people still believe that, with a strong help from the rich countries, the developing countries can pull themselves out of poverty. The most ‘progressive’ and comprehensive of the mainstream discourses on development along this line is arguably embodied in the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

According to the UN, the MDGs’ eight goals are:
Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education.
Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women.
Goal 4: Reduce child mortality.
Goal 5: Improve maternal health.
Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability.
Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development.

There are many different elements in the MDGs, especially as each goal has a number of ‘targets’ that span across different sub-issues, but most of them relate to reducing poverty and improving education and health in poor countries. This is obvious for the case of goals 1-6, but telling from the targets under its heading, even goal 7 (environmental sustainability) is partly about health (improving access to safe drinking water and increasing access to improved sanitation).

Laudable these goals and targets may be, their sum total does not amount to development in the sense we are talking about, as they pay no serious attention to the transformation of productive structure and capabilities.

The only explicit ‘development’ dimension in the MDGs is embodied in Goal 8. The targets under this heading include: development of an ‘open, rule-based, predictable, nondiscriminatory trading system’; reduction or even writing-off of developing country foreign debt; increase in foreign aid from rich countries, including trade-related technical assistance; provision of access to affordable essential drugs for developing countries; and the spread of new technologies, mainly information and communications technologies.

The emphasis in this vision is very much on the trinity of increased aid, debt reduction, and increased trade. Debt reduction and increased aid (unless they are on very large scales, which they are not going to be) are simply enabling conditions (and in which the developing countries are mere recipients rather than originators), rather than those that determine the contents of development. Thus seen, the view on the relationship between trade and development is the key to understanding the vision of development underlying the MDGs. So what are the contents of an ‘open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading system’ that the MDG agenda talks about here?

Telling from the concrete indicators that measure the ‘developmental’ contribution of the world trading system in the MDG discourse, we see that the ‘pro-developmental’ trading system boils down to one where the rich countries reduce their tariffs and subsidies on agriculture, textile, and clothing exports from developing countries, especially the least developed countries (LDCs).

However, the understanding of the relationship between trade and development implicit in this vision is non-developmental. In this vision, the best way to make trade help development is by liberalizing the rich country markets so that the developing countries can sell more of what they are already selling – or ‘trade their way out of poverty’, as a popular slogan puts it. There is no notion that developing countries need to get out of what they are doing now (the specialization in which is after all what keeps them poor) and move into higher-productivity activities, if they are to achieve development.

Thus seen, the MDG envisages ‘development without development’. Most of what it takes as ‘development’ is really provision of basic needs and poverty reduction. What little attention it pays to the question of production is based on the view that development can be achieved by specializing more in the products in which a country has comparative advantage (supported by the rich countries reducing debts and giving more aids).

However, doing more of the same thing in terms of one’s productive activities is not how today’s developed countries have become developed. Starting from 18th century Britain through to 19th century USA, Germany, and Sweden, down to 20th century Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, history has repeatedly shown that development is achieved by upgrading a country’s productive capabilities and moving into more ‘difficult’ industries before they acquire comparative advantages in those new activities, by using protection, subsidies, and other means of market-defying government intervention (Chang, 2002a, 2007a). Let me give some prominent examples.

In 1960, when Nokia entered the electronics industry, per capita income of Finland was only 41% that of the US, the frontier country in electronics and overall ($1,172 vs. $2,881). It was thus not a big surprise that the electronics subsidiary of Nokia ran losses for 17 years and remained in business mainly because of cross-subsidization from mature firms in the same business group (helped by government procurement programmes).

In 1961, per capita income of Japan was a mere 19% that of the US ($563 vs. $2,934), but Japan was then protecting and promoting all sorts of ‘wrong’ industries through high tariffs, government subsidies, and ban on foreign direct investment – automobile, steel, shipbuilding, and so on.

To take an even more dramatic example, take the case of South Korea. Its (then) state-owned steel mill, POSCO, which had been set up in 1968, started production in 1972, when its per capita income was a mere 5.5% of the US income ($322 vs. $5,838). To make it worse, in the same year, South Korea decided to deviate even further from its comparative advantage by launching its ambitious Heavy and Chemical Industrialization programme, which promoted shipbuilding, (home-designed) automobile, machinery, and many other ‘wrong’ industries. Even as late as 1983, when Samsung decided to design its own semiconductors, Korea’s income was only 14% that of the US ($2,118 vs. $15,008).

By discussing these examples of countries defying the market and entering activities where they do not have comparative advantage, I do not mean that all forms of ‘traditional’ activities, such as agriculture or textile/clothing, are incompatible with development. After all, the Netherlands is still the world’s third largest exporter of agriculture despite not having much land (it has the fifth highest population density in the world, excluding city states or island states with territories less than, and including, that of Hong Kong). For another example, Germany used to be the world’s fifth largest exporter of textiles and clothing until as late as the early 1990s. However, these were possible only because these countries applied advanced technologies to these ‘traditional’ activities and upgraded them – hydroponic culture in the case of Dutch agriculture and specialty textiles and high-class design in the case of German textile/clothing. At the other extreme, countries like the Philippines export a lot of high-tech products, like electronics, but no one calls it developed because the production uses someone else’s technologies, is organized by someone else, and has few roots in the domestic economy. Should all the multinational companies decide to leave the Philippines tomorrow, it will be reduced to exporting primary commodities.

Once again, these examples confirm my earlier point that it is not what one has but how one has got it that determines whether a country is developed or not. Without any vision of transformation in productive structure and the upgrading of the productive capabilities that make it possible, the vision of development behind the MDGs can only be described as ‘development without development’.

板谷敏彦

統治システムを隋・唐代と中国から輸入した日本は、宋代から中国とたもとを分かち、身分制を温存した。「中国化」の対立語は「江戸時代化」である。
日本は明治維新で一度は「中国化」するものの、選挙制度を通じて地域利権代表による「江戸時代化」へと逆戻りしてしまう。そのあらわれが、政治家の世襲、地縁、地元の利権などであった。
ところが今度は世界が「中国化」しはじめた。レーガンやサッチャーの新自由主義の波である。規制緩和は既得権益の撤廃を意味した。世襲議員が頼りなく見え、利権を持っていた業者、公務員、労働組合までも含めた既得権益がおかされる。これまで自分を守ってくれていた地縁にも終身雇用の会社にも頼れなくなってしまった。
「日本化」を克服するには「中国化」の道しかないのであろうか。

