Global flows in a digital age
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
7More
Global flows in a digital age | McKinsey & Company - 0 views
-
Now, one in three goods crosses national borders, and more than one-third of financial investments are international transactions. In the next decade, global flows could triple,
-
Exchanges of goods such as aircraft and automobiles, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and microelectronics, as well as professional services and foreign direct investment flows, are growing faster than others.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
we find that countries with a larger number of connections in the global network of flows increase their GDP growth by up to 40 percent more than less connected countries do. The penalty for being left behind is rising.
-
Digital technologies, which reduce the cost of production and distribution, are transforming flows in three ways: through the creation of purely digital goods and services, “digital wrappers” that enhance the value of physical flows, and digital platforms that facilitate cross-border production and exchange.
-
Developing economies now account for 38 percent of global flows, nearly triple their share in 1990. S
-
oday, digital technologies enable even the smallest company or solo entrepreneur to be a “micromultinational,” selling and sourcing products, services, and ideas across borders. Individuals can work remotely through online platforms, creating a virtual people flow. Microfinance platforms enable entrepreneurs and social innovators to raise money globally in ever-smaller amounts.
3More
Dubai, Once a Humble Refueling Stop, Is Crossroad to the Globe - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Five years ago, the global credit crisis brought Dubai near bankruptcy. But the city has recovered its drive, helped partly by a $10 billion bailout from neighboring Abu Dhabi, and a return of investors from the Middle East and Eastern Europe
-
Dubai’s success has rattled its rivals, particularly airlines in Europe and the United States, which have complained that traffic was being siphoned from their hubs.
12More
A European Energy Executive's Delicate Dance Over Ukraine - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Major Western oil companies like BP and Exxon Mobil have extensive exploration deals in Russia that they fear could be jeopardized if the United States and European Union impose stiffer sanctions on the Putin regime.
-
“This is by far the toughest time for European energy security that I have seen,” said Mr. Scaroni. “This issue might stop the supply of Russian gas.”
- ...9 more annotations...
-
The goal is to be able to ship gas to Ukraine at an annual rate of more than three billion cubic meters by the time the heating season begins in the autumn, increasing the flow to up to 10 billion cubic meters annually by next spring. Last year Ukraine imported nearly 30 billion cubic meters of gas, according to a recent report by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
-
Part of his message is that, even though gas demand in Europe has been weak because of sluggish economies, imports from Russia actually rose last year by about 16 percent as other sources of supply including Norway and Algeria declined. Europe, he warned, is simply not prepared to do without gas from Russia.
-
But with the gradual introduction of more competitive pricing in the European markets, the gas business has become much less attractive for ENI and other big gas middlemen. They are stuck with high-priced long-term contracts to a handful of suppliers like Gazprom and Sonatrach, the Algerian state-owned company, while their customers are able to secure gas at often lower spot market prices — assuming the gas is flowing.
-
The pipeline would be a major new source of Russian gas for energy-hungry Europe. But European Union authorities have become deeply skeptical about the South Stream plan, seeing it as just another way of making Europe more dependent on Russian energy.
-
Given the balance of interests, tighter sanctions by Western governments might more likely aim to stem the technology that Russia needs to increase its future production, rather than to cut off gas supplies to Europe,
-
hose outages in 2006 and 2009 are a top reason that the European Union had already been trying to chip away at Europe’s dependence on Russia even before the Crimea annexation.
-
One of the most acrimonious battles is between the bloc’s antitrust authorities and Gazprom. That standoff began in 2011 when the European Commission carried out surprise raids on natural gas companies across Europe, including Gazprom affiliates, seeking evidence of blocking access to networks, charging excessive prices and raising barriers to diversification of supplies.
-
That is partly because powerful Eastern European countries like Poland argue that such clean-energy policies would impede their ability to reduce Russian dependence by mining more coal or developing their own shale gas resources.
-
nd this month, the European Commission issued rules aimed at reducing the subsidies that governments use to support the wind and solar industries,
15More
Europe's dangerous addiction to Russian gas needs radical cure - FT.com - 0 views
-
“It really boils down to this: no nation should use energy to stymie a people’s aspirations,” Mr Kerry said in Brussels, just as Russia’s Gazprom raised the price it charges Ukraine for gas.
-
Bernstein Research has calculated that to do so, Europe needs to eliminate 15 bcm of residential and industrial gas demand, invest $215bn and incur $37bn of annual costs in the form of higher-priced energy. That works out as $160 for every single person in Europe.
- ...12 more annotations...
