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EmergingFrontierMarkets.comemerging and frontier markets:the unofficial field guideSite
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Based in: Manila,
Philippines
Posted on Fri, 23 Mar 12: Three-way World Bank race seen as deadline looms, Reuters, 23 Mar 12 GMT [courtesy Chicago Trib]: The US faces an unprecedented challenge to its grip on the WB presidency, with emerging economies poised to nominate at least one candidate on Fri to set up the 1st contested bid for the top job at the global development lender. One analyst said the delay in naming a US candidate had opened the door for others. Unspoken is the likelihood that whoever the US puts forward will get the job Phil Auerswald: And the winner of the great global growth race is...Equatorial Guinea, Forbes, 8 Mar 12: Because Equatorial Guinea is the winner, all nations seeking to prosper should adopt its econ and social policies. First, install a ruthless tyrant. Second, find a large deposit of oil. Then make sure that you concentrate wealth in the hands of few lackeys. And finally, deprive the overwhelming majority of your population of basic human rights and zero-out entrepreneurship. Sounds good?, asks Kauffman Found. senior fellow/ George Mason U assoc prof (Global innovation policy report unveiled, Kauffman-ITIF) Asia-Pacific gaining against poverty, but slow to reduce hunger, child and maternal deaths, UN-ADB, 17 Feb 12: The Asia-Pacific region has made great strides in reducing poverty and is moving fast towards other dev't goals, acc to a recent report. However, while strong econ dynamism has driven regional success in poverty reduction, even fast growing nations continue to lose shocking numbers of children before their 5th birthday, and thousands of mothers die unnecessarily while giving birth (The other rebalancing - Asia's quest for inclusive growth, IMF, Oct '11) Posted on Wed, 21 Mar 12: Piketty/ Saez/ Stantcheva: What to do about inequality--Testing tax policy, Vox EU, Mar-Apr '12 [courtesy Boston Rev]: There is a belief that taxing the rich won't do much to solve extreme income inequality in the US, because it does nothing to correct the real culprit - the growing gap in pre-tax income. We disagree. Our research shows that there is a strong correlation between reductions in top tax rates and increases in top 1% pre-tax income shares, say Paris Sch Econ prof, UC-Berkeley prof/ John Bates Clark Medal '09 awardee, and MIT PhD cand (Hubbard: Tax reform is the swiftest path to growth, WSJ, Aug '11) [courtesy Amer Enterp Inst] L Chandy and H Kharas: The contradictions in global poverty numbers, Brookings Inst, 6 Mar 12: Calculating poverty numbers requires making many assumptions and the World Bank should be commended for making its methodology and data available in a transparent fashion. But one should not take the bank's final figures at face value; there are too many discrepancies with common sense. Poverty numbers are too important a target for global development to be left in their current state. Isn't it time for the dev't community to organize itself to resolve these contradictions?, ask Inst fellow and senior fellow/ prog deputy dir; and From our archive (2 Mar): Bank sees progress vs extreme poverty, but flags
vulnerabilities, World Bank, 29 Feb 12: In
every region of the developing world, the percentage of people living
on less than $1.25 a day and the number of poor declined between
2005/08, acc to estimates released Wed. by the bank. This
across-the-board reduction over a 3-year monitoring cycle marks a 1st
since the bank began monitoring extreme poverty. An estd. 1.29 bln
people in '08 lived below $1.25 a day, or 22% of the pop. of the
developing world. "Having 22% of people in developing nations still
living on less than $1.25 a day is intolerable," says the bank's
poverty reduction group dirCoffee/Tea Room: Seoul's airport is best in the world, Airports Council Int'l/ Canada, 14 Feb 12 [PDF]: SKorea's Seoul (Incheon) int'l airport has taken the top customer service award for the 7th straight year as best airport worldwide, with Singapore, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Nagoya garnering 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th place respectively. The annual Airport Service Quality passenger survey measures customer feedback on a range of service delivery parameters that track the customer experience at an airport from the moment of arrival to the departure gate Posted on Mon, 19 Mar 12: India and China - Asia's giants discuss way forward, IMF Survey Mag, 16 Mar 12: While recent indicators may signal a relaxing of global econ difficulties, protracted stresses and risks - in Europe and elsewhere - pose a challenge for emerging markets. Both China and India are growing rapidly, but have taken different development paths. While China has followed a more traditional manufacturing- and export-led growth strategy, India's growth has been driven by the services sector and reliance largely on domestic demand. Today they both face differing challenges Timothy Besley: Poor choices - Poverty from the ground level, Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb '12: Why are some countries rich and others poor? Differing accounts put more or less weight on the role of policies, geography, culture, history, and int'l interventions. Only by answering this question can one decide how best to reduce poverty in low-income nations. Three new books look at poverty from the bottom up, painting