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Gene Ellis

Educated in America: College graduates and high school dropouts | vox - 0 views

  • The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
  • Throughout the first half of the 20th century, each new cohort of Americans was more likely to graduate high school than the preceding one. This upward trend in secondary education increased worker productivity and fueled American economic growth (Goldin and Katz 2003)
  • Contrary to claims based on the official statistics, we find no evidence of convergence in minority-majority graduation rates over the past 35 years. (4) Exclusion of incarcerated populations from the official statistics greatly biases the reported high school graduation rate for blacks.
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  • The graduation rate issued by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) – widely regarded as the official rate – shows that U.S. students responded to the increasing demand for skill by completing high school at increasingly higher rates. By this measure, U.S. schools now graduate nearly 88 percent of students and black graduation rates have converged to those of non-Hispanic whites over the past four decades.
  • Depending on the data sources, definitions, and methods used, the U.S. graduation rate has been estimated to be anywhere from 66 to 88 percent in recent years—an astonishingly wide range for such a basic statistic. The range of estimated minority rates is even greater—from 50 to 85 percent.
  • After adjusting for multiple sources of bias and differences in sample construction, we establish that (1) the U.S. high school graduation rate peaked at around 80 percent in the late 1960s and then declined by 4-5 percentage points; (2) the actual high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the 88 percent official estimate; (3) about 65 percent of blacks and Hispanics leave school with a high school diploma and minority graduation rates are still substantially below the rates for non-Hispanic whites.
  • Heckman, Lochner, and Todd (2008) show that in recent decades, the internal rate of return to graduating high school compared to dropping out has increased dramatically and is now over 50 percent
  • These trends are for persons born in the United States and exclude immigrants. The recent growth in unskilled migration to the U.S. further increases the proportion of unskilled Americans in the workforce apart from the growth due to a rising high school dropout rate.
  • The most significant source of bias in the official statistics comes from including GED (General Educational Development) recipients as high school graduates.
  • A substantial body of scholarship summarised in Heckman and LaFontaine (2008) shows that the GED program does not benefit most participants, and that GEDs perform at the level of dropouts in the U.S. labour market.
  • Men now graduate from high school at significantly lower rates than women
  • A significant portion of the racial convergence reported in the official statistics is due to black males obtaining GED credentials in prison. Research by Tyler and Kling (2007) and Tyler and Lofstrom (2008) shows that, when released, prison GEDs earn at the same rate as non-prison GEDs, and the GED does not reduce recidivism.
  • Evidence suggests a powerful role of the family in shaping educational and adult outcomes. A growing proportion of American children are being raised in disadvantaged families.
Gene Ellis

Op-Ed Columnist - Learning From Europe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • It’s true that the U.S. economy has grown faster than that of Europe for the past generation. Since 1980 — when our politics took a sharp turn to the right, while Europe’s didn’t — America’s real G.D.P. has grown, on average, 3 percent per year. Meanwhile, the E.U. 15 — the bloc of 15 countries that were members of the European Union before it was enlarged to include a number of former Communist nations — has grown only 2.2 percent a year. America rules!
  • In 2008, 80 percent of adults aged 25 to 54 in the E.U. 15 were employed (and 83 percent in France). That’s about the same as in the United States. Europeans are less likely than we are to work when young or old, but is that entirely a bad thing?
  • Broadband, in particular, is just about as widespread in Europe as it is in the United States, and it’s much faster and cheaper.
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  • Or maybe not. All this really says is that we’ve had faster population growth. Since 1980, per capita real G.D.P. — which is what matters for living standards — has risen at about the same rate in America and in the E.U. 15: 1.95 percent a year here; 1.83 percent there.
  • And Europeans are quite productive, too: they work fewer hours, but output per hour in France and Germany is close to U.S. levels.
  • After all, while reports of Europe’s economic demise are greatly exaggerated, reports of its high taxes and generous benefits aren’t. Taxes in major European nations range from 36 to 44 percent of G.D.P., compared with 28 in the United States. Universal health care is, well, universal. Social expenditure is vastly higher than it is here.
  • So if there were anything to the economic assumptions that dominate U.S. public discussion — above all, the belief that even modestly higher taxes on the rich and benefits for the less well off would drastically undermine incentives to work, invest and innovate — Europe would be the stagnant, decaying economy of legend. But it isn’t.
Gene Ellis

