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Gene Ellis

Are the Long-Term Unemployed on the Margins of the Labor Market? - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...nemployed-margins-labor-market

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Are the Long-Term Unemployed on the Margins of the Labor Market?
Gene Ellis

Russia puts squeeze on Ukraine, jacks up natural gas prices 40 percent - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...-natural-gas-prices-40-percent

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  • Russia puts squeeze on Ukraine, jacks up natural gas prices 40 percent
  • On Thursday, the International Monetary Fund threw a financial lifeline, agreeing to stump up $14-18 billion as part of a two-year bailout package in exchange for tough economic reforms.
  • Russia's milk union has asked for a ban on Ukrainian dairy products
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Russia accounts for 13 percent of Ukraine's iron and steel exports, and the political crisis has already hit shipments from Ukrainian steelmakers this year.
  • Sales of rebar - a steel bar or mesh of steel wires used in reinforced concrete - to the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a bloc of former Soviet states, fell 70 percent to 45,000 tonnes in January compared with the average monthly export figure in the first half of 2013.Russian steelmakers have aggressively lobbied their government to implement measures to defend domestic producers from Ukrainian imports.
  • Tough competition on the international steel market makes the chance of (steelmakers) expanding their export market presence very low," Eavex Capital metals analyst Ivan Dzvinka said in Kiev
  • Manufacturers of train carts and turbo engines, which together account for 2.5 percent of Ukraine's total exports, will be hit particularly hard.
  • "Re-orienting these industries to Europe would be nearly impossible without very heavy investment,
  • "The point of the FTA is not to make it possible for Ukraine to export Soviet-era tractors to Europe. That's not going to happen. But it could eventually lead to Ukraine becoming a producer of Peugeots, Volkswagens, fridges or Nokia telephones," the EUISS's Popescu said.
Gene Ellis

Italy's Mob Extends Reach in Europe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...b-spreads-reach-in-europe.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Italy’s Mob Extends Reach in Europe
Gene Ellis

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.
Gene Ellis

The Economist explains: How countries calculate their GDP | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...economist-explains-26

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  • How countries calculate their GDP
  • Simon Kuznets, a Russian emigrant to America, is credited with creating the first true GDP estimate, for delivery to America’s Congress in 1934
  • Output can be measured in three (theoretically equivalent) ways: by adding up all the money spent each year, by adding up all the money earned each year, or by adding up all the value added each year. Some economies, including Britain, combine all three methods into a single GDP figure, whereas others, like America, produce different statistics for each.
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  • merica’s Bureau of Economic Analysis draws data from surveys of manufacturers, builders and retailers, as well as from trade and financial flows, among other sources. These data are used to estimate the components of GDP, such as total investment and net exports
  • Real, or inflation-adjusted, GDP is needed to compare figures across time periods, while GDP per person is best for understanding how individual incomes are evolving.
Gene Ellis

The Economist explains: How Nigeria's economy grew by 89% overnight | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...economist-explains-2

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A snapshot of Nigeria’s economy in 1990 gave little or no weight to fast-growing parts of the economy such as mobile telephony or the movie industry. At the time the state-owned telephone company had a few hundred thousand customers. Today the country has 120m mobile-phone subscriptions. On the old 1990 figures, the telecoms sector was less than 1% of GDP; it is now almost 9% of GDP. Motion pictures had not shown up at all in the old figures, but the industry’s size is now put at 1.4% of GDP.
  • The oil industry’s share of GDP is now put at just 14%, compared with 33% according to the old figures.
  • Manufacturing is much larger than previously thought. Services are booming.
Gene Ellis

Europe's dangerous addiction to Russian gas needs radical cure - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...64-11e3-8b15-00144feabdc0.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Europe’s dangerous addiction to Russian gas needs radical cure
  • “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.”
Gene Ellis

Citi Cuts Costa Rica Growth Forecast After Firings - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-intel-fire-3-000-workers.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Citi Cuts Costa Rica Growth Forecast After Firings
  • 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.”
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  • 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
Gene Ellis

Intel Says It Will Cut 1,500 Jobs in Costa Rica - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...702304819004579489860932369306

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has been grappling with the effects of a slowdown in sales of personal computers that use its microprocessor chips. The company has also been slow to build a sizable business in chips for smartphones and tablets.
  • Brian Krzanich and Renee James —appointed last May as Intel's chief executive and president, respectively—have been studying Intel operations and concluded that reducing the assembly and test operations in Costa Rica made most economic sense, said Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman. "We have to be more efficient and effective," he said. Most of Intel's chips are fabricated in the U.S., Ireland or Israel and then sent to other companies to be encapsulated in packaging and tested. Those chores now handled in Costa Rica will be moved to existing Intel operations in Malaysia, Vietnam and China, Mr. Mulloy said.
Gene Ellis