-
A new energy corridor has just been sanctioned that will bring Caspian gas being developed by a BP-led consortium into the heart of Europe.
-
Import terminals are being built to receive liquefied natural gas (LNG) from places such as Qatar and Nigeria.
-
And countries such as the UK are moving ahead with developing their substantial reserves of shale gas.
-
There are 20 operational LNG regasification plants in the EU, with a combined import capacity of about 198 bcm of gas per year. A further 30 bcm/y are under construction. But Europe’s terminals are conspicuously underused. Imports of LNG have fallen sharply, partly because of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, which prompted Japan to switch to gas-fired generation and diverted LNG cargoes from Europe.
-
The question is: are European customers prepared to pay Japanese prices for LNG?” says one Brussels-based European gas industry official.
-
Arguably a more urgent task is to improve energy security by unifying the EU market – in particular, linking up the countries of eastern Europe.
-
If Europe is serious about reducing its dependence on Russian gas, it will have to take radical measures. Bernstein’s Mr Clint lists some: switching from gas to diesel power, closing gas-intensive industries such as oil refining, reducing gas consumption in heating and adding more coal-fired generation – which would inevitably increase carbon emissions.
-
Added to that, Europe is contractually obliged to continue taking delivery of Russian gas. Bernstein makes the point that Gazprom has about 120 bcm of take-or-pay contracts – with companies such as ENI, Edison and RWE – that require Europe to continue paying about $50bn for Russian gas. Many of these stretch way beyond 2020.
-
Europe accounts for half of Gazprom’s gas revenues, according to the company, and 71 per cent of Russia’s crude oil exports, according to the International Energy Agency.
-
“Gazprom has heard it all before,” said Jonathan Stern, director of gas research at the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies. “For the past 20 years Europe has been trying to diversify away from Russian gas and failed.”
-
A growing share of oil, largely from Rosneft, is flowing directly to China by pipeline. Lukoil last week started commercial production at its enormous West Qurna field in Iraq – much of whose production is likely to be sold in Asian markets, analysts say. And Novatek, together with CNPC of China, is building an LNG terminal that will help shift gas exports towards Asia.
-
Any reduction in imports from Russia thanks to Europe’s diversification strategy “is not a prospect for the next few years,” he said. “And by that time I think Russia will find alternative gas export markets, especially in an environment of strong Asian demand for gas.”
7More
Citi Cuts Costa Rica Growth Forecast After Firings - Bloomberg - 0 views
-
Hours later, BofA said it would be exiting operations in Costa Rica, Guadalajara, Mexico and Taguig, Philippines, without saying how many jobs would be lost. Costa Rica’s foreign investment agency said the BofA move would result in 1,500 layoffs.
-
“This is a strong call to the country to keeps tabs on things like the rising cost of electricity, telecommunications, wages and social guarantees.”
- ...4 more annotations...
-
The country of 4.7 million people climbed seven spots to 102nd in the World Bank’s annual “Doing Business” report this year, lagging behind China, Vietnam and Namibia. Moody’s Investors Service lowered its outlook on Costa Rica to negative from neutral in September, citing a rising debt burden and widening budget deficit. Moody’s rates the country Baa3, putting it in the same category as Turkey and Iceland.
-
In a Bloomberg survey published last month, Costa Rica was ranked fourth behind Russia, Argentina and Ukraine on a list of countries confronting the biggest loss of investor confidence. The survey cited data including the rising cost of credit default swaps and the currency’s performance against the dollar.
-
California-based Intel, whose processors run more than 80 percent of personal computers shipped worldwide every year, originally chose to establish operations in Costa Rica after studying sites in Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, according to a 2000 case study by Harvard University’s Center for International Development. The company’s $600 million investment at the time represented about 4.2 percent of GDP, prompting the company’s then-Vice President Bob Perlman to say Intel’s arrival was like “putting a whale in a swimming pool,” according to the study.
-
n 2013, about 21 percent of Costa Rica’s exports of goods came from Intel, according to investment promotion agency CINDE
9More
Learning about global value chains by looking beyond official trade data: Part 1 | vox - 0 views
-
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.
11More
Ukraine crisis: Russian retaliation could hit Western mulitinationals - 0 views
-
"There no doubt would be Russian retaliation," said Justin Logan, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. "Companies with money tied up in Russia would have a tough time getting it back out."
-
The White House said Friday that President Barack Obama and the leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy agreed after a conference call that they're ready to inflict targeted sanctions against Russia if Moscow es
-
The lion's share of foreign money in Russia is from major energy sector players like Shell, Exxon, and BP, said Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst at Oppenheimer
- ...8 more annotations...