U.S. Ports See Costly Delays as Cargo Ships,Volumes Grow - WSJ - 0 views

  • U.S. Ports See Costly Delays as Cargo Ships, Volumes Grow
Gene Ellis

Reversing the Flow of Oil - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Reversing the Flow of Oil
  • “Economically, it means that money that was flowing out of the United States into sovereign wealth funds and treasuries around the world will now stay in the U.S. and be invested in the U.S., creating jobs. It doesn’t change everything, but it certainly provides a new dimension to U.S. influence in the world.”
  • The oil bounty is thanks to modern production techniques including hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves injecting water and chemicals into the ground to crack oil-saturated shale.
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  • Domestic oil production has rocketed by roughly 70 percent over the last six years to 8.7 million barrels a day, and imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have already been cut roughly by half.
  • many oil experts predict that the country’s output will rise to as much as 12 million barrels a day over the nex
  • Shale oil is predominately light, sweet oil, meaning it is low in sulfur content and flows freely at room temperature.
  • United States exports of oil could reach three million to four million barrels a day in a few years, more than most OPEC producers currently provide world markets.
Gene Ellis

With Restructuring Done, EADS Faces New Challenges - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • One of the big arguments being made by the economic ministry is, ‘We give you lots of defense business, so you have got to provide a lot of high-tech jobs in Germany.’
  • EADS’s future in the United States, meanwhile, poses different challenges.
  • Those attempts have included an ultimately unsuccessful bid for a $35 billion aerial refueling tanker contract with the U.S. Air Force as well as the failed attempt last year to merge with BAE, one of the Pentagon’s top 10 contractors.
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  • But with major U.S. players like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman almost certainly out of reach for national security reasons,
  • “I have no illusions about how difficult it is to sell non-American products on the American market,” Mr. Enders said. “We should not even dream about trying to sell a product to a U.S. defense customer if it is not really superior to what our American peers are offering.” Analysts tended to agree.
Gene Ellis

Tomato Imports Deal Reached by U.S. and Mexico - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The agreement, reached late Saturday, raises the minimum sales price for Mexican tomatoes in the United States, aims to strengthen compliance and enforcement, and increases the types of tomatoes governed by the bilateral pact to four from one.
  • “The draft agreement raises reference prices substantially, in some cases more than double the current reference price for certain products,
  • Florida growers contended it set the minimum price of Mexican tomatoes so low that the Florida growers could not compete.
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  • “Even though no dumping or injury to the U.S. industry was demonstrated by our competitors,
  • The new agreement covers all fresh and chilled tomatoes, excluding those intended for use in processing like canning and dehydrating, and in juices, sauces and purées.
  • It raises the basic floor price for winter tomatoes to 31 cents a pound from 21.69 cents — higher than the price the Mexicans were proposing in October — and establishes even higher prices for specialty tomatoes and tomatoes grown in controlled environments. The Mexicans have invested billions in greenhouses to grow tomatoes, while Florida tomatoes are largely picked green and treated with a gas to change their color.
  • The dispute unfolded in the heated politics surrounding the presidential election, with Mexican growers charging that the Commerce Department was courting voters in the important swing state of Florida. Instead, the timing of the negotiations ensured that the government could win those votes and bring the controversy to a conclusion satisfactory to the Mexicans after the election was over.
  • The Mexicans enlisted roughly 370 American businesses, including Wal-Mart Stores and meat and vegetable producers, to argue their cause.
Gene Ellis

