Skip to main content

Home/ Global Economy/ Group items matching "value" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
9More

Learning about global value chains by looking beyond official trade data: Part 1 | vox - 0 views

www.voxeu.org/...ond-official-trade-data-part-1
shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Gross trade accounting: A transparent method to discover global value chain-related information behind official trade data: Part 1
  • With the rapid increase in intermediate trade flows, trade economists and policymakers have reached a near consensus that official trade statistics based on gross terms are deficient, often hiding the extent of global value chains. There is also widespread recognition among the official international statistics agencies that fragmentation of global production requires a new approach to measure trade, in particular the need to measure trade in value-added. This led the WTO and the OECD to launch a joint “Measuring Trade in value-Added” initiative on 15 March 2012, which is designed to mainstream the production of trade in value-added statistics and make them a permanent part of the statistical landscape.
  • All the estimation methods used in recent efforts to measure trade in value-added are rooted in Leontief (1936). His work demonstrated that the amount and type of intermediate inputs needed in the production of one unit of output can be estimated based on the input-output structures across countries and industries.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If one is only interested in estimating the domestic value-added embedded in a country’s or sector’s gross exports, applying Leontief’s insight is sufficient. However, for many economic and policy applications, one also needs to quantify other components in gross exports and their structures. In such circumstances Leontief’s original insight is not sufficient, as it does not provide a way to decompose intermediate trade flows across countries into various value-added terms according to their final absorption,
  • Our gross trade accounting framework in fact allows one to further decompose each of the four major parts of gross exports above into finer components with economic interpretations
  • By the gross statistics, presented in column 1 of Table 1, the trade is highly imbalanced – Chinese exports to the US ($176.9 billion in 2011) are five times that of US exports to China ($35.1 billion in 2011). If we separate exports of final goods and of intermediate goods (reported in columns 2a and 2b of Table 1), we see that most of the Chinese exports consist of final goods, whereas most of the US exports consist of intermediate goods.
  • In other words, the US exports rely overwhelmingly on its own value-added (only 2.1% from China and 5.8% from other countries in 2011), whereas the Chinese exports use more foreign value-added, especially value-added from third countries (with 3.2% from the US and 23.1% from Japan, Korea, and all other countries).
  • As a consequence of these differences in the structure of value-added composition, the China–US trade balance in this sector looks much smaller when computed in terms of domestic value-added than in terms of gross exports.
  • By identifying which parts of the official data are double counted and the sources of the double counting, our gross trade accounting method provides a transparent way to bridge official trade statistics (in gross terms) and national accounts (in value-added terms) consistent with the System of National Accounts standard.
5More

Euro Crisis: Italy 'To Dump Public Holidays' - Yahoo! Eurosport UK - 0 views

uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/...lidays-121903420--finance.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • As a result, technocrat prime minister Mario Monti is considering cutting back on public holidays in a bid to increase growth after officials said even slashing days off by a working week would boost growth and raise GDP by as much as 1%.
  • Italy has a total of 11 recognised public holidays a year but unlike Britain these remain fixed and if they fall mid-week people traditionally take the days off either side as well in order to ''make a bridge'' until the weekend, which has drastic consequences on industrial output.
  • Sources say the Government will keep the ''main religious festivals such as Easter and Christmas'' but are looking at scrapping some of the secondary ones such as Boxing Day, Epiphany on January 6th and the Immaculate Conception on December 8th.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • One idea drawn up by ministers Antonio Catricala and Antonio Polillo, from the Finance ministry, is to move them and the military holidays to the nearest Sunday so they will in effect still be celebrated but not on the specific date itself.
  • 'These holidays represent the best of our past, the values on which our Republic was founded on, they are in a word history and they should not be touched. You cannot tell us that there are no other ways of boosting productivity and increasing growth. ''The country should be left its history and it should be allowed to conserve its values, values that the majority of the country are fully supportive of, that is what we are asking the government to remember.''
7More

Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-benefits-of-technology.html benefits of IT
shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • “Pretty much every human on earth can access all human knowledge,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist.
  • o how to measure the Internet’s contribution to our lives? A few years ago, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago and Peter J. Klenow of Stanford gave it a shot. They estimated that the value consumers gained from the Internet amounted to about 2 percent of their income — an order of magnitude larger than what they spent to go online. Their trick was to measure not only how much money users spent on access but also how much of their leisure time they spent online.
  • Earlier this year, Yan Chen, Grace YoungJoo Jeon and Yong-Mi Kim of the University of Michigan published the result of an experiment that found that people who had access to a search engine took 15 minutes less to answer a question than those without online access.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • the consumer surplus from free online services — the value derived by consumers from the experience above what they paid for it — has been growing by $34 billion a year, on average, since 2002. If it were tacked on as “economic output,” it would add about 0.26 of a percentage point to annual G.D.P. growth.
  • The consumer surplus from television is about five times as large as that delivered by free stuff online, according to Mr. Brynjolfsson’s calculations.
  • As the economist Paul Samuelson once pointed out, if a man married his maid, G.D.P. would decline.
  • “We know less about the sources of value in the economy than we did 25 years ago,” wrote Mr. Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders of the University of British Columbia. If we really want to understand the impact of information technology on our future well-being, we first need to find a consistent way to measure it.
1More

An iPod Has Global Value. Ask the (Many) Countries That Make It. - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...28scene.html Business value supply chain ipod
shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Jan 14 - Cached
  • This value added calculation illustrates the futility of summarizing such a complex manufacturing process by using conventional trade statistics.
1More

The Dollar Value of an Extra Year of Life - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...value-of-an-extra-year-of-life
shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The Dollar Value of an Extra Year of Life
14More

The euro crisis: The non-puzzle of peripheral pain | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...euro-crisis-0
shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Mystery mostly solved, then; the rich periphery's riches relative to Germany were largely a short-run phenomenon driven by a dramatic short-run divergence in house price trends.
  • Investors who bet that productivity growth would be much faster in the south were wrong.* All the prices and wages set on the basis of the expectation of faster productivity growth were correspondingly wrong and needed to adjust. Real effective exchange rates were badly out of alignment.
  • Two things began happening in the euro zone in 2007. Growth in the number of euros spent every year began slowing, and the distribution of euro spending within the euro area began shifting back northward.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The picture is one in which there are many fewer euros floating around the euro area than markets expected a half decade ago, and the distribution of those euros is moving northward.
  • It seems reasonable to argue that the distributional shift needed to occur, given the actual productivity performance.  The overall slowdown in euro spending growth, however, looks like an unnecessary and painful complication to adjustment.
  • This has all been the result of the commitment to keep just one euro. But that commitment is painful, and the alternative—more than one euro—is looking more attractive.
  • Where prices were rigid, as in goods and labour markets, fewer euros meant slow disinflation but rapid contraction in output and a big rise in unemployment.
  • Where prices were more flexible, as in asset markets, price adjustment was quick. Over the past two years, Spanish equities have fallen 24%, while German equities are up 8%.
  • Since 2010, Spanish home prices have dropped over 20%, while German home prices are up a smidge.
  • If there had been no single currency, the northward capital flight would have depreciated peripheral currencies. Had the periphery borrowed in its own currency, that would have imposed losses on its foreign creditors while also boosting its export industry. Had peripheral economies instead borrowed in dollars or deutschmarks their debt burdens would have ballooned with depreciation, potentially pushing banks and sovereigns into default—but the depreciation boost to competitiveness would have remained. Either way, the depreciation of the currency would effectively shrink the value of wealth in the periphery.
  • The northward euro shift had two nasty effects, then: it shrank asset values while also (via wage rigidity) creating substantial unemployment.
  • This threatened to accelerate into a full-scale run and collapse until the ECB intervened.
  • as markets observed the periphery's reduced ability to pay off its debts, they moved their euros northward even faster
  • For the periphery to raise its external surplus (necessary in order to service its large and growing debts) it must rely much more on import compression than on export growth.
9More