-
Shell is working with Gazprom on natural gas extraction in Russia; Exxon has a multibillion dollar exploration partnership with Rosneft, a major oil producer controlled by the Russian government, and BP owns nearly 20 percent of Rosneft.
-
"Shell and Exxon have physical assets in Russia," said Gheit. "But pound-for-pound, BP has the biggest exposure in Russia." Although BP may have the most to lose from an economic tug-of-war between Moscow and the West, tough lessons that BP learned in Russia—through a defunct partnership with Rosneft called TNK-BP—also make BP best equipped for any future fallout, said Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy.
-
Spiro said that several German firms have also steeled themselves for possible fallout from friction between the Russia and the West. "German companies are huge here," said Spiro, naming BASF, energy firm RWE, and Siemens as companies with operations in Russia. BASF is working to finalize a deal with Gazprom that would give it a stake in Siberian oil fields; RWE has reached a preliminary deal to sell its natural gas subsidiary to Russian billionaires Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, and Siemens has a partnership with state-run railroad monopoly Russian Railways. Late last month, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser made a trip to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at his residence and voice support for a "trusting relationship" with Russian companies.
-
"It starts with Germany and works its way down," said Hogan. "They have the most trade back-and-forth, and Germany gets the highest percentage of its energy from Russia."
-
Alcoa owns aluminum fabrication facilities in Russia, and Boeing has a design center in Moscow, as well as a joint venture with VSMPO-Avisma, the world's largest titanium producer.
-
Members of the Russian parliament have also proposed charging international payments companies like Visa and Mastercard with pre-emptive "security fees," with the stated aim of preparing for future financial disruptions.
13More
Profits Vanish in Venezuela After Currency Devaluation - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
The country’s high inflation — currently around 60 percent a year — has also meant that the prices in bolívares that companies charge for many goods and services have risen sharply.
-
Now companies are feeling the pain from a series of currency devaluations over the last year and a half. Photo
- ...10 more annotations...
-
But the rosy outlook changed in late March, when Brink’s started calculating its sales using the recently created exchange rate of about 50 bolívares to the dollar
-
Further complicating the picture, the Venezuelan government has not allowed companies to repatriate profits for the last five years.
-
Companies have ways of chipping away at the locked-up profits, including charging higher fees to Venezuelan subsidiaries for goods and services provided by the parent corporation. But many foreign companies are stuck holding vast troves of bolívares that shrink in value each time there is a devaluation.
-
Procter & Gamble said in April that it had the equivalent of about $900 million in cash in this country and that it was taking a $275 million write-down as a result of applying the government’s intermediate exchange rate to its Venezuelan balance sheet. Colgate-Palmolive wrote down $174 million, while Ford wrote down about $316 million.
-
“All the companies knew there would be a loss because everyone knew there wouldn’t be dollars” available at the fixed exchange rate, said an executive with an American company in Venezuela who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We were trapped because the law here did not give you a way out.”
-
The government has also failed to pay companies the hard currency it had promised them for imports bought on credit from suppliers, and in many cases suppliers are now refusing to ship more goods to Venezuela until they receive payment.
-
Stores are often out of basic products such as dish soap or corn flour. DirecTV has stopped taking on new customers because it cannot get the dollars to import more dish antennas.
-
Without dollars, car companies cannot import the parts needed to assemble vehicles; Ford and Toyota were forced to temporarily close their factories.
-
In yet another reflection of the currency restrictions, the government has refused to let airlines operating in Venezuela trade the bolívares they receive for ticket sales and other services here for dollars. The International Air Transport Association says that the airlines have more than $4 billion in revenues held up in the country, based on the government’s base exchange rate at the time the tickets were sold.
13More
Educated in America: College graduates and high school dropouts | vox - 0 views
-
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.
- ...10 more annotations...
-
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.
-
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.
6More
The Economist explains: Why airlines make such meagre profits | The Economist - 0 views
-
In those six decades passenger kilometres (the number of flyers multiplied by the distance they travel) have gone from almost zero to more than 5 trillion a year. But though the industry has done much to connect the world, it has done little to line the pockets of the airlines themselves. Despite incredible growth, airlines have not come close to returning the cost of capital, with profit margins of less than 1% on average over that period. In 2012 they made profits of only $4 for every passenger carried. Why has a booming business failed to prosper?