Suez Isn't the Real Crisis for Oil Prices - WSJ.com - 0 views

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    "BY LIAM DENNING Oil bulls are misreading the wisdom of crowds. Near-month U.S. crude-oil futures jumped above $100 a barrel Wednesday, ostensibly because of mass protests in Egypt. But it is worth remembering that Egypt is a net oil importer, not exporter. As for the Suez Canal, net traffic of oil and refined products-that is, the difference between northbound and southbound transit-amounted to roughly 101,000 barrels a day in the first quarter, according to the Suez Canal Authority. That is all of 0.1% of global demand. Egypt's Suez-Mediterranean"
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    "BY LIAM DENNING Oil bulls are misreading the wisdom of crowds. Near-month U.S. crude-oil futures jumped above $100 a barrel Wednesday, ostensibly because of mass protests in Egypt. But it is worth remembering that Egypt is a net oil importer, not exporter. As for the Suez Canal, net traffic of oil and refined products-that is, the difference between northbound and southbound transit-amounted to roughly 101,000 barrels a day in the first quarter, according to the Suez Canal Authority. That is all of 0.1% of global demand. Egypt's Suez-Mediterranean"
Gene Ellis

What If We Never Run Out of Oil? - Charles C. Mann - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.”
  • Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)
  • To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.
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  • Water-assisted fracturing has been in use since the late 1940s, but it became “fracking” only recently, when it was married with horizontal drilling and the advanced sensing techniques that let it be used deep underground. Energy costs are surprisingly small; a Swiss-American research team calculated in 2011 that the average EROEI for fracked gas in a representative Pennsylvania county was about 87—about six times better than for Persian Gulf oil and 16 times better than for tar sands. (Fracking uses a lot of water, though, and activists charge that the chemicals contaminate underground water supplies.)
  • Today, a fifth of U.S. energy consumption is fueled by coal, mainly from Appalachia and the West, a long-term energy source that has provided jobs for millions, a century-old way of life
  • and pollution that kills more than 10,000 Americans a year (that estimate is from a 2010 National Research Council study).
  • Roughly speaking, burning coal produces twice as much carbon dioxide as burning the equivalent amount of natural gas. Almost all domestic coal is used to generate electricity—it produces 38 percent of the U.S. power supply. Fracking is swiftly changing this: in 2011, utilities reported plans to shut down 57 of the nation’s 1,287 coal-fired generators the following year. Largely in consequence, U.S. energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions have dropped to figures last seen in 1995. Since 2006, they have fallen more than those from any other nation in the world.
  • In the sort of development that irresistibly attracts descriptors like ironic, Germany, often touted as an environmental model for its commitment to solar and wind power, has expanded its use of coal, and as a result is steadily increasing its carbon-dioxide output. Unlike Americans, Europeans can’t readily switch to natural gas; Continental nations, which import most of their natural gas, agreed to long-term contracts that tie its price to the price of oil, now quite high.
  • Several researchers told me that the current towel-snapping between Beijing and Tokyo over islands in the East China Sea is due less to nationalistic posturing than to nearby petroleum deposits.)
  • In mid-March, Japan’s Chikyu test ended a week early, after sand got in the well mechanism. But by then the researchers had already retrieved about 4 million cubic feet of natural gas from methane hydrate, at double the expected rate.
  • What is known, says Timothy Collett, the energy-research director for the USGS program, is that some of the gulf’s more than 3,500 oil and gas wells are in gas-hydrate areas.
  • In Dutch-disease scenarios, oil weakens all the pillars but one—the petroleum industry, which bloats steroidally.
  • Because the national petroleum company, with its gush of oil revenues, is the center of national economic power, “the ruler typically puts a loyalist in charge,” says Michael Ross, a UCLA political scientist and the author of The Oil Curse (2012). “The possibilities for corruption are endless.” Governments dip into the oil kitty to reward friends and buy off enemies. Sometimes the money goes to simple bribes; in the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of euros from France’s state oil company, Elf Aquitaine, lined the pockets of businessmen and politicians at home and abroad.
  • How much of Venezuela’s oil wealth Hugo Chávez hijacked for his own political purposes is unknown, because his government stopped publishing the relevant income and expenditure figures. Similarly, Ross points out, Saddam Hussein allocated more than half the government’s funds to the Iraq National Oil Company; nobody has any idea what happened to the stash, though, because INOC never released a budget. (Saddam personally directed the nationalization of Iraqi oil in 1972, then leveraged his control of petroleum revenues to seize power from his rivals.)
  • “How will the royal family contain both the mullahs and the unemployed youth without a slush fund?”
  • It seems fair to say that if autocrats in these places were toppled, most Americans would not mourn. But it seems equally fair to say that they would not necessarily be enthusiastic about their replacements.
Gene Ellis