與那覇潤

中世の昔から日本は「グローバル・スタンダードに合わせるのか、日本独自の道をゆくのか」で揺れてきて。。。ただし、その「グローバル・スタンダード」は「中国標準」のことだった。
実際、。。。宋朝以降の中国の国内秩序と、現在賛否両論の「グローバリズム」の国際秩序は、すごく似ていて。よく言えば徹底的な競争社会、悪く言うと弱肉強食の格差社会で、形式的には「平等」な条件で自由競争していることになってるにもかかわらず、実態としては猛烈な権力の「一極化」や富の偏在が起きている。そういう中国=グローバル社会のあり方を受け入れるか否か、で国論が二分されたから、日本は中世のあいだはものすごい内戦状態だったんだけど、結局、「受け入れない」という結論を出したおかげで、近世にはピタリと平和になって。。。
今日のグローバリゼーションの核にあるとされる「西洋文明」というのは、新参者として後から日中に割り込んできたわけ。しかもコイツが曲者で、ある面では中華文明に似てるのだけど、他の面では日本文明に近い。その結果として、20世紀の半ばまでは日本文明のほうが相対的にうまく適応していたのですが、冷戦が終わる頃から、「停滞する日本」と「台頭する中国」という構図が出てきちゃった。

>佚名

>世界上目前使用人数最多的语言是汉语,据统计,汉语的使用者数量超过16亿,主要分布在亚洲地区,是世界使用者人数最多的语言,使用的广泛度居世界第二位。
汉语又叫中文、汉文、中国话,包含书面语以及口语两部分,古代书面汉语称为文言文,现代书面汉语一般指现代标准汉语,方言众多,某些方言的口语之间差异较大,而书面语相对统一。
汉语主要分布国家和地区为中国大陆、香港特区、澳门特区、台湾地区、新加坡共和国等地,据联合国教科文组织统计,世界上会说汉语的人大约有16亿,是世界人口数量使用最多的语言(占世界人口使用语言五分之一)、使用广泛度居世界第二(英语广泛度第一)。
汉语是联合国承认的官方六大的工作语言之一,它以北京语音为标准音,却又不等同于北京话,是摒弃了北京语音中的一些土音而形成的,汉族的通用语在中国大陆称为普通话,在香港、澳门、台湾称为国语,在新加坡、马来西亚称为华语,但较之普通话有部分差异。
吉尼斯网友情提示:古汉语也曾对其周边国家的语言文字产生过重要影响。例如日语、朝鲜语、越南语中都保留有大量的古汉语借词以及古汉语书写体系文字。

>Jak

>Approximately 375 million people speak English as their first language. English today is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. However, when combining native and non-native speakers it is probably the most commonly spoken language in the world, though possibly second to a combination of the Chinese languages.
Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to over a billion depending on how literacy or mastery is defined and measured.

>田村秀男

>ユーロ加盟の問題5カ国、ギリシャ、ポルトガル、アイルランド、イタリア、スペインと、フランス、ドイツの標準国債の利回り推移である。2002年にユーロ建て国債が普及して以来、各国債利回りはほぼ1本の縄となり安定していたが、08年9月のリーマン・ショックに直撃されバラけてしまった。

>Simon Constable

>… Yes, there are some mammoth-sized unknowns out there that could hurt your returns. But when the biggest “what ifs” are resolved, you could also profit, if you play it right.

  1. What if Europe gets worse? No matter how much investors might desire it, Europe’s economic mess just won’t go away. But the big fear is that it will deteriorate even more before it gets better.
  2. What if U.S. housing finally improves? It’s now close to five years since the housing bubble burst. When it rebounds isn’t only an investment question, but of vital importance to households as well.
  3. What if the jobs recovery falters? The long-awaited jobs recovery seems to have arrived. The unemployment rate has dropped steadily, albeit slowly, from 9.1% in August to 8.5% in December. The big question: Can it be sustained?
  4. What if there’s another budget crisis? Last summer, investors watched in horror as Congress wrestled over the government’s finances. They even risked the first-ever default on U.S. debt.
  5. What if China’s economy heats up? China’s economy matters because it’s the second largest in the world. Over the past decade, the communist country has grown fast, but lately it has been cooling off. The question is: What happens when it heats up again?

>Michael Aneiro

>The trailing 12 month global speculative-grade corporate default rate continues to decline, finishing the fourth quarter of 2011 at 1.7%, slightly down from 1.8% in the previous quarter and 3.2% a year ago.
In the U.S., the speculative-grade default rate edged lower from 2.0% in the third quarter to 1.8% in the fourth quarter, but in Europe the default rate almost doubled from 1.4% to 2.7%. A year ago, the default rate was higher at 3.4% in the U.S. but lower at 2.3% in Europe.
… the global speculative-grade default will rise to 2.9% by the end of 2012. … the global default rate could rise to as high as 8.5% in a pessimistic scenario if the U.S. recovery stalls and the European debt crisis deteriorates materially.
By region, … the default rate will climb to 2.8% in the U.S. by end of 2012 under its baseline scenario, versus 3.7% for Europe. Across industries over the coming year, … default rates to be highest in the consumer services sector in the U.S. and the business services sector in Europe.

>Thomas L. Friedman

>Islamist movements have long dominated Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both the ayatollahs in Iran and the Wahhabi Salafists in Saudi Arabia, though, were able to have their ideology and the fruits of modernity, too, because they had vast oil wealth to buy off any contradictions. Saudi Arabia could underutilize its women and impose strict religious mores on its society, banks and schools. Iran’s clerics could snub the world, pursue nuclearization and impose heavy political and religious restrictions. And both could still offer their people improved living standards, because they had oil.
Egypt’s Islamist parties will not have that luxury. They will have to open up to the world, and they seem to be realizing that. Egypt is a net importer of oil. It also imports 40 percent of its food. And tourism constitutes one-tenth of its gross domestic product. With unemployment rampant and the Egyptian pound eroding, Egypt will probably need assistance from the International Monetary Fund, a major injection of foreign investment and a big upgrade in modern education to provide jobs for all those youths who organized last year’s rebellion. Egypt needs to be integrated with the world.

>Curriculum 21

>Curriculum 21 is the outgrowth of the work of a dynamic group of educators worldwide attempting to help colleagues transform curriculum and school designs to match the needs of 21st century learners.

>Helia Ebrahimi

>The unexpected breakdown in talks between Greece and its private-sector creditors has taken the country a step closer to bankruptcy after a failure to sign up lenders to a voluntary and “orderly” 50pc haircut to their holdings.
The clock is ticking for Greece, as a deal must be reached before March 20, when the country is due to receive a further €130bn (£107bn) bail-out tranche from the International Monetary Fund and must make a key €14.5bn bond payment.
The problem centres on the difference between lenders agreeing to a “voluntary” and orderly default – which would mean swapping into bonds with a lower value – and lenders refusing terms, which would cause a default.
This type of “credit event” would trigger billions of insurance claims through credit default swaps (CDS), insurance policies taken out to protect investors in the event of a default.
The problem is that, of the €315bn of Greek debt outstanding, only €7.8bn is covered by Greek CDS. The vast majority of Greek debt is held by European banks, which have little insurance on their exposure. Most Greek CDS are held by hedge fund managers – accused by Germany and France of financially benefiting from sovereign woes. Some claim that hedge fund managers would benefit from a default, with Europe’s banks being the losers.

