Yet within the club of economies that doubled in size were no less than eight from ____, the region traditionally written off as a hopeless economic backwater. Indeed, that region took 17 of the top 40 spots in the decade's global GDP growth rankings; its GDP is 66 percent larger than it was in 2000.
Qaddafi's Libya produces 0.27 barrels per citizen per day; the United Arab Emirates (where Dubai is located) produces 0.34 barrels per citizen per day. Yet the average Emirati is three times as wealthy as the average Libyan, according to IMF data on gross domestic product at purchasing power parity per capita. Why are Libyans poorer on average than Mexicans while Emiratis richer than Americans?
The mystery of the just-down-13-percent gasoline prices is almost entirely created by trying to treat the NYMEX price as the relevant benchmark, but it isn’t. (As noted here in February.) Currently the Brent price is a better indicator of the world oil market price for crude oil. Our story here, then, is that world oil prices have dropped 18 percent since April while average gasoline prices dropped 13 percent. Hardly a different warranting a headline.The reporter fully recognizes this point, as he explains, “gasoline prices on the East Coast and even in the Gulf Coast track the price of Brent crude, which analysts view as a better indicator of global prices than Nymex. While Nymex futures are down 30% since April 29, Brent is down 18%.” And the story is accompanied by a graphic, above, which graphically illustrates the point that Brent seems to be the relevant reference point.
So why the struggle to cast this story about gasoline prices that are not falling fast enough?
The whole thing reminds me of something a professor told us often: "Remember, the guys who write for the WSJ are more likely to be experts at journalism than at business. Don't be too ready to learn about your industry from a journalism major."
Yep.
The importance of exports as a driver of China's growth is overstated. Exports as a percentage of China's 2010 gross domestic product were 27%, down from 35% in 2007. In value-added terms, the real share of exports is even smaller. UBS economist Wang Tao sees a base case in which falling exports shave a percentage point from China's 2012 GDP growth. With GDP growth expected to be around 9% in 2011, all else being equal, that is hardly a disaster.Real-estate investment is a key driver of China's growth, equal to around 14% of GDP in 2010. Ghost towns of empty houses raise fears that construction might be set to slow sharply. But with millions moving from the countryside to the city each year, and rising wages driving demand for higher-quality accommodations for existing city dwellers, fundamental demand is strong. The government also has policy options: Borrowing restrictions for developers can be loosened and speculators allowed back into the market.
Spot on.
There are way too many empty apartments in the cities now. But there are still hundreds of millions of people who are going to want to fill them in the coming years. If prices fall, it will simply speed up migration to the cities.
Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice University says in the next decade, new oil in the US, Canada and South America could change the center of gravity of the entire global energy supply."Some are now saying, in five or 10 years' time, we're a major oil-producing region, where our production is going up," she says.
The US, Jaffe says, could have 2 trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drilled. South America could hold another 2 trillion. And Canada? 2.4 trillion. That's compared to just 1.2 trillion in the Middle East and north Africa.
Skip the article's human