The Two Innovation Economies by William Janeway - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...-innovation-by-william-janeway
shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The strategic technologies that have repeatedly transformed the market economy – from railroads to the Internet – required the construction of networks whose value in use could not be known when they were first deployed.
  • Consequently, innovation at the frontier depends on funding sources that are decoupled from concern for economic value;
  • Financial speculation has been, and remains, one required source of funding. Financial bubbles emerge wherever liquid asset markets exist. Indeed, the objects of such speculation astound the imagination: tulip bulbs, gold and silver mines, real estate, the debt of new nations, corporate securities.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Complementing the role of speculation, activist states have played several roles in encouraging innovation.
  • Occasionally, the object of speculation has been one of those fundamental technologies – canals, railroads, electrification, radio, automobiles, microelectronics, computing, the Internet – for which financial speculators have mobilized capital on a scale far beyond what “rational” investors would provide. From the wreckage that has inevitably followed, a succession of new economies has emerged.
  • In the United States, the government constructed transformational networks (the interstate highway system), massively subsidized their construction (the transcontinental railroads), or played the foundational role in their design and early development (the Internet).
  • For countries following an innovative leader, the path is clear. Mercantilist policies of protection and subsidy have been effective instruments of an economically active state.
  • List noted how Britain’s emergence as “the first industrial nation” at the end of the eighteenth century depended on prior state policies to promote British industry. “Had the English left everything to itself,” he wrote, “the Belgians would be still manufacturing cloth for the English, [and] England would still have been the sheepyard for the [Hanseatic League].”
  • To begin, the “national champions” of the catch-up phase must be rendered accessible to competitive assault. More generally, the state’s role must shift from executing well-defined programs to supporting trial-and-error experimentation and tolerating entrepreneurial failure. And the debilitating “corruption tax” that seems inevitably to accompany economic revolutions must be curbed, as it was in Britain during the nineteenth century and America during the twentieth.
5More

PORTFOLIO.HU | Blanchard: Eurozone integration needs to go forward or go back, but it c... - 0 views

www.portfolio.hu/...it_cant_stay_here.24931-2.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 04 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • There is no question that, when it was introduced, inflation targeting represented progress. But we have learnt that it has serious limitations. You can have an economy in which inflation is stable and low, but behind the scenes the composition of the output is wrong, and the financial system accumulates risks. It’s very clear that, to deal with all these issues, just using the policy rate is not enough.
  • The way to think about monetary policy in the future is that the central bank has in effect two sets of tools. One is a traditional one, the policy interest rate. The other is the set of macro prudential tools, from loan to value ratios, to cyclical capital ratios, etc. If there is a housing boom, you do not want to kill it through an increase in the policy rate which would affect the whole economy. You want to use measures that will limit mortgage lending to households.
  • I think that it has either to go forward or to go back, but it cannot stay where it is. I think nobody really wants to go back, so it has to go forward.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I suspect that, in order to limit country specific shocks, euro members may have to actively use macro prudential tools such as rules on the amount of liquidity that banks should hold, or upper limit to loans to value ratios, much more so that they have in the past.
  • If the U.S. and a number of other advanced countries are going to decrease their current account deficits, then some countries will have to decrease their current account surpluses. And for this to happen, there has to be, among other changes, an adjustment of the exchange rates. Put more bluntly, most emerging markets have to accept an appreciation.
10More

Europe Can't Handle the Euro - 0 views

www.nber.org/...wj020800.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 31 May 12 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 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.
9More

Optimism about an end to the euro crisis is wrong - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...9a-11e3-86ef-00144feab7de.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Adjustment is the key to ending the eurozone crisis. The optimists are saying that this process of regaining competitiveness is now taking place.
  • This judgment is profoundly wrong.
  • In other words, the eurozone is adjusting at the expense of the rest of the world.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • But while the eurozone is a fixed-currency regime internally, it is nothing of the sort externally. The currency does exactly what textbooks say it should: it keeps on rising, thus offsetting the improvements in the current account. Last week the euro rose to more than $1.38 against the dollar.
  • The main problem with the rise in the euro’s external value is that it makes the internal adjustment harder. The crisis countries need to lower their export prices but the higher value of the euro raises the prices of exports to outside the eurozone.
  • It essentially says internal adjustment is not really happening.
  • Second, the prices of Spanish tradeable goods would have to fall against those of non-Spanish tradeable goods elsewhere in the eurozone.
  • Put bluntly: the scale of necessary adjustment is absolutely enormous. The IMF does not believe that this is going to happen.
  • In a monetary union adjustment is hard without any transfers and without a fiscal union.
14More