>NHK

>ヨーロッパの国々を脅かす国債危機「ソブリン・クライシス」。そして野火のように広がるアメリカのデモ「ウォール街を占拠せよ」。そして日本はその二つの危機に挟まれて記録的な円高に見舞われている。背景にあるのは、“自由”な金融市場で広がる“マネー”。時として制御を失い、リーマン・ショックによる金融機関の破たんのみならず、国家を揺るがす事態を引き起こすパワーを持つに至った。世界はいま、国家の財政危機と銀行などの金融危機が同時に進行するただ中にある。経済危機が起きる度に“マネー”が引き起こす新たな“バブル”によって乗り越えてきた世界経済。しかし、先進国をも巻き込んだ連鎖の中で格差が拡大、失業が解消されず、不況が長引き、社会保障制度まで大きく揺らいでいる。日本も、もはや“対岸の火事”ではない。GDP国内総生産の2倍を超える財政赤字を抱える日本では、消費税増税の議論が本格化する。世界は、実体経済を凌駕し、国家をも左右する“マネー”がもたらす困難を乗り越えることができるのか。

>Louis Gargour

>There will be significant market dislocation, and where there is dislocation investment opportunities abound. In Italy, France and Spain there are global companies with strong balance sheets doing well. The sovereign dislocation has created the corporate opportunity.

>Lawrence Summers

>The agricultural economy gave way to the industrial one because progress enabled demands for food to be met by only a small fraction of the population freeing large numbers of people to work elsewhere. The same process is now under way with respect to manufacturing and a range of services, reducing employment prospects for most citizens. At the same time, just as in the early days of the industrial era the combination of substantial dislocations and greater ability to produce at scale is enabling a lucky few to acquire great fortunes.

>Paul Collier

>Africa has been very slow in liberalizing internally. Very often the barriers of trade within Africa are bigger than the barriers facing outsiders. And that is what fair trade should be all about. It is unfair of Europe to demand from Africa that it worsens its terms of trade by giving Europe preferential access. That is the message to the fair trade movement. Trade really matters and fair trade really matters. Right now, the European Commission trade officials are negotiating with Africans and trying to force them to accept the worse for their terms of trade. They are doing that on our behalf and we should stand up and say we don’t want that.

>NPR

>As people’s incomes rise in a developing nation, so does the amount of food they eat. That’s what has been happening in China for the past 30 years. But many people, especially in the middle class, are discovering that you don’t have to eat and eat just because there’s plenty of food available.
Still, fast food has become a habit for a lot of people. KFC now operates more than 3,000 stores in China. McDonald’s has about half that many, and there are dozens of Chinese chains, too. It’s no surprise, then, that Chinese people are getting fat.
But fast food is only part of the problem. People are also just eating more.
… But an analyst points out that a lot of traditional food — like yotiao, a double deep-fried dough stick that people love to eat for breakfast — isn’t that healthful. He says what people really need is to learn how to make good choices.
… And fortunately, there is plenty of nutritious food available.
… In many ways, figuring out how to stay slim and healthy in modern China is a bit like the struggle Chinese face in other parts of life. It’s how to decide what to keep from the past, and what to take from all the new choices a growing economy offers.

>Jeremy Rifkin

>We are entering a new phase in world history – one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

The new information and telecommunication technologies have the potential to both liberate and destabilize civilization in the coming century. Whether the new technologies free us for a life of increasing leisure or result in massive unemployment and a global depression will depend in large part on how each nation addresses the question of productivity advances.

>Paul Krugman

>What can be done about mass unemployment? All the wise heads agree: there are no quick or easy answers. There is work to be done, but workers aren’t ready to do it — they’re in the wrong places, or they have the wrong skills. Our problems are “structural,” and will take many years to solve.
But don’t bother asking for evidence that justifies this bleak view. There isn’t any. On the contrary, all the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand — full stop. Saying that there are no easy answers sounds wise, but it’s actually foolish: our unemployment crisis could be cured very quickly if we had the intellectual clarity and political will to act.
In other words, structural unemployment is a fake problem, which mainly serves as an excuse for not pursuing real solutions.

>Tyler Cowen

>Political discourse and behavior have become highly polarized, and what I like to call the ‘honest middle’ cannot be heard above the din. People often blame the economic policies of ‘the other side’ or they belligerently snipe at foreign competition. But we are failing to understand why we are failing. All of these problems have a single, little-noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. We have built social and economic institutions on the expectation of a lot of low-hanging fruit, but that fruit is mostly gone.
In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies. Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are barer than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.

>Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

>The grim unemployment statistics puzzled many because other measures of business health rebounded pretty quickly after the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009. GDP growth averaged 2.6% in the seven quarters after the recession’s end, a rate 75% as high as the long-term average over 1948-2007. U.S. corporate profits reached new records. And by 2010, investment in equipment and software returned to 95% of its historical peak, the fastest recovery of equipment investment in a generation.
Economic history teaches that when companies grow, earn profits, and buy equipment, they also typically hire workers. But American companies didn’t resume hiring after the Great Recession ended. The volume of layoffs quickly returned to pre-recession levels, so companies stopped shedding workers. But the number of new hires remained severely depressed. Companies brought new machines in, but not new people.
Why has the scourge of unemployment been so persistent? Analysts offer three alternative explanations: cyclicality, stagnation, and the “end of work.”

>Peter Clark

>China, Japan and Korea finalized their feasibility study for a Trilateral FTA (CJKFTA). These countries account for 20% of global GDP and are ideally placed to expand any arrangement they conclude to the tigers of ASEAN.
CJKFTA envisages an institutional framework which will foster trilateral co-operation and develop win-win-win situations. This is a refreshing change from Washington’s highly mercantilist approach to the TPP, based on selling access to newcomers by demanding pre-conditions which the U.S itself is not prepared to undertake.
An integrated set of principles will guide the CJKFTA negotiations:

  • it will be a comprehensive and high-quality FTA;
  • it should be WTO-consistent;
  • it should strive for balanced result and achieve win-win-win situations on the basis of reciprocity and mutual benefit; and
  • the negotiations should be conducted in a constructive and positive manner with due consideration to the sensitive sectors in each country.