Severe Drought Has U.S. West Fearing Worst - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Severe Drought Has U.S. West Fearing Worst
Gene Ellis

Why Apple Got a 'Made in U.S.A.' Bug - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Today, rising energy prices and a global market for computers are changing the way companies make their machines.
  • Hewlett-Packard, which turns out over 50 million computers a year through its own plants and subcontractors, makes many of its larger desktop personal computers in such higher-cost areas as Indianapolis and Tokyo to save on fuel costs and to serve business buyers rapidly.
  • “It’s important that they get an order in five days,
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  • there is a pride for the local consumer to see a sticker that says ‘Made in Tokyo,’
  • Cook is looking to give Apple some good news.
  • A Dell factory in Winston-Salem, N.C., for which Dell received $280 million in incentives from the government, was shut in 2010 (Dell had to repay some of the incentives).
  • In 1998, President Bill Clinton visited a Gateway Computer factory outside Dublin to cheer the role of American manufacturers in the rise of a “Celtic Tiger” in technology.That plant was shut in 2001, when Gateway elected to save costs by manufacturing in China
  • As cheap as a Chinese assembly worker may be, an emerging trend in manufacturing, specialized robots, promises to be even cheaper. The most valuable part of the computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with robots. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.
  • The labor cost on a notebook, which is about 4 to 5 percent of the retail price, is only slightly higher than the cost of shipping by air. Soon even that is likely to change because of the twin forces of lower manufacturing costs from automation and higher transportation costs from rising global activity.
  • Intel, which makes most of the processors, has plants in Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Israel, Ireland and China.
  • Many other chip companies design their own products and have them made in giant factories, largely in Taiwan and China. Computer screens are made in Taiwan and South Korea, for the most part.
  • The special glass used for the touch screens of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, however, is an exception. It comes primarily from the United States.
  • More recent products, laptops and notebook computers, were in many cases originally assembled in China, and they are still largely made there. So are most smartphones and tablets. Every week, H.P. sends a group of cargo containers filled with notebooks to Europe.
  • That plant was shut in 2001, when Gateway elected to save costs by manufacturing in China. Dell, which made its mark by developing lean manufacturing techniques in Texas, closed its showcase Austin factory in 2008 as part of a companywide move to manufacturing in China. A Dell factory in Winston-Salem, N.C., for which Dell received $280 million in incentives from the government, was shut in 2010 (Dell had to repay some of the incentives).
Gene Ellis

Luring Back the Chinese Who Study Abroad - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • First, the rate of return has remained approximately 30 percent for decades.
  • In late 2008, the Chinese Communist Party began the “1,000 Talents” program, aimed at these supremely talented Chinese. Through a wide variety of terrific incentives — sometimes as much as $1 million — the party has encouraged academic and research institutes, as well as municipal governments, to “bring back the best.”
  • Second, the return rate among Chinese who received Ph.D.’s in the United States is shockingly low. Approximately 92 percent of all Chinese who received a science or technology Ph.D. in the U.S. in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007. This rate was well above India’s, which is in second place with 81 percent.
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  • in 2009, more than 240,000 Chinese students went abroad to study at all levels — high school, undergraduate and graduate degrees, a tenfold increase over 2004.
  • Most important, it must weaken the power of academic and scientific administrators.
  • Similarly, in many institutions, promotion depends on your relationship with the dean or senior faculty and not your academic pedigree.
  • Returnees, or those who hesitate to return, often say that in China, “personal relationships are too complex” – a code for the backstabbing and petty jealousies and the need to cultivate ties with leaders in your own field.
Gene Ellis