Waiting for the Markets to Blink - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-for-the-markets-to-blink.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • “You get these occasional disconnects and start asking who’s right and who’s wrong,” said Daniel Morris, global investment strategist at TIAA-CREF.
  • “We think the equity market is right,” he said. “If that’s the case, bond yields are too low.”
  • “We’re constructive about the future and think all this intervention is going to work, but how much is priced in” to the stock market? So much, in his view, that “we’ve been selling into the strength,” he said.
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  • “Do you believe that things are going to get better? If you do, you don’t want to be in Treasuries at 2.5 percent,” he said. “Some things don’t make sense to me. It’s frustrating.”
  • He says it doesn’t make sense that the stock market has held up as well as it has amid the Fed’s debt purchases and its policy of maintaining short-term interest rates near zero, a measure taken in a crisis that is supposed to be over.
  • “How do you know there has been an economic recovery and the patient is breathing normally when it’s in an oxygen tent?”
  • For all of 2013, gross domestic product increased by 1.9 percent, compared with 2.8 percent for 2012.
  • Orders and shipments of durable goods
  • were flat in 2013, and housing has weakened. February was the eighth consecutive month of declines in pending home sales, leaving them down 10.2 percent from 12 months earlier.
  • “It will be extremely difficult for the U.S. economy to escape its Great Recession hangover with this poor profits backdrop,” Mr. Edwards wrote. “Indeed it leaves the economy extremely vulnerable to adverse shocks,” like declining growth in Asia.
  • “We’re keeping a very close eye on China,” Ms. Patterson said. “If there are signs that it’s slowing more than we expect, that would hurt our view of emerging markets and worsen the outlook for developed markets due to contagion” because of the increasing importance of China in the global economy.
  • American real estate companies and European banks, for instance — but he is keeping 13 percent of his fund in cash because of a dearth of attractive investment choices.
  • Mr. Morris finds a wider array of opportunities. He likes shares of consumer-discretionary companies, which provide the products and services that people want but do not need. The sector includes businesses as diverse as hotels, carmakers and clothing stores.
  • the industrial sector, which includes manufacturers of business equipment. Another preferred segment is banks; he expects them to flourish as interest rates rise and the gap widens between what they charge in interest and what they pay.
  • Mr. Morris encourages stock investors to buy American.
  • “You can’t just unwind quantitative easing, with all of its distortions, and achieve stability without some pain along the way,” he warned. “What that pain is, when it happens, that’s where the uncertainties lie. The margin to maneuver is getting less and less with the passage of time.”
Gene Ellis

France and Europe: More special pleading | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...be-italy-more-special-pleading

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  • Bureaucratic France has 90 public-sector staff per 1,000 people compared to 50 in Germany. Most enjoy almost total job security.
  • France’s serial requests are treated as duplicitous by those who ask why big countries break rules that smaller ones have to obey (a game that first began when France and Germany bust the stability pact in 2002). The Hollande government has already been given one delay
  • The best guess is that France will yet again get its way,
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Another would mark the third time in seven years that France has missed targets.
  • France and Europe More special pleading
Gene Ellis

Ukraine crisis: Russian retaliation could hit Western mulitinationals - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/101614522

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  • "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
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  • 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.
  • We know that if the West's resolve starts to crumble, it will almost certainly start in Germany,
  • "That's the canary in the coal mine."
  • "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.
Gene Ellis

Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change - 0 views

www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/...neil-postman--five-things.html

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  • Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change
Gene Ellis

Technological change: The last Kodak moment? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/21542796

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  • Technological change The last Kodak moment?
Gene Ellis

Rise of the Robots - NYTimes.com - NYTimes.com - 0 views

krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...rise-of-the-robots

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  • Search Rise of the Robots
  • The most valuable part of each computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with robots, according to my colleague Quentin Hardy. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.
  • Robots mean that labor costs don’t matter much, so you might as well locate in advanced countries with large markets and good infrastructure (which may soon not include us, but that’s another issue)
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  • But the college premium hasn’t risen for a while. What has happened, on the other hand, is a notable shift in income away from labor:
Gene Ellis

A European Energy Executive's Delicate Dance Over Ukraine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...licate-dance-over-ukraine.html

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  • A European Energy Executive’s Delicate Dance Over Ukraine
  • 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,
Gene Ellis

Growth in Global Trade Is in Ideas, Not Stuff - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ade-is-in-ideas-not-stuff.html

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  • Growth in Global Trade Is in Ideas, Not Stuff
Gene Ellis

Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...te-methane-global-warming.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils
  • ound for pound, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But in stark contrast to CO2, methane breaks down quickly in the atmosphere.
  • He argues, essentially, that the world has yet to mount a serious effort to control carbon dioxide, which will be vastly more harmful in the long run, and that methane and other short-term pollutants should largely be ignored until that bigger problem is fixed.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The methane is like a hangover that you can get over if you stop drinking,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of a textbook on planetary atmospheres. “CO2 is more like lead poisoning — it sticks around, you don’t get rid of it, and it causes irreversible harm.”
  • Aggressively controlling methane, they say, would help slow the warming sharply over the coming decades.
  • By contrast, “our success in controlling CO2 emissions is likely to make very little difference on temperature over the next 40 years,” said Drew Shindell, a longtime NASA climate scientist who is leaving for Duke University.
  • Experts say that, looking at the more distant future, it is hugely important to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere now, even if that requires burning more gas. Dr. Pierrehumbert and Dr. Shindell largely agree on this point, with Dr. Pierrehumbert discounting the gas-is-worse-than-coal argument as “bunkum.”
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