>Yonhap

>South Korea will map out its action plans on a free trade agreement (FTA) with China and Japan before the heads of state from the three Northeast Asian countries meet in May.
Based on consultations with China and Japan and the results of the joint study, we will prepare our action plans before the summit talks.
Detailed timetables, a negotiation road map and other preparations will be included in the action plans, a ministry official noted.
South Korea, China and Japan recently concluded a year-long joint study on the feasibility of an FTA with their final meeting in PyeongChang, some 180 kilometers east of Seoul.
They concluded the deal would be a “win-win-win” action that would provide a comprehensive cooperation platform for all three countries.
The three Asian countries have seen their share of global trade grow over past few decades.

>Peter Ford

>Here’s a telling tidbit for those who bewail America’s declining influence in the world: Samoa is skipping Friday to get closer to China.
At midnight on Thursday, the Pacific island nation is doing the exact opposite of what it did in 1892, when it switched to the East of the international dateline and celebrated July 4 twice in order to fall more closely in line with Californian clocks. At the time, that made trading sense.
Today, though, “we do a lot more business with New Zealand and Australia, China, and Pacific Rim countries,” said Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi earlier this year, announcing the change.
So Samoans, who currently live 20 miles east of the dateline, will go to sleep on Thursday night, skip Friday, and wake up on Saturday morning on the Asian side of the imaginary line.

>Elisabeth Rosenthal

>Clamshell containers on supermarket shelves in the United States may depict verdant fields, tangles of vines and ruby red tomatoes. But at this time of year, the tomatoes, peppers and basil certified as organic by the Agriculture Department often hail from the Mexican desert, and are nurtured with intensive irrigation.
… even as more Americans buy foods with the organic label, the products are increasingly removed from the traditional organic ideal: produce that is not only free of chemicals and pesticides but also grown locally on small farms in a way that protects the environment.
… from now until spring, farms from Mexico to Chile to Argentina that grow organic food for the United States market are enjoying their busiest season.
… while traditional organic farmers saw a blemish or odd shape simply as nature’s variations, workers at Sueño Tropical are instructed to cull tomatoes that do not meet the uniform shape, size and cosmetic requirement of clients like Whole Foods. Those “seconds” are sold locally.

>藤沢数希

>日本で労働者に月30万円の給料を払って洋服を作っていた会社が日本の工場を閉鎖して、中国で月1万円の給料で洋服を作ってそれを日本に輸入して売るわけです。だから、日本で高い給料を貰っていた人は失業して、逆に中国で仕事がなかった人に職がもたらされるのです。しかし、中国の労働者がどんどん豊かになっていき月1万円では働いてくれなくなって、逆に日本の失業者が例えば月10万円でも働きたいと思いはじめます。そして洋服を作る人の給料が中国でも日本でも月5万円ぐらいに落ち着くのです。このように同一労働同一賃金の圧力が世界中のあらゆる労働者にかかっているのです。
グローバリゼーションによって、先進国の単純労働者の賃金が急速に低下していくのです。しかし、このことは悪いことではありません。もともと何の努力もせずにただ先進国に生まれたと言うだけの人間に贅沢をさせ、たまたま途上国に生まれてチャンスのない人間に貧しい暮らしを強いる方がよっぽどおかしな話なのです。グローバリゼーションは既得権益を破壊する力を内包しているのです。

>Andrew J. Bacevich

>“Is America Over?” That question adorns the cover of the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, premier organ of the foreign policy establishment.  As is typically the case with that establishment, Foreign Affairs is posing the wrong question, one designed chiefly to elicit a misleading, if broadly reassuring answer.
Proclaim it from the rooftops: No, America is not “over.”  Yet a growing accumulation of evidence suggests that America today is not the America of 1945.  Nor does the international order of the present moment bear more than a passing resemblance to that which existed in the heyday of American power.  Everyone else on the planet understands this.  Perhaps it’s finally time for Americans — starting with American politicians — to do so as well.  Should they refuse, a painful comeuppance awaits.

>Bloomberg

>The agreement announced between China and Japan to strengthen financial ties and promote yuan-yen trade is a small, but notable, step toward a new global economy. Its immediate practical significance is limited, yet the deal signals that a deeper transformation is under way — and one that the world should welcome.
The plan was a surprise: It marks a warming of relations that had been chilly of late. The accord still lacks a timetable for implementation, but once in force it will let Chinese and Japanese trading companies switch between yuan and yen without converting to dollars first. This will encourage commerce by reducing currency risk and trading costs.
The agreement will let a Japanese-backed institution sell yuan bonds in China, helping to open China’s capital market. In return, Japan will convert some of its foreign- exchange reserves into Chinese bonds. China has signed financial pacts with other nations, mainly in Asia, but the size of China-Japan trade — $340 billion last year, and growing fast — makes this deal the most important by far.
Warmer relations and short-term benefits for regional trade, though, are not the main reasons the agreement matters. China seeks a bigger role for its currency in global markets, and wants power in international forums that is commensurate with its economic might. The sooner its currency is fully convertible and its economy is open to global investment, the sooner this will happen.

>Andrew Meier

>Many years ago, when I was still living in the Moscow kommunalka a few blocks from the Kremlin with my friends Andrei and Lera, they took me to visit a dacha far outside town. It belonged to a friend of Lera’s, an old Jewish woman, the soft-spoken matriarch of five generations of women. She had lived several lives, had survived the ravages of World War II and Stalinism. If anyone, I thought, she would know.
What was the difference, I asked, between Stalin and Hitler?
“Hitler,” she replied without pause, “killed only his enemies.”

On June 6, 2002, it officially declared Russia a free market economy. The optimism was shared by few Russians. The poverty line after all still cut through a third of Russia’s households. Per capita GDP, at twenty-one hundred dollars in 2001. True, stocks were up again, but who owned stock? The capitalization of Russia’s entire stock market, moreover, equaled less than a sixth of General Electric’s. True, the fall of the Soviet bloc had opened new markets for the men who now controlled Russia’s oil and gas, but the rest o the populace discovered only the downside of globalization: the onslaught of foreign brands and the competitive advantage of exporters East and West.

>Steve Keen

>The global economy of the early 21st century looks a lot more like the economic textbook ideal that did the world of the 1950s. Barriers to trade have been abolished or dramatically reduced, regulations controlling the flow of capital have been liberalised, currencies are now valued by the market rather than being set by governments; in so many spheres of economic interaction, the government’s role has been substantially reduced. All these changes have followed the advance of economists that the unfettered market is the best way to allocate resources, and that well-intentioned interventions which oppose market forces will actually do more harm than good.
With the market so much more in control of the global economy now than fifty years ago, then if economists are right, the world should be a manifestly better place: it should be growing faster, with more stability, and income should go to those who deserve it.
Unfortunately, the world refuses to dance the expected tune. In particularly, the final ten years of the 20th century were marked, not by tranquil growth, but by crises: …

>Philip Stevens

>

A new report from the Campaign for Fighting Diseases explores the so-called “10/90 Gap” – the idea that only 10% of global health research is devoted to conditions accounting for 90% of the global disease burden. The report shows that the 10/90 Gap is a myth.