An interview with Athanasios Orphanides: What happened in Cyprus | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...nterview-athanasios-orphanides
shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Cyprus had developed its financial center over three decades ago by having double taxation treaties with a number of countries, the Soviet Union for example. That means if profits are booked and earned and taxed in Cyprus, they are not taxed again in the other country. Russian deposits are there because Cyprus has a low corporate tax rate, much like Malta and Luxembourg, which annoys some people in Europe.
  • In addition, Cyprus has a legal system based on English law and follows English accounting rules
  • This government took a country with excellent fiscal finances, a surplus in fiscal accounts, and a banking system that was in excellent health. They started overspending, not only for unproductive government expenditures but also they raised implicit liabilities by raising pension promises, and so forth.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The size of the banking sector and exposure to Greece were known risks but at that time there was no banking problem in Cyprus
  • The containers were part of a shipment going from Iran to Syria that was intercepted in Cypriot waters after a tip from the U.S. The president took the decision to keep the ammunition. [NOTE: An independent prosecutor found that Christofias has ignored repeated warnings and pleas to destroy or safeguard the ammunition, apparently in hopes of one day returning it to Syria or Iran.]
  • Instead, they started lobbying the Russian government to give them a loan that would help them finance the country for a couple more years, and Russia came through, unfortunately,
  • I say unfortunately because as a result the government could keep operating and accumulating deficits without taking corrective action.
  • The next important date was the October 26-27, 2011 meeting of the EU council in Brussels where European leaders decided to wipe out what ended up being about 80% of the value of Greek debt that the private sector held. Every bank operating in Greece, regardless of where it was headquartered, had a lot of Greek debt.
  • For Cyprus, the writedown of Greek debt was between 4.5 and 5 billion euro, a substantial chunk of capital.
  • The second element of the decision taken by heads of states was to instruct the EBA to do a so- called capital exercise that marked to market sovereign debt and effectively raised abruptly capital requirements. The exercise required banks to have a core tier-1 ratio of 9%, and on top of that a buffer to make up for differences in market and book value of government debt. That famous capital exercise created the capital crunch in the euro area which is the cause of the recession we've had in the euro area for the last 2 years.
  • The Basle II framework that governments adopted internationally, and that the EU supervisory framework during this period also incorporated, specifies that holdings of government debt in a states' own currency are a zero-risk-weight asset, that is they are assigned a weight of zero in calculating capital requirements.
  • the governments should have agreed to make the EFSF/ESM available for direct recapitalization of banks instead of asking each government to be responsible for the capitalization.
  • Following a downgrading in late June 2012, all three major rating agencies rated the sovereign paper Cyprus below investment grade. According to ECB rules, that made the government debt not eligible as collateral for borrowing from the eurosystem, unless the ECB suspended the rules, as it had done for the cases of Greece, Portugal and Ireland. In the case of Cyprus, the ECB decided not to suspend the eligibility rule.
  • The governments have created risk in what before last week were considered perfectly safe deposits. This is going to have a chilling effect on deposits in any bank in a country perceived to be weak. This will mean the cost of funding will increase in the periphery of Europe and as a result, the cost of financing for businesses and households will increase. That will add to the divergences we already have and make the recession in the periphery of Europe deeper than it already is. This is really a disaster for European economic management as a whole. 
12More

The problem with TTIP | vox - 0 views

www.voxeu.org/...problem-ttip
shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The problem with TTIP
  • The TPP is a deep international integration arrangement between the US and 11 other Pacific states, which would cover 40% of world GDP and over 30% of world trade. It seeks to address as series of issues that 21st century commerce, but arguably its most obvious feature is that it excludes China – the world’s largest international trader and before long the world’s largest economy. There are, of course, the ritual genuflections towards ‘open regionalism’ – China can join if only it will agree to the necessary policy requirements – but this is about as much use as saying the Chief Rabbi can dine with you while insisting that the menu contains pork.
  • By signing TTIP Europe would be tying itself to a static rather than a dynamic part of the world economy and substantially reinforcing the US’s exclusionary policies.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • In the areas that are sound, it is mainly that TPP members will probably have to approach the US norms faster than desirable, and possibly faster than they can effectively administer. But there are also areas in which the TPP is not in the interests of most non-US members.
  • However, it is generally accepted that TTIP is more important to Europe than to the US, which greatly strengthens the US’s hand in negotiations.
  • it is widely accepted that the deeper intra-European integration fostered by the Single Market initiative was a major contributor to European prosperity between 1992 and 2007
  • he US has strongly promoted Investor-State Dispute Arbitration in which foreign-owned private firms can seek settlements against governments for taking actions that are not prohibited by the agreements but which reduce the value of investments that the firms have made in member countries.
  • For states that do not have a lot of, say, social or environmental legislation at the time TPP is signed, Investor-State Arbitration threatens to make progress in these dimensions difficult.
  • f China, India or Brazil felt that these disciplines were too arduous or just did not fit, the world trading system would be effectively be split with arguably the most dynamic areas excluded. And given that the TPP would be attractive to smaller economies and that the latter would probably be offered quite accommodating terms, the split would probably deepen rather than the opposite.
  • This reads very much like an agreement to cooperate to make sure that outcomes in the trading system are as the US and EU want them – and with around half of world GDP between them and a further 15% in the rest of TPP, it suggests that the choice facing other will be capitulation vs. exclusion. I fear the latter.
  • Champions of the multilateral system must be much more explicit about its virtues and value – and among these I include Europe (middle-sized countries with a strong belief in negotiated outcomes and order) and China (which has been a massive beneficiary of open markets and non-discrimination to date).
  • urope had better get on with an internally driven liberalisation, especially of services and utilities markets, to stimulate the recovery quite independent of the outside pressures of a trade negotiation;
9More

