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Benjamin McKeown

Global M&A: Shifting the global chemical industry balance | KPMG | GLOBAL - 0 views

www.kpmg.com/...-global-chemical-industry.aspx

HL pollution

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 19 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • This assessment certainly holds true for the chemical industry. Many chemical companies now have strong balance sheets as the result of increased sales in 2010 and lower overhead due to cost-cutting measures taken during the recession. With volumes still below 2008 levels, further sales growth is expected in 2011.
  • In addition, political instability in the Middle East and North Africa have the potential of generating a significant and long-term impact on oil prices and hence the global economy. As a result, many chemical companies are adopting a wait-and-see attitude for deal making in the region.
  • BICME countries (Brazil, India, China, Middle East) will increasingly dominate chemical industry M&A activity in the years ahead, supported by growth in end markets, government policies and access to funding. Already, M&A in BICME countries have increased from 5 percent of deal value and 17 percent of deal volume in 2007 to 30 percent of deal value and 28 percent of deal volume in 2010.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Recent KPMG research suggests that over US$100 billion in deals could be transacted for global chemicals in the next two years. Much of this activity will have a deeply transformative effect on the industry.
  • Possible new majors by 2020
  • The world's chemical producing regions are starting from different positions in the race to capture this downstream demand. The established companies in the West will continue to leverage their traditional strengths in technology and expertise. Asian and Middle Eastern companies will take advantage of their relatively strong cash positions, government funding and proximity to feedstocks and high-growth markets. At the same time, competition between emerging market companies is likely to increase as players in both areas seek to acquire the same assets.
  • Benjamin McKeown on 19 Mar 13
     
    "Global M&A: Shifting the global chemical industry balance"
Benjamin McKeown

The most important thing about the new NAFTA deal is that it exists - 0 views

slate.com/...ta-deal-is-that-it-exists.html

NAFTA HL Globalization free trade

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • da has agreed to give United States farmers more access to its heavily regulated dairy market—thus assuaging Trump’s single most frequent complaint about Canada’s trade policies. Canada also signed on to stronger intellectual property protections sought by U.S. industries, and increased the dollar limit on the amount of merchandise Canadians can buy across the border before duties kick in (alas, we won’t be hearing about shoe smuggling any longer). However, the Trump administration gave Canada a win by dropping its demand to scrap a dispute-resolution system in which countries can challenge each others’ anti-dumping tariffs outside of each others’ courts. Overall, the changes are more than cosmetic, but perhaps a bit less than Trump promised when he vowed to renegotiate what he’s often called “the worst trade deal in history.” The deal is designed to benefit U.S. auto-workers by requiring that more of each vehicle be produced within North America to qualify for tariff-free treatment, and that a certain percentage of each car be built by employees making $16 an hour. It curtails the use of controversial investor-state dispute settlement panels. The IP protections are a boost—perhaps unfortunately—to copyright-holders and prescription drug companies. But progressive groups are already complaining that the agreement still lacks mechanisms to enforce labor standards in Mexico, among other issues. But more than the details, the most important thing about this deal is that it exists at all. One of the major questions about Trump’s approach to economic policy and globalization was whether he would simply light trade deals on fire, or use his sometimes unhinged rhetoric as a means to obtain some reforms. In the case of NAFTA, we have a solid answer. Whether you like it or not, it’s spelled USMCA. One more thing If you think Slate’s work matters, become a Slate Plus member. You’ll get exclusive members-only content and a suite of great benefits—and you’ll help secure Slate’s future. Join Slate Plus Join Slate Plus Tweet Share Comment Canada Donald Trump Mexico Trade
Benjamin McKeown