Vilfredo Pareto

  • 20 percent of the customers account for 80 percent of the sales.
  • 20 percent of the products or services account for 80 percent of the profits.
  • 20 percent of your stock takes up 80 percent of your warehouse space.
  • 80 percent of your stock comes from 20 percent of your suppliers.
  • 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your sales force.
  • 20 percent of your staff will cause 80 percent of your problems.
  • 20 percent of a company’s staff will output 80 percent of its production.

>Nouriel Roubini

>

Europe is fully occupied for the moment with saving the eurozone. Japan is likewise tied down with complex political and economic problems at home. None of these powers’ governments has the time, resources, or domestic political capital needed for a new bout of international heavy lifting. Meanwhile, there are no credible answers to transnational challenges without the direct involvement of emerging powers such as Brazil, China, and India. Yet these countries are far too focused on domestic development to welcome the burdens that come with new responsibilities abroad.
We are now living in a G-Zero world, one in which no single country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage—or the will—to drive a truly international agenda. The result will be intensified conflict on the international stage over vitally important issues, such as international macroeconomic coordination, financial regulatory reform, trade policy, and climate change. This new order has far-reaching implications for the global economy, as companies around the world sit on enormous stockpiles of cash, waiting for the current era of political and economic uncertainty to pass. Many of them can expect an extended wait.

>杨斌

>

2011年6月,美国著名经济学家鲁比尼认为,当前美国、欧洲和日本的三大经济同时陷入低迷状态,中国经济又面临着房地产泡沫濒临破裂的形势,这意味着全球经济很可能被拖入具有强烈震撼力的“完美风暴”之中。中国许多人一直担忧房地产市场崩盘可能带来的冲击,这引发了国内外舆论关于中国经济面临“硬着陆”危险的热议。美国纽约大学教授鲁比尼曾准确地预见到将会爆发次贷危机,他最近还指出马克思关于资本主义有自我毁灭倾向的预言是正确的,他是西方为数不多的具有深远洞察力和真知灼见的经济学家,他再次发出的全球经济面临重大风险的预警值得引起高度重视。当前美国和欧洲陷入了严重主权债务危机,中国经济因控制通货膨胀和房地产泡沫而趋于减速,日本经济长期低迷后因地震、核灾难陷入经济衰退,这些不利因素确实可能汇聚起来并发生相互共振,带来远远超过单一不利因素的更为强烈的经济冲击。

>OccupyWallStreet

>

On July 13, 2011, “Culture Jammers HQ” at Adbusters issued a call to action: Occupy Wall Street! The goal stated is to gather 20,000 people to Wall Street, in New York, NY on September 17, 2011, beginning a popular occupation of that space for two months and more. Inspired by the popular assemblies of Egypt, Spain, Oaxaca and worldwide, those gathered will work to find a common voice in one clear, unified demand.
This is why we’ve created OccupyWallSt.org. Technology has made it easier than ever before for the people to stay in close contact and assist one another in acheiving a collective goal. Our aim is to make these tools available so our users–the true organizers of this event–can make an occuptation of Wall St. successful. We may not be able to teach a person to fish, or do it on their behalf, but we can build a damn good fishing pole.
But it isn’t enough to simply make these tools freely available, they must also belong to the people. So we’ve taken the time to release our work as an open source project. This way others may use and build upon our work freely without any dependence on our leadership.
The sovereign people of any nation have the power, the right, and the duty, of guiding the destiny of their nation. Most just do not realize this. An organizer brings the process of realization.
Why occupy Wall Street? Because it belongs to us! Because we can!

>East Site Inc.

>Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world.

As merchants and other travellers traversed Silk Road, they also carried culture, art, philosophies and beliefs with them. Buddhism came to China on The Silk Road and Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Confucianism all had their itinerant proselytiser. Goods and ideas were exchanged in cities with exotic names like Antioch, Babylon, Erzerum, Hamadn, Bukhara, Samarkand, Khiva, Kashgar and Xian, as well as in dozens of others whose names are now lost in time. However, many remain and travellers again have the chance to visit these sites, relive the legends and capture some of the magic.

>International Coffee Organization

>Initially, the authorities in Yemen actively encouraged coffee drinking. The first coffeehouses or kaveh kanes opened in Mecca and quickly spread throughout the Arab world, thriving as places where chess was played, gossip was exchanged and singing, dancing and music were enjoyed. Nothing quite like this had existed before: a place where social and business life could be conducted in comfortable surroundings and where – for the price of a cup of coffee – anyone could venture. Perhaps predictably, the Arabian coffeehouse soon became a centre of political activity and was suppressed. Over the next few decades coffee and coffeehouses were banned numerous times but kept reappearing until eventually an acceptable way out was found when a tax was introduced on both.

>frelkins

>

  • … more than 22 million people around the world who produce the second most valuable lawfully traded commodity in the world: coffee.
  • … coffee is grown in 50 countries around the world.
  • the market for coffee has always been affected by temporary swings in supply because of changes in weather patterns and the ravages of war, labor strife and other cyclical events.
  • … has increased growth in worldwide production of all types of coffee from 85.7 million bags in 1995/1996 to 117 million bags in 2001/02.
  • lower prices, however, have not caused increased demand. … supply far exceeds demand on a global basis.
  • the market, as virtually every knowledgeable authority would agree, remains clearly oversupplied.

>Anne Applebaum

>

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: It reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy works only within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A “global community” cannot be a national democracy. And a national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world.

>Globalization 101

>

Is it the integration of economic, political, and cultural systems across the globe? Or is it the dominance of developed countries in decision-making, at the expense of poorer, less powerful nations? Is globalization a force for economic growth, prosperity, and democratic freedom? Or is it a force for environmental devastation, exploitation of the developing world, and suppression of human rights? Does globalization only benefit the rich or can the poor take advantage of it to improve their well-being?

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

World military expenditure in 2010 is estimated to have been $1630 billion, an increase of 1.3 per cent in real terms.
The USA has increased its military spending by 81 per cent since 2001, and now accounts for 43 per cent of the global total, six times its nearest rival China. At 4.8 per cent of GDP, US military spending in 2010 represents the largest economic burden outside the Middle East.