Four rescue measures for stagnant eurozone - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...81-11e4-a882-00144feabdc0.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Four rescue measures for stagnant eurozone
  • The EBA has a long record of stress tests that grotesquely underestimate the capital holes in EU banks.
  • Both the AQR and the stress test relied heavily on national regulators and supervisors – the very entities on whose watch the excesses that led to the financial crisis were allowed to fester and compound.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • They were in charge of the regulatory leniency that permitted the banks in their jurisdictions to engage in lender forbearance (extend and pretend/delay and pray) and to overstate the fair value of their assets.
  • To avoid the cyclical stagnation in the eurozone turning into secular stagnation, four policies are required.
  • he first is a proper AQR and stress test followed by a speedy recapitalisation of the capital-deficient banks and a wave of consolidation in the eurozone banking sector to bring higher profitability
  • The second measure is a temporary fiscal stimulus (say 1 per cent of eurozone GDP per year for two years, concentrated in the countries with the largest output gaps, that is, in the periphery), which is permanently funded and monetised by the ECB.
  • this will be a reminder that the most important asset of central banks – the present value of future seigniorage profits – is off-balance sheet.
  • Finally, to achieve debt sustainability for the eurozone sovereigns, radical supply side reforms are required that boost the growth rate of potential output to at least 1.5 per cent in Italy, Portugal and other sclerotic countries.
1More

Aluminium value chain - Norsk Hydro ASA - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch
shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Aluminium value chain - Norsk Hydro ASA
1More

Value chain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/Value_chain
shared by Gene Ellis on 07 Mar 14 - Cached
2More

Are National Champions Really Winners? by Michael Hüther - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ions-by-michael-h-ther-2015-02
shared by Gene Ellis on 23 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Are National Champions Really Winners?
  • Although the proportion of imported intermediate goods in German manufacturing exports has risen from around 19% to 30% since 1995, the globalization of value chains during this period has improved competitiveness, and dramatically increased manufacturing value.
5More

Midsize Cities in Poland Develop as Service Hubs for Outsourcing Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-for-outsourcing-industry.html outsourcing europe industry poland
shared by Gene Ellis on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Midsize Cities in Poland Develop as Service Hubs for Outsourcing Industry
  • Part of Poland’s edge derives from the fact that it has yet to join the euro currency union. Its currency, the zloty, has been relatively stable against the world’s reserve currencies in the last year.
  • (The public sector, employing about a quarter of Poland’s 15.7 million workers, is still the country’s largest source of jobs.)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • industry specialists say Poland must move into more sophisticated services, like research and development, to continue attracting investment and corporate clients.
  • “The question for Poland is, ‘How do I move up the value chain?' ” said Peter Schumacher, chief executive of the value Leadership Group, a management consultancy based in Frankfurt and New York. “How can I go from basic process management work to more sophisticated creative work?”
9More