Advertising and Global Culture | Cultural Survival - 0 views

www.culturalsurvival.org/...advertising-and-global-culture

culture HL TNC

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 26 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • of
  • Author Janus Noreen No one can travel to Africa, Asia, or Latin America and not be struck by the Western elements of urban life. The symbols of transnational culture - automobiles, advertising, supermarkets, shopping centers, hotels, fast food chains, credit cards, and Hollywood movies - give the, feeling of being at home. Behind these tangible symbols are a corresponding set of values and attitudes about time, consumption, work relations, etc. Some believe global culture has resulted from gradual spontaneous processes that depended solely on technological innovations - increased international trade, global mass communications, jet travel. Recent studies show that the processes are anything but spontaneous; that they are the result of tremendous investments of time, energy and money by transnational corporations. This "transnational culture" is a direct outcome of the internationalization of production and accumulation promoted through standardized development models and cultural forms.
  • The common theme of transnational culture is consumption. Advertising expresses this ideology of consumption in its most synthetic and visual form.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Advertisers rely on few themes: happiness, youth, success, status, luxury, fashion, and beauty. In advertising, social contradictions and class differences are masked and workplace conflicts are not shown. Advertising campaigns suggest that solutions to human problems are to be found in individual consumption, presented as an ideal outlet for mass energies...a socially acceptable form of action and participation which can be used to defuse potential political unrest. "Consumer democracy" is held out to the poor around the world as a substitute for political democracy.
  • Transnational advertising is one of the major reasons both for the spread of transnational culture and the breakdown of traditional cultures.
  • Transnational culture strives to eliminate local cultural variations. Barnett and Muller discuss the social impact of this process:
  • What are the long range social effects of advertising on people who earn less than $200 a year? (Peasants, domestic workers, and laborers) learn of the outside world through the images and slogans of advertising. One message that comes through clearly is that happiness, achievement, and being white have something to do with one another
  • In mestizo countries (sic) such as Mexico and Venezuela where most of the population still bear strong traces of their Indian origin, billboards depicting the good life for sale invariably feature blond, blue-eyed American-looking men and women. One effect of such "white is beautiful" advertising is to reinforce feelings of inferiority which are the essence of a politically immobilizing colonial mentality...The subtle message of the global advertiser in poor countries is "Neither you nor what you create are worth very much, we will sell you a civilization (emphasis added).
  • Transnational firms and global advertising agencies are clearly aware of the role of advertising in the creation of a new consumer culture in Third World countries
  • Television antennas are gradually taking the plac
  • tom-tom drums across the vast stretches of Africa. Catchy jingles are replacing tribal calls in the Andes of Latin America. Spic-and-span supermarkets stand, on the grounds where colorful wares of an Oriental Bazaar were once spread throughout Asia. Across vast continents hundreds of millions of people are awakening to the beat of modern times.
  • Increasingly advertising campaigns are aimed at the vast numbers of poor in Third World countries
  • As one U.S. advertising executive observes about the Mexican consumer market, even poor families, when living together and pooling their incomes, can add up to a household income of more than $10,000 per year
  • The use of television to spread transnational culture is especially effective with illiterates
  • By consuming Coca-Cola, Nestle products, Marlboro, Maggi, Colgate or Revlon, Ivorians are not only fulfilling unnecessary needs but also progressively relinquishing their authentic world outlook in favor of the transnational way of life.
  • In trying to be as white as possible, that is to say, in becoming ashamed of their traditional being, the Ivorians are at the same time relinquishing one of the most powerful weapons at their disposal for safeguarding their dignity as human beings: their racial identify. And advertising is not neutral in such a state of affairs.
  • Yet, the advertising of Coca-Cola and Heinekens portrays drinking as an individual act rather than a collective one.
  • Santoro concluded that these stereotypes held by children were largely the same ones to be found in typical Venezuelan television and advertising contents.
  • These results, while very tentative, suggest that the impact of transnational culture is greater among the poor - the very people who cannot afford to buy the lifestyle it represents. The poor are more likely to associate consumption with happiness and feel that industrialized products are better than the locally made ones. But at the same time they are painfully aware that only the rich have access to the lifestyle portrayed.
  • Virtually every child showed an acute awareness of the different access to these products by class.
  • Again, poor children more often answered that Nescafe is coffee, and Tang is orange juice
  • poorer children were significantly more likely to associate the luxury possessions with happiness than the rich children.
  • What political impact does the spread of transnational culture have on the poor for whom luxury lifestyles are not possible? How do they deal with the daily contradictions that this awareness implies? How much will they accept and how much will they reject? How can they maintain their own identities in the face of transnational culture
  • Benjamin McKeown on 26 Feb 19
     