>Yochai Benkler

>

I believe we are ready to break free of the selfishness mythand embrace human cooperation as the powerful and po-tentially positive force that it is. We as a society are in themidst of great disruptions in technology, business, ideology,and science. Ideas, trends, practices, and habits of mindtend to cohere over periods of time. When any relatively stable and coherent system—an economy, a country, or acommunity—suffers a shock, it leads to a new flexibility, anew openness to different ways of explaining our world andorganizing our lives. This is the way we come to reexam-ine old practices, try new ones, and adapt to the changeshappening around us. The economic collapse of 2008has forced all of us to come to terms with the fallibility of economic and financial systems built on self-interest. Thisdoesn’t mean we’re all about to become socialists (as someon the right might suggest). It simply means we shouldopen our minds to the possibility that the Invisible Handof the unregulated markets is a poor explanation of actualmarkets and actual human beings. It means that we shouldlook to ways we can harness cooperation and collaborationto improve the systems we inhabit, rather than stubbornly cling to impoverished descriptions of those systems.

Jeffrey Sachs

At the Monterrey Financing for Development Conference in 2002, world leaders pledged “to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7%” of their national income in international aid. In today’s dollars, that would amount to almost $200 billion each year.
In 2005, total aid from the 22 richest countries to the world’s developing countries was just $106 billion—a shortfall of $119 billion dollars from the 0.7% promise. On average, the world’s richest countries provided just 0.33% of their GNP in official development assistance (ODA). The United States provided just 0.22%.
The cost of supporting countries to meet the Goals would require donors to increase ODA to 0.44% of GNP by 2006 (or $135 billion) and to plan for a scale-up to 0.54% by 2015 (or $195 billion) – well within the bounds of the 0.7% promised in Monterrey. This means that of the combined rich world GNP of approximately $30 trillion dollars, on average just $150 billion a year would be enough to get the world on track to ending extreme poverty throughout the world.

>Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

>Every year, 9 million children die before their fifth birthday. A woman in sub-Saharan Africa has a one-in-thirty chance of dying while giving birth—in the developed world, the chance is one in 5,600. There are at least twenty-five countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average person is expected to live no more than fifty-five years. In India alone, more than 50 million school-going children cannot read a very simple text.

>CIA

>Budget expenditures 2011 Country Ranks, By Rank

1 United States $3,397,000,000,000 2009 est.
2 Japan $2,252,000,000,000 2009 est.
3 Germany $1,516,000,000,000 2009 est.
4 France $1,441,000,000,000 2009 est.
5 China $1,270,000,000,000 2009 est.
6 United Kingdom $1,154,000,000,000 2009 est.
7 Italy $1,042,000,000,000 2009 est.
8 Canada $677,700,000,000 2009 est.
9 Spain $648,600,000,000 2009 est.
10 Brazil $552,600,000,000 NA
11 Australia $426,500,000,000 2009 est.
12 Netherlands $399,300,000,000 2009 est.
13 Russia $341,100,000,000 2009 est.

>Wikipedia

>Global assets under management

Private wealth $32,800,000,000,000
1 Pension funds $29,937,000,000,000
2 Mutual funds $24,699,000,000,000
3 Insurance companies $24,634,000,000,000
4 Real estate $10,000,000,000,000
5 Foreign exchange reserves $7,341,000,000,000
6 Sovereign wealth funds $3,980,000,000,000
7 Hedge funds $1,800,000,000,000
8 Private equity funds $1,600,000,000,000
9 REITs $764,000,000,000

>Towers Watson

>The World’s 500 Largest Asset Managers

1 BlackRock $3,346,256,000,000 New York, NY
2 State Street Global $1,911,240,000,000 Boston, MA
3 Allianz Group $1,859,351,000,000 Munich, Germany
4 Fidelity Investments $1,699,106,000,000 Boston, MA

>Brandon Griggs

>

According to the latest statement from the U.S. Treasury, the government had an operating cash balance Wednesday of $73.8 billion. That’s still a lot of money, but it’s less than what Steve Jobs has lying around.
Tech juggernaut Apple had a whopping $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of June, according to its last earnings report. Unlike the U.S. government, which is scrambling to avoid defaulting on its debt, Apple takes in more money than it spends.

>The Travel Insider

>

Deregulation didn’t just happen by some random chance event.
Deregulation was the result of an increasingly – and obviously – broken system that was dysfunctional, and benefiting neither the airlines nor the traveling public.
What started off as a well meant series of protective measures to nurture the new airlines of the 1930s, and what was meant to bring about a strong and successful airline system had evolved to the point that it was doing nothing of the sort, but was grossly interfering with both what the airlines and the public wanted.
As a result a bipartisan consensus, lead by Democrats, brought about the dismantling of the government regulations that were preventing an efficient effective and economical air transportation system in the US.

池田信夫

これもクルーグマンの教科書から引用しよう。
  • アメリカでは1000万本のバラを栽培しているが、これに使う資源で10万台のコンピュータを生産できるとしよう。他方、南米では同じ資源で3万台のコンピュータしか生産できないとすると、アメリカでバラの生産をやめて全量を南米から輸入したら、南米のバラの生産は1000万本増えてコンピュータの生産は3万台減るが、アメリカではバラの生産がゼロになってコンピュータの生産が10万台増える。つまり世界全体では、バラの生産量は変わらないが、コンピュータの生産量は7万台増える。
各国で生産費が異なるときは、相対的にコストの安い財に特化して輸出することによって世界全体の生産量が増え、双方の国が利益を得るWin-Winが実現するのだ。これがリカード以来知られている比較優位の原理である。日本のような製造業に比較優位をもつ国が農産物に高率の関税をかけて農業を保護するのは、製造業を犠牲にして世界経済を収縮させているのだ。
このとき貿易黒字になるか赤字になるかはどうでもよい。黒字は対外債権、赤字は対外債務だが、企業が債務をもっていても返済できれば問題ないのと同じである。輸出するのは輸入の代金を払うためであり、輸出代金をためこんでもしょうがない。そのように外貨を稼ぐこと自体に意味があると錯覚するのが、アダム・スミスも批判した重商主義である。

>Robert Rector

>The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau, taken from various government reports:

  • Forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
  • Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
  • Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
  • The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
  • Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.
  • Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
  • Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
  • Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

>Michael Rothschild

>

Fortunately, political freedom and economic progress are natural partners. Despite capitalism’s lingering reputation as the source of all the world’s evils, the fact remains that every single democracy is a capitalist country. Half a century of economic experimentation proved beyond doubt that tyranny cannot yield prosperity. … Socialism collapsed because it is a policy of unrestrained intervention. It tries to fix what is ‘wrong’ with the spontaneous, self-organizing phenomenon called capitalism. But, of course, a natural process cannot be ‘fixed.’
Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon.