-
Airlines were state-owned beasts in receipt of juicy handouts from state coffers. These “flag carriers” were regarded as important strategic businesses with monopoly powers that conferred national pride and international prestige. But they rapidly turned into bloated nationalised industries that regarded profit as a dirty word.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
Air travel was governed by inter-governmental deals that dictated which airlines could fly where, how many seats they could offer and, in many cases, what fares they could charge. The result was inefficiency and losses.
-
Low-cost carriers, such as SouthWest and Ryanair, introduced cut-throat rivalry on short-haul routes. Former flag-carriers struggled with the legacy of older fleets, large networks, uppity unionised workforces and vast pension liabilities. Low-cost carriers devastated their model of feeding short-haul passengers onto more lucrative long-haul services.
-
As well as stiff competition from their rivals, airlines face the problem that there is little competition in the industries that supply them. Two firms—Airbus and Boeing—provide the majority of the planes, and airports and air-traffic control are monopolies
8More
Dani Rodrik reviews the fundamental lessons about emerging economies that economists ha... - 0 views
-
First, emerging-market hype is just that. Economic miracles rarely occur, and for good reason. Governments that can intervene massively to restructure and diversify the economy, while preventing the state from becoming a mechanism of corruption and rent-seeking, are the exception.
-
the rapid industrialization that they engineered has eluded most of Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
We have long known that portfolio and short-term inflows fuel consumption booms and real-estate bubbles, with disastrous consequences when market sentiment inevitably sours and finance dries up. Governments that enjoyed the rollercoaster ride on the way up should not have been surprised by the plunge that inevitably follows.
-
Third, floating exchange rates are flawed shock absorbers. In theory, market-determined currency values are supposed to isolate the domestic economy from the vagaries of international finance, rising when money floods in and falling when the flows are reversed. In reality, few economies can bear the requisite currency alignments without pain.
-
It is true, but unhelpful, to say that governments have only themselves to blame for having recklessly rushed into this wild ride. It is now time to think about how the world can create a saner balance between finance and the real economy.
10More
Shifting energy trends blunt Russia's natural-gas weapon - The Washington Post - 0 views
-
As clunky Soviet-era factories and mines have become more efficient or gone out of business, Ukraine’s domestic gas consumption has dropped nearly 40 percent over the past five years, cutting its imports from Russia in half, according to a report by Sberbank Investment Research.
-
Domestic consumption might drop further if Ukraine trims the generous subsidies it gives households using natural gas, although so few households are paying their bills that it might not matter. “People will go from not paying the lower price to not paying the higher price,” said Thane Gustafson, senior director of Russian energy for the consulting firm IHS CERA.
-
Even if the deals with foreign companies advance, Ukraine will need to import about half of its gas needs,
- ...7 more annotations...
-
“An inefficient and opaque energy sector continues to weigh heavily on public finances and the economy,” the International Monetary Fund said, noting that energy subsidies reached 7.5 percent of Ukraine’s GDP in 2012. “The very low tariffs for residential gas and district heating cover only a fraction of economic costs and encourage one of the highest energy consumption levels in Europe,” the IMF said in December.
-
Now, the upheaval of the past two weeks has thrown Ukraine’s gas strategy into greater confusion. “There is no government and there are no agencies to do business with,” said Simon Pirani, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “How high up the list of priorities it is is anyone’s guess.”
-
Even if residential customers paid up, the Ukrainian state energy company, Naftogaz, would lose money on those sales
-
In 2012, many European industrial users and power plants switched to coal, and Russia agreed to renegotiate.
-
Gazprom also agreed to eliminate contract clauses that said a country such as Germany could reship Russian gas only with Gazprom’s approval.
-
As a result, Ukraine ended up paying more than Gazprom’s customers in Germany, and last year Ukraine imported small quantities of natural gas from Germany and Hungary through pipelines in Slovakia and Poland, experts say. Germany buys gas from a variety of countries, but rerouted Russian gas has effectively been undercutting other Russian gas.
6More
Squash Seeds Show Andean Cultivation Is 10,000 Years Old, Twice as Old as Thought - New... - 0 views
-
Seeds of domesticated squash found by scientists on the western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old, about twice the age of previously discovered cultivated crops in the region, new, more precise dating techniques have revealed.
-
The excavations also yielded peanut hulls and cotton fibers — about 8,500 and 6,000 years old, respectively
-
Their research also turned up traces of other domesticated plants, including a grain, manioc and unidentified fruits, and stone hoes, furrowed garden plots and small-scale irrigation canals from approximately the same period of time.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
The article also noted that 10,000-year-old cultivated squash seeds had recently been reported in Mexico, along with evidence of domesticated corn there by 9,000 years ago. Scholars now think that plants were domesticated independently in at least 10 “centers of origin,” including, in addition to the Middle East, Mexico and Peru, places in Africa, southern India, China and New Guinea.