    "of"
Benjamin McKeown

Global warming 'will make our winters colder' - Climate Change - Environment - The Inde... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ur-winters-colder-9819825.html

climate climate change

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 02 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Climate scientists believe they have found evidence to suggest that the loss of floating Arctic sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas north of Scandinavia can affect the global circulation of air currents and lead to bitterly cold winds blowing for extended periods in winter over Central Asia and Europe, including the UK.
  • the cooling effect is unlikely to last beyond this century
  • Rising global temperatures will eventually cancel out any localised cooling caused by loss of Arctic sea ice, although they said it is not possible to predict when this will happen.
Benjamin McKeown

El Nino and extreme weather will be a theme of 2016 - 0 views

www.slate.com/...r_will_be_a_theme_of_2016.html

el nino

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 08 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • In fact, it’s probably the strongest that’s ever been measured. I
  • In fact, due to an atmospheric lag, extreme weather will likely keep getting worse for several more months. Though El Niño is typically the most powerful player among the world’s constantly feuding meteorological morphologies, it takes months for its burst of heat to filter around the globe from the tropical Pacific. Ocean temperatures in the El Niño regions of the Pacific usually peak in November or December, but globally-averaged temperatures don’t typically peak until between February and July of the following year.
  • Though El Niño is the proximate cause of many of this year’s weather records, its effects are an upward wiggle on top of the slow-rolling steamroller of climate change.
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  • Nearly 100 million people worldwide are facing food and water shortages this year due to drought and floods linked to El Niño.
  • current
  • El Niño is also helping to spread vector-borne diseases, like Zika, malaria, and dengue fever. And all the crazy weather is creating an uncertain economic environment, too.
  • been a few Florida tornado outbreaks th
  • This is what weather chaos looks like. Thankfully, climate scientists are using this rare event to learn as much as they can about what the super El Niño might tell them about future events and climate change—like in coral reefs, which are especially threatened this year.
  • his El Niño will transition to a La Niña—featuring an unusually cool patch of tropical Pacific waters—by late this year.
Benjamin McKeown

Water, Food and Energy | UN-Water - 0 views

www.unwater.org/...water-food-and-energy

water food energy Nexus

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Benjamin McKeown on 01 Nov 18
     
    "The water-food-energy nexus is central to sustainable development. Demand for all three is increasing, driven by a rising global population, rapid urbanization, changing diets and economic growth. Agriculture is the largest consumer of the world's freshwater resources, and more than one-quarter of the energy used globally is expended on food production and supply. The inextricable linkages between these critical domains require a suitably integrated approach to ensuring water and food security, and sustainable agriculture and energy production worldwide."
Benjamin McKeown

How Successful Were the Millennium Development Goals? A Final Report | New Security Beat - 0 views