The iEconomy - Nissan's Move to U.S. Offers Lessons for Tech Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Since its first pickup truck rolled off the line here on June 16, 1983, Nissan has produced more than seven million vehicles in the United States. It now employs 15,000 people in this country. It makes more than a half-million cars, trucks and S.U.V.’s a year, with the plant in Smyrna building six models, including the soon-to-be-produced, all-electric Nissan Leaf.
  • Could the Japanese car companies achieve the same quality using American workers?
  • including currency fluctuations that made exporting more expensive. The final push came from American anger as imports grabbed one-fourth of the United States market.
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  • “The pressure put on the Japanese was absolutely critical for them to agree to export restraints,”
Gene Ellis

Even Greece Exports Rise in Europe's 11% Jobless Recovery - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • “The current- account deficits of countries that have been under stress diminished over the last years considerably.”
  • Just two of 14 euro-zone government leaders have kept their posts in elections since late 2009 and extremists such as Golden Dawn in Greece are gaining support.
  • “The internal rebalancing in the euro area is progressing,” said Fels. “Some of them, especially Spain but also Portugal not to speak of Ireland, are regaining competitiveness.”
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    • Gene Ellis
       
      This is the same sort of response which companies would have made to a depreciation in the local currency without the euro, but with the added problem of deflationary effects on the rest of the economy.
  • Ford Motor Co. (F) (F) said at the end of last year it will increase capacity near Valencia as it shuts plants in the U.K. and Belgium.
  • While a slide in imports accounts for some of the correction, Greece boosted its exports outside the EU by about 30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 from the previous year, while Italy’s rose 13 percent in January from a year ago, he said.
  • In Ireland, U.S. companies such as EBay Inc (EBAY) (EBAY)., Google Inc. (GOOG) (GOOG) and Facebook Inc (FB). all have expanded in the past two years, taking advantage of a corporate-tax rate of just 12.5 percent compared to Spain’s 30 percent.
    • Gene Ellis
       
      'Beggar thy neighbor' kinds of effects.
  • The metamorphosis is known as internal devaluation
  • Prevented by membership of the euro from driving down currencies, governments and companies are squeezing labor costs to spur productivity.
  • aising the retirement age, making it easier to fire workers in downturns and preventing unions from clinging to boom-time wage deals.
  • reducing social- security payments
  • On average, the periphery is about halfway to eliminating large structural current-account deficits, which allow for declines related to recession-driven weaker import demand, estimates Goldman Sachs (GS).
  • The OECD today published an index showing that relative labor costs in Spain and Portugal have now dropped below Germany’s for the first time since 2005.
  • “It’s potentially good for the economy but only if it results in faster investment,”
  • “If not then there’s a downward spiral risk.”
  • It’s the mirror image of the euro’s first decade, when historically low interest rates in the periphery fueled inflationary spending booms, reflected in credit bubbles and deteriorating current accounts and government budgets.
  • The smaller trade imbalances really reflect a collapse in demand for imports as consumers and companies hunker down,
    • Gene Ellis
       
      An important point.
  • “At this stage it is still demand destruction which has helped current-account deficit countries balance their accounts,” said Mayer. “It’s not a healthy situation.”
  • They also say countries will need to run even healthier current accounts than now if they are to stabilize the debts they owe abroad.
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    Good update article, as of March, 2013.
Gene Ellis

Kerry promotes U.S.-European trade deal - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • France wants to slow down consideration of the proposed transatlantic free-trade zone encompassing about 40 percent of the world’s trade. Germany and Britain are in favor of the plan and want to move fast.
  • The Obama administration says a comprehensive deal would further open European markets and expand exports to the euro zone of U.S. goods and services, currently worth $459 billion a year. Backers say the deal would add more than 13 million jobs in the United States and Europe.
  • But supporters also fear that trade talks will bog down or collapse over parochial concerns, and must be streamlined to succeed.
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  • one of the objections that France is expected to raise over what it calls cultural exceptions to free trade on products with a specific geographic or national significance, such as Champagne wine.
Gene Ellis