>Robert Lucas

>

Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution. In this very minute, a child is being born to an American family and another child, equally valued by God, is being born to a family in India. The resources of all kinds that will be at the disposal of this new American will be on the order of 15 times the resources available to his Indian brother. This seems to us a terrible wrong, justifying direct corrective action, and perhaps some actions of this kind can and should be taken. But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production.

>Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, Matthew Denhart, Christopher Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe

>Colleges and universities are turning out graduates faster than America’s labor markets are creating jobs that traditionally have been reserved for those with degrees. More than one-third of current working graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, and the proportion appears to be rising rapidly. Many of them are better described as “underemployed” rather than “gainfully employed”. Indeed, 60 percent of the increased college graduate population between 1992 and 2008 ended up in these lower skill jobs, raising real questions about the desirability of pushing to increase the proportion of Americans attending and graduating from four year colleges and universities. This, along with other evidence on the negative relationship between government higher education spending and economic growth, suggests we may have significantly “over invested” public funds in colleges and universities.

>Walter E. Williams

>

In terms of natural resources, Africa is the world’s richest continent. It has 50 percent of the world’s gold, most of the world’s diamonds and chromium, 90 percent of the cobalt, 40 percent of the world’s potential hydroelectric power, 65 percent of the manganese, millions of acres of untilled farmland as well as other natural resources.
Despite the natural wealth, Africa is home to the world’s most impoverished and abused people. Of the 41 black African nations, only three (Senegal, Botswana and Mauritius) allow their people the right to vote and choose their own leaders. Only two (Botswana and Senegal) permit freedom of expression and criticism of government policies. In countries like Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, Sudan, Chad and others, ethnic genocide has taken the lives of untold millions of innocent victims. Slavery is still practiced in the Sudan and Mauritania.

>Marc Levin

>

Before spreading to the rest of the country, the suburban dream was born in Levittown, Long Island after World War II. What began as an eight thousand dollar housing market evolved into today’s four hundred thousand dollar home. But with a dwindling economy and the average term of unemployment longer than ever before, homeowners struggle to make their mortgage payments.
The reason I decided to do it was because the story needed to be told. People in the U.S. are suffering. They’re hungry, and they’re in many ways worse off than my husband and myself. And that awareness has to be brought to mind.
There might be some people who’ll say, ‘They had a good run, I’m not going to feel sorry for them.’ But it goes to the core of the essential question that we as Americans face now. If we can’t provide that promise that Long Island has always held, that promise of shared prosperity — if all of that is going to disappear, what have we got?

>Gordon Gekko

>

(Bud Fox: How much is enough?) It’s not a question of enough, pal. It’s a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another.
The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market. And you’re a part of it. You’ve got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I’ve still got a lot to teach you.

>Gideon Rachman

>

Over the past thirty years the world’s major powers have all embraced “globalization”—an economic system that promised rising living standards across the world and that created common interests between the world’s most powerful nations. In the aftermath of the cold war, America was obviously the dominant global power, which added to the stability of the international system by discouraging challenges from other nations.
But the economic crisis that struck the world in 2008 has changed the logic of international relations. It is no longer obvious that globalization benefits all the world’s major powers. It is no longer clear that the United States faces no serious international rivals. And it is increasingly apparent that the world is facing an array of truly global problems—such as climate change and nuclear proliferation—that are causing rivalry and division between nations. After a long period of international cooperation, competition and rivalry are returning to the international system. A win-win world is giving way to a zero-sum world.

>Eric Robert Morse

>

In a closed economy, individuals and companies had become capable of controlling large sums of wealth and thus dictating the terms of contracts with those who did not have similar stockpiles of wealth. Given its altered composition, the economy of the twentieth century could no longer be called a Capitalism, but rather a Vulgar Capitalism.
Exploitation comes in two main forms: pricing consumer goods higher than they are worth, and paying employees less than they are worth. Both are conducted extensively throughout the world, though the latter is more noticeable and reprehensible. A third form of exploitation is pollution or reckless use of natural resources at the expense of the public.
Since contracts are technically based under free terms, consumers, workers, and the public are responsible for their own exploitation. Producers and owners are no more malicious than their victims; they are simply in a better position to take advantage of others. Since consumers, workers, and the public seek the same ultimate goal of wealth, they serve as engines to further entrench themselves in their plight.

>Gustav von Hertzen

>Well-known zero-sum games, like poker, do not create value; the amount of money around the table is only changing hands but does not grow. In a zero-sum game, the main competitive weapon is deception or, at the very least, withholding information – ergo the proverbial poker face. In contrast, the decisive success factors for plus-sum play are honesty and openness, which creates and maintains the requisite trust between the parties.

A society exists in order to produce added value for its members through fruitful cooperation. The internal rules of the game should therefore promote value-enhancing plus-sum games and minimize futile zero-sum play. Destructive minus-sum games should be totally unacceptable. By defining these interrelations in mathematical terms, game theory becomes applicable and fundamental insights can be gained.

>Robert Reich

>

We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century. As we move into the borderless economy, the notion of national products, national technologies, and national corporations will become increasingly meaningless. The only thing that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who make up a nation. This shift has enormous political implications. It means that the traditional idea of national solidarity and purpose can no longer be defined in purely economic terms. It also leads to fragmentation as those citizens best positioned to thrive in the world market are tempted to slip the bonds of national allegiance, and by so doing disengage themselves from their less favored fellows.

>Tyler Cowen

>

You hear people say, “Oh, in the old Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, intellectuals and artists were so important.” Often they were. People would sort of hang onto the next work from a critic or a poet. But when you have a freer, wealthier, more stable society, they’re not important in the same way. You know, maybe something is lost there, but in net terms I have no doubt it’s for the better.
There’s another reason why intellectuals are so often hostile to markets. At least part of it is because markets do not reward quality per se, and that is resented. In a cultural context, if you look at how rewards are distributed, they’re not linked directly to quality, no matter how you care to define it. You look out in the market and see that Michael Jackson, who maybe is not the best father, earned however many millions from his music. Or that Madonna, who’s not the best singer, earned so much more than a great opera singer. We instinctively feel there’s something wrong with that. Maybe there is something wrong with that at some moral level, but the more important question is whether the system as a whole delivers the cultural goods. Does a system that allows a bad singer to earn more than a good singer get you more singing of many different kinds? The answer is yes.

>ILO

>

The slow-down in the global economy could result in a massive jobs shortfall among G20 members by next year. … Employment may in fact grow 0.8 per cent until the end of 2012, resulting in a 40 million job shortfall in G20 countries next year and a much larger shortfall by 2015.