a vivid portrait of the lives poor people live. In focusing on individual behavior, however, the books neglect a crucial political question: how to get govts to improve the situation, says London Sch Econ prof Posted on Fri, 16 Mar 12: Open letter to Pres Obama on the EU aviation emissions trading scheme (ETS), by 5 Nobel Laureates and 21 economists, 14 Mar 12 [PDF]: We implore you to support the EU's innovative efforts to place a price on carbon from aviation through the ETS, or, at the very least, to stop actively opposing these efforts. Addressing emissions in this sector by negotiating a global pricing system through the Int'l Civil Aviation Org would send an important signal that carbon pricing is an effective way to correct a major market failure - the growing concentration of greenhouse gases (UN agency sees difficult path to airline emissions plan, Reuters | 16 scientists: No need to panic about global warming, WSJ) [courtesy Canada Free Press]
Inequality offensive, MIT News, 14 Mar 12: Economists have measured America's growing wealth gap in great detail: by income, educational attainment, and in terms of the country's declining social mobility, among other metrics. At an MIT forum on Tue night, however, economists suggested the issue matters for an overarching reason that is slightly harder to quantify: Inequality, they said, constitutes a threat to America's values and political system Tackling poverty and inequality, OECD Observer, 28 Feb 12: Some 16.3 mln Brazilians (or 8.5% of the population) live on less than $1.50 per day, which by most int’l definitions indicates extreme poverty. However, thanks to the efforts of successive govts, including that of the current pres, the country has made tremendous progress in reducing that poverty and tackling income inequality too. In fact, income redistribution has become one of the pillars of Brazil's growth model Posted on Wed, 14 Mar 12: S Griffith-Jones and A Persaud: Why critics are wrong about a financial transaction tax, European Voice, 12 Mar 12: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer could have been describing the journey of financial transaction taxes, which are somewhere between stages two and three, say Columbia U's Initiative for Policy Dialogue fin. markets program dir, and Intelligence Capital Ltd chair/ London Bus. School senior fellow (Rogoff: Wrong tax for Europe, Proj Syndicate) [courtesy Businessworld/ India] $1 market offers more insight into US presidential race than opinion polls, 24H Vancouver, 24 Feb 12: What's really going on in the US pres'l election? Is Rick Santorum a threat, and if so, to which party? That's the $1 question. Why one dollar? Because in such situations I push aside my crystal ball, which turned out to be acrylic anyway, back in the Clinton years, and check out the Iowa Electronic Markets. They're a practical effort by the Univ of Iowa business school to harness the wisdom of crowds (Republican nomination markets | As of 13 Mar) C-Suite/Boardroom: S Greenstein and M Devereux -- Crisis at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Northwestern Univ, July '09 (rev) | at Google Docs: Ency. Britannica was the leading provider of encyclopedias in the English language, but after sales declined rapidly in the early '90s it was forced to file for bankruptcy. Many different organizational and market factors contributed to this crisis, such as the diffusion of the PC, the invention of Encarta, the technical challenges of moving text to electronic formats, and the difficulties of inventing a new format while also operating the leading seller of books. Looking back, what could it have done differently? (The anatomy of foresight traps) Posted on Mon, 12 Mar 12: ISDA classifies Greek swap deal a 'credit event', Press Trust of India, 11 Mar 12 (courtesy Zee News): The Int'l Swaps and Derivatives Association classified the debt swap deal between the Greek gov't and private sector lenders as a 'credit event', triggering insurance payments running into billions of dollars. The ISDA said a 'credit event', or a technical default, has occurred because the Greek gov't activated the Collective Action Clause (CAC) in its bond contracts to force the participation of those bondholders who have not signed up for the deal (ISDA on the Greek credit default swaps [CDS]) A Revenga and S Shetty: Empowering women is smart economics, Finance & Dev't, Mar/May '12: In most nations - rich and developing - women are going to school more, living longer, getting better jobs, and acquiring legal rights and protections. But large gender gaps remain. Women and girls are more likely to die, relative to men and boys, in many low- and middle-income nations than their counterparts in rich nations. Women earn less and are less economically productive than men almost everywhere across the world, say World Bank sector dirs (Int'l Women's Day 2012) Development economist to receive French award, MIT News, 18 Nov 11:
Robert Townsend, an expert in the ways financial systems and practices can contribute to the growth of developing economies, has been named winner of the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in economics for 2011. The prize has been awarded annually since '05, to an "int'l high-level economist whose research, in the spirit of Prof. Jean-Jacques Laffont, combines both the theoretical and applied aspects of economics". The award is given by the city of Toulouse and the Univ Toulouse's Inst of Industrial Econ (Tracing families' escape from poverty) |