www.newsecuritybeat.org/...development-goals-final-report

MDG

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “despite many successes, the poorest and most vulnerable people are being left behind.”
  • eport calls for better data collection practices to create a post-2015 development agenda that can overcome the MDG’s shortcomings.
  • number of people living in extreme poverty and proportion of undernourished people in developing regions has declined by more than half since 1990,
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  • The maternal mortality ratio has declined by 45 percent worldwide, and the proportion of the global population using an improved drinking water source rose from 76 percent to 91 percent
  • Those still left out, however, are increasingly concentrated in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and all across the globe, women and young people face the highest odds of living in poverty
  • Conflict and displacement is taking a toll as well.
  • While hunger has fallen in most areas, projections indicate that the prevalence of undernourishment in the Middle East will rise by 32 percent between 2014 and 2016 due to war, civil unrest, and increasing numbers of refugees.
  • Progress in maternal health is sharply divided along rural-urban lines
  • marginalized and easily forgotten amidst promising overall trends. “Millions of people are being left behind, especially the poorest and those disadvantaged because of their sex, age, disability, ethnicity, or geographic location,”
  • We need to tackle root causes and do more to integrate the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development,
  • “employment opportunities have diminished in both developing and developed regions
  • he employment-to-population ratio, which measures what percentage of the working population is employed, has declined around the world since 1990 with the biggest drops in East and South Asia.
  • rapid urbanization is taxing already-inadequate infrastructure. The proportion of the urban population living in slums in developing regions fell from 39 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in 2014, surpassing the MDG target. However, the total number of urban residents living in slums continues to grow as a result of accelerating urbanization and population growth
  • Population growth and increased consumption have also stressed the environment, presenting challenges that overshadow progress on the seventh MDG
  • While ozone-depleting substances have nearly been eliminated since 1990 and the ozone layer is expected to recover by midcentury, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by more than 50 percent in the past 25 years
  • Between 1998 and 2011, the number of countries experiencing water stress increased from 36 to 41. Water scarcity currently affects more than 40 percent of the world population, a statistic that is only projected to increase.
  • For the global poor whose livelihoods are directly tied to natural resources and suffer the most from environmental degradation, climate change hinders development in other sectors. That’s why environmental change is a much bigger focus in the Sustainable Development Goals, set to be adopted later this year.
Benjamin McKeown

The Most Important Thing, and It's Almost a Secret - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-and-its-almost-a-secret.html

poverty disparity

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.• In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5; this toll has since dropped by more than half. • More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do.
  • Granted, some 16,000 children still die unnecessarily each day. It’s maddening in my travels to watch children dying simply because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
  • The world’s best-kept secret is that we live at a historic inflection point when extreme poverty is retreating. United Nations members have just adopted 17 new Global Goals, of which the centerpiece is the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • oung journalists or aid workers starting out today will in their careers see very little of the leprosy, illiteracy, elephantiasis and river blindness that I have seen routinely.
  • “The next two decades can be even better and can become the greatest era of progress for the world’s poor in human history,
  • globally, inequality is diminishing, because of the rise of poor countries.
  • Cynics argue that saving lives is pointless, because the result is overpopulation that leads more to starve. Not true. Part of this wave of progress is a stunning drop in birthrates.
  • Haitian women now average 3.1 children; in 1985, they had six. In Bangladesh, women now average 2.2 children. Indonesians, 2.3. When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.
Benjamin McKeown

Food, energy and water: the politics of the nexus | Jeremy Allouche | Science | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...od-energy-water-politics-nexus

water food energy Nexus

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 06 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Jeremy Allouche
  • In a paradoxical way, this was the first time that the business community came to realise the limits to growth.
  • modellers, farmers, and civil engineers have known about these inter-relationships for a long time.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • systems approach, where the interactions between different sectors are modelled as global and regional flows, ignoring day-to day realities, local priorities and needs; • A decision-making tool based on these interactions, which provides an economic valuation of these resources and a market mechanism to efficiently allocate them.
  • It treats the trade-offs between human needs for water, energy and food as a perfect equilibrium model, in which resource allocation can be decided.
  • This can encourage the commodification of resources, downplaying environmental externalities, such as biodiversity and climate change, as well as poverty alleviation needs.
  • The villagers affected by the Rasi Salai Dam are now experiencing water scarcity after losing these wetlands.
  • Originally, the government claimed that the dam would provide water for 5,500 hectares of land
  • look
  • This example highlights how elements of the nexus, whether food, water or energy security, take on different meanings at different levels of analysis, from the global to the local.
  • optimisation;
  • A different framing of the nexus is required: one which recognises that global priorities may not reflect local concerns; and that resource allocations are political decisions, which need to be decided through more open and transparent decision making. The nexus must become more inclusive, so that its interrelationships can be grounded in local realities and human needs.
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