Cyprus adds to Europe's confusion - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...4a-11e2-a4fa-00144feabdc0.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • First, the eurozone does indeed have the capacity to do the right thing in the end, though not before first exhausting all the alternatives.
  • It protects the small deposits and imposes a rational resolution process.
  • Second, a euro is indeed not a euro everywhere.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • A consensus on the principle that creditors, not taxpayers, should pay if a bank becomes insolvent does not yet exist across the eurozone. Does anybody imagine the German government would not rescue Deutsche Bank if it were in trouble? Of course it would.
  • Yet, as Guntram Wolff of Bruegel notes, a currency union with internal exchange controls is a contradiction in terms. Only the willingness of the European Central Bank to finance Cypriot banks without limit could end these controls in the near future. Will it be willing to act soon?
  • The outcome in Cyprus underlines the fact that the value of a euro of bank liabilities depends on the solvency of the bank itself and the solvency of the government standing behind the bank. If both bank and state are insolvent, lenders are likely not only to lose a big proportion of their money outright, but to find that the rest is frozen behind controls,
  • The ideal conclusion from the Cypriot imbroglio would be that all eurozone banks should have more capital.
  • A final lesson of this crisis is that what I have called the “bad marriage” that binds the eurozone members together has become worse.
  • Thus the eurozone limps on through crisis after crisis. Can – or will – this continue indefinitely? I do not know.
12More

Car Factories Offer Hope for Spanish Industry and Workers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nish-industry-and-workers.html car offer hope spanish industry workers
shared by Gene Ellis on 28 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Four years of economic turmoil and the euro zone’s highest jobless rate have made the Spanish labor market so inviting — an estimated 40 percent less expensive than those of Europe’s other biggest car-making countries, Germany and France — that Ford and Renault recently announced plans to expand their production in Spain.
  • Some experts say such gains in competitiveness and investment are exactly what Spain needs for its economy to recover and to remove any doubts about whether the country can remain in the euro union.
  • Because Spain no longer has its own currency to devalue as a way to lower the price of its exports, it is having to find its competitive advantage in lower labor costs. Many economists have argued that societies cannot survive such painful downward adjustments.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • That is the lowest level since 1972.
  • Its trade deficit has been shrinking — down 28 percent for the first 10 months of this year,
  • “From 2008, we suddenly realized that we had lost a lot of competitiveness and needed to work very hard to improve things, particularly in terms of labor issues and logistics,
  • Over all, Spain’s unit labor costs — a measure of productivity — are down 4 percent since 2008, according to Eurostat, the European statistics agency.
  • In a related measurement, the most recent Eurostat data put Spain’s average hourly labor cost at 20.60 euros which was well below Germany’s 30.10 euros and France’s 34.20 euros.
  • Unlike most other Spanish industries, car manufacturing has no sectorwide collective bargaining agreement with unions. As a result, each carmaker has been able to adjust working hours with its own employees, in response to changing demand.
  • In return, the companies have promised workers that they will not be subjected to the huge layoffs made in other parts of the economy,
  • I don’t want to give lessons to anybody. But at such a delicate moment for Spain, showing that we believe in flexibility and consensus has certainly been highly valued by the carmakers.”
  • The car sector employs 280,000 people in Spain, including parts suppliers, and accounts for a tenth of the country’s economic output. About 85 percent of the industry’s workers are on long-term contracts.
4More

The Electric Car's Short Circuit by Bjørn Lomborg - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...electric-cars-by-bj-rn-lomborg electric car
shared by Gene Ellis on 17 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Recent research indicates that electric cars may reach break-even price with hybrids only in 2026, and with conventional cars in 2032, after governments spend €100-150 billion in subsidies.
  • A life-cycle analysis shows that almost half of an electric car’s entire CO2 emissions result from its production, more than double the emissions resulting from the production of a gasoline-powered car.
  • Proponents proudly proclaim that if an electric car is driven about 300,000 kilometers (180,000 miles), it will have emitted less than half the CO2 of a gasoline-powered car. But its battery will likely need to be replaced long before it reaches this target, implying many more tons of CO2 emissions.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Even if driven much farther, 150,000 kilometers, an electric car’s CO2 emissions will be only 28% less than those of a gasoline-powered car. During the car’s lifetime, this will prevent 11 tons of CO2 emissions, or about €44 of climate damage.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphGiven the size of the subsidies on offer, this is extremely poor value. Denmark’s subsidies, for example, pay almost €6,000 to avoid one ton of CO2 emissions. Purchasing a similar amount in the European Emissions Trading System would cost about €5. For the same money, Denmark could have reduced CO2 emissions more than a thousand-fold.
1 - 20 of 51 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page