Exports of U.S. Gas May Fall Short of High Hopes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    The need for flexibility in the world markets...
Gene Ellis

Europe Can't Handle the Euro - 0 views

  • When leaders of the 11 nations that agreed to combine their currencies gathered in January 1999, they predicted great things: the single currency would shift global portfolios to euro assets, depressing the value of the dollar relative to the euro, and the new eurozone would be a strong player in the global economy, reflecting the size of an integrated European market. Instead the euro plummeted, Europes economy remains weak, and unemployment is more than twice the U.S. level.
  • The ECB will eventually be judged not by its words but by whether it achieves low inflation and does so without increasing cyclical unemployment. I am not optimistic about either part of this goal.
  • The ECB must make monetary policy for "Europe as a whole," which in practice means doing what is appropriate for Germany, France and Italy, the eurozones three largest countries. Last year demand conditions in those countries were relatively weak, while demand conditions in Spain and Ireland were very strong. That meant a monetary policy that was too expansionary for Spain and Ireland, causing a substantial acceleration of their inflation and threatening their competitiveness.
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  • Such disparities of demand conditions will undoubtedly persist in the future because European countries differ substantially in industrial composition and in a variety of economic policies.
  • the time will come when the ECB will set a policy that is too tight for the outliers, leading to substantially higher unemployment than if they were free to set their own monetary policies. Even without discretionary monetary policies, the interest rates in countries with weak demand would naturally decline, and the external values of their currencies would fall, both acting as offsetting stabilizers of the countries weak demand. But this will not be possible within the EMU, where a single interest rate and a single exchange rate prevail. Result: higher average cyclical unemployment.
  • In the U.S., a fall in regional demand leads to lower wages, which help to maintain employment; to movements of labor to regions where demand is stronger; and to a net fiscal transfer from Washington (because lower regional income means lower federal tax liability). None of this happens in Europe, where wages are inflexible, mobility is severely limited by language and custom, and there are no significant fiscal transfers.
  • Politicians can now blame the ECB for high unemployment and complain that it is a powerful force beyond national control. Instead of seeking to make labor markets more flexible, European governments are talking more about "social wages," about mandatory 35-hour workweeks, and about rolling back even the small reductions in social benefits Germany achieved under Helmut Kohls government. Worse yet, there are attempts to eliminate differences in labor practices and even differences in wages among the EMU countries.
  • Moreover, these policies reduce the international competitiveness of many European industries and encourage the adoption of protectionist policies to keep out non-European products.
  • Forcing a single monetary policy on all of Europe will cause the countries that suffer what they regard as unnecessarily high unemployment to resent the actions of others. Attempts to force a Europewide tax system, especially if taxes are used to redistribute incomes among European countries, will compound the potential for conflict.
  • EMU is meant to be a marriage made in heaven with no possibility of divorce.
Gene Ellis

U.S. Ports Seek to Lure Big Ships After Panama Canal Expands - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But, he said, containers loaded on the West Coast, which has built up its container yards and highway and rail infrastructure, can outrun those that travel to the East Coast by water, and that can make the difference when speed and dependability are more important than cost alone
  • Besides, he added, costs and fees can shift; Panama can be expected to raise rates for canal passage, and “the railroads are not going to sit idly by” and let the water route undercut their business.
  • After Hurricane Katrina, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi trumpeted plans for a “port of the future” at Gulfport with a 50-foot-deep channel, redirecting some $600 million in federal housing disaster funds on a project he pledged would spur the economy and create bountiful jobs.
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  • To Robert Puentes, a transportation expert at the Brookings Institution, the problem of whether the ports are overbuilding for a Panama payoff is one of planning. “We are the only industrialized country on the planet that doesn’t have a comprehensive freight policy,” he said.
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