>Nassim Nicholas Taleb

>

Black Swan Theory:
  1. The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology
  2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities)
  3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs

>Australian Visa Bureau

>

In an effort to both raise awareness amongst potential asylum seekers of the dangers of people smuggling and illustrate the risks they face when they enter Australia illegally, the Australian government has launched a new multi-lingual YouTube channel.
One of the short videos hosted on the YouTube channel show Australia immigration officers tracking and arresting a suspected member of a people smuggling gang.
The videos have been translated into eight languages, including Arabic, Tamil and Bahasa and it’s a new attempt by the Australian government to illustrate the risks and dangers that asylum seekers face when they pay criminal gangs to help them reach Australia by boat.
Another video details an agreement reached earlier this month that will see 800 asylum seekers from Malysia returned to their native country after being detained in Australia.

>Kathleen Pender

>

Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of bond giant Pimco, doubts that the Federal Reserve can do anything more to stimulate the economy or create jobs.
Speaking today at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, he said that no matter how much stimulus the Fed puts into the system, it cannot overcome five economic problems that require structural or long-term solutions: housing, the labor market, long-term public finance, the flow of credit and infrastructure. Only Congress and the administration can solve these problems, but so far they have only been providing short-term or cyclical or solutions.
“Suppose I’m overweight,” El-Erian said in an interview after his speech at the Fed’s Asian Symposium on Banking and Finance. “A cyclical solution would be, I’m going to starve myself for one day and then I will be okay.” A structural solution would be changing your eating and exercise habits.

>PLoS Biology

>

PLoS Biology (eISSN-1545-7885; ISSN-1544-9173) is an open-access, peer-reviewed general biology journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource. New articles are published online weekly; issues are published monthly.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all works we publish. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLoS journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.

>橘玲

>

日本の財政が破綻したら、以下の三つの経済事象が発生する(これ以外のことは起きない)。
  • 国債価格の暴落にともなう金利の大幅な上昇
  • 通貨が信任を失うことによる円安
  • 高金利と円安が引き起こす高率のインフレ
すなわち「国家破産」後の日本は、「低金利・円高・デフレ」の現在とまったく逆の世界になるのだ。

>橘玲

>

日本銀行「主要時系列統計データ表(月次)」から作成した名目実効為替レートと実質実効為替レートのグラフ(2005年を100として指数化)
これを見ればわかるように、名目レート(青線)では円はたしかに戦後最高値になっていますが、インフレ率を勘案した実質レート(赤線)では7月末で101.46でしかありません。これは、「超円高」と騒がれた95年4月(実質レート151.11/1ドル=83.77円)はもちろん、99年末(実質レート131.37/1ドル=102.08円)や88年11月(実質レート124.17/1ドル=121.85円)よりもはるかに“円安”であることがわかります。
インフレ率(物価のちがい)を勘案した実質レートでは、現在は円高でもなんでもなく、今後、さらに20~30%円高になってもなんの不思議もありません。
このように、デフレと低金利がつづくかぎり、名目為替レートが円高になるのは避けられません。日本はG7などで「異常な円高」の協調介入を求めていますが、各国はもちろん、実質為替レートで見れば円高など存在しないことを知っているので、相手にされないのも当たり前です。名目為替レートを円安にするには、金利を上げるか、インフレにするかしかないのです(日銀がいくら市場介入してもなんの効果もありません)。

>Brian Whitmore

>

The sixth wave of Russian emigration is underway — and as in the past it appears to be claiming some of the country’s best and brightest. … approximately 1.25 million Russians have left the country permanently in the last several years. … That figure is less than the two million who left in the two waves in the early 20th century — immediately after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and following the advent of the Stalin-era terror in the 1930s. It is also slightly more than the estimated one million who fled the USSR in both the World War II era and in the 1970s.
The main thing is that just as in all the previous cases, the most independent and qualified people are leaving and for the same fundamental reasons: the model of the state built by Lenin and Stalin and softly being restored by Putin is flawed from the outset. … the Putin system works well for the “bosses” and for the “lumpen,” who are awed by images of “a bright future and a mighty power.” But the independent minded and the “strongest and most gifted people,” on the other hand, are deeply alienated by the regime.

>Mohamed El-Erian

>Policymakers are fully engaged in an effort to avoid another Great Depression. The secular forces of productivity gains and entrepreneurial dynamism will not disappear. And there are pockets of considerable economic and social flexibility, high self-insurance, and even some global policy coordination.
Yet, while these factors help reduce the risk of a deflationary depression, they are not strong enough for a return to the high growth and low inflation that characterized 2002–07. Simply put, there are insufficient demand buffers and fast-acting structural reforms to provide for a spontaneous and sustainable recovery in the global economy.
No wonder we have characterized the financial crisis as a crisis of the global system (as opposed to a crisis within the system). Lacking endogenous circuit breakers, the system will not reset quickly and without permanent changes (and some would argue that even if it could, it should not). For markets that are highly conditioned by the most recent periods of “normality,” this will feel like a new normal. Indeed, it will be a major shock to those that are trapped by an overly dominant “business-as-usual” mentality.

池田信夫

対外純資産は為替レートとは無関係である。経常収支が黒字になると通貨が強くなるという理論は、1970年代まではあったが今はない。もともと変動相場制は、フリードマンなどが経常収支の不均衡を是正するメカニズムとして提案したものだが、実際にはそうならなかった。
その原因は、貿易の決済のための実需は外為市場のごく一部しかなく、為替取引(5兆ドル/日)の99% は投機的取引だからである。ここでは通貨は株式や債券と同じ金融資産だから、経常収支なんか関係なく、重視されるのはそのインカムゲイン(金利)とキャピタルゲイン(値上がり益)だ。
金利は名目でみると日本は低いが、デフレなので実質金利は高く、日米でほぼ均等化している。値上がり益は予想に依存するが、今回のようにFRBが時間軸政策で低金利にコミットすると、ドルが下がるという予想が支配的になる。それが今回のドル安の原因である。
名目レートをみると「歴史的な円高」だが、実質的にはそうでもない。円の(物価上昇率などの影響を除いた)実質実効レートは、1995年に比べて3割近く下がっている。名目レートが上がったのは、この16年間にアメリカの物価が約40%上がったのに対して日本がほぼ0%だったためだ。購買力平価の簡単な指標であるビッグマック指数でみても、日本は4.08ドル、アメリカは4.07ドルで、円は高くも安くもない。
このように資産市場としてみると、現在の為替レートは合理的な水準で、一時的要因でドル安ではあるが円高ではなく、まだ円は強くなる余地がある。1日に5兆ドルが動く外為市場の動きを数千億ドルの為替介入で阻止することはできない。

>Henry Jenkins

>

In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.
This circulation of media content—across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders—depends heavily on consumers’ active participation.
The term ‘participatory culture’ contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands. Not all participants are created equal. Corporations—and even individuals within corporate media—still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers. And some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others.