-
In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, an arc from modern-day Israel through Syria and Turkey to Iraq, wheat and barley were domesticated by 10,000 years ago, and possibly rye by 13,000 years ago. Experts in ancient agriculture suspect that the transition from foraging to cultivation had started much earlier and was not as abrupt a transformation as indicated in the archaeological record.
-
The distribution of building structures, canals and furrowed fields, Dr. Dillehay said, indicated that the Andean culture was moving beyond cultivation limited to individual households toward an organized agricultural society.
7More
Dani Rodrik shows why Sub-Saharan Africa's impressive economic performance is not susta... - 0 views
-
As researchers at the African Center for Economic Transformation in Accra, Ghana, put it, the continent is “growing rapidly, transforming slowly.”
-
Fewer than 10% of African workers find jobs in manufacturing, and among those only a tiny fraction – as low as one-tenth – are employed in modern, formal firms with adequate technology. Distressingly, there has been very little improvement in this regard, despite high growth rates. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa is less industrialized today than it was in the 1980’s. Private investment in modern industries, especially non-resource tradables, has not increased, and remains too low to sustain structural transformation.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
As in all developing countries, farmers in Africa are flocking to the cities. And yet, as a recent study from the Groningen Growth and Development Center shows, rural migrants do not end up in modern manufacturing industries, as they did in East Asia, but in services such as retail trade and distribution. Though such services have higher productivity than much of agriculture, they are not technologically dynamic in Africa
-
Xinshen Diao of the International Food Policy Research Institute has shown that this growth was led by non-tradable services, in particular construction, transport, and hotels and restaurants. The public sector dominates investment, and the bulk of public investment is financed by foreign grants. Foreign aid has caused the real exchange rate to appreciate,
-
What Rwanda and other African countries lack are the modern, tradable industries that can turn the potential into reality by acting as the domestic engine of productivity growth.
-
Studies show that very few microenterprises grow beyond informality, just as the bulk of successful established firms do not start out as small, informal enterprises.
3More
China's Economic Empire - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
China has also invested heavily in building infrastructure, undertaking huge hydroelectric projects like the Merowe Dam on the Nile in Sudan — the biggest Chinese engineering project in Africa — and Ecuador’s $2.3 billion Coca Codo Sinclair Dam. And China is currently involved in the building of more than 200 other dams across the planet, according to International Rivers, a nonprofit environmental organization.
-
China has become the world’s leading exporter; it also surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest trading nation in 2012.
-
annual investment from China to the European Union grew from less than $1 billion annually before 2008 to more than $10 billion in the past two years. And in the United States, investment surged from less than $1 billion in 2008 to a record high of $6.7 billion in 2012, according to the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm. Last year, Europe was the destination for 33 percent of China’s foreign direct investment.
8More
Lethal Malfeasance in Malawi - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Government investigators believe $500 million in donor money was lost to graft during the eight-year reign of Ms. Banda’s predecessor.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
“For every one I have arrested,” she said of government crooks, “I have lost a whole village of votes.”
-
In February the health minister admitted that Malawi’s central medical stores held only 5 percent of the drugs they were supposed to stock.
-
Dr. Chiudzu blamed not corruption but an overcentralized state: The hospital is barred from buying supplies itself, yet the Health Ministry, which holds all the procurement power, is unable to meet needs.
4More
The Poor Need Cheap Fossil Fuels - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, excluding South Africa, the entire electricity-generating capacity available is only 28 gigawatts — equivalent to Arizona’s — for 860 million people. About 6.5 million people live in Arizona.
-
Over the last 30 years, China moved an estimated 680 million people out of poverty by giving them access to modern energy, mostly powered by coal. Yes, this has resulted in terrible air pollution and a huge increase in greenhouse gas emissions. But it is a trade-off many developing countries would gratefully choose.
-
Today, 81 percent of the planet’s energy needs are met by fossil fuels, and according to the International Energy Agency, that percentage will be almost as high in 2035 under current policies, when consumption will be much greater. The unfortunate fact is that many people feel uncomfortable facing up to the undeniable need for more cheap and reliable power in the developing world.
- ...1 more annotation...
-
Because burning natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, this technology has helped the United States reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the lowest level since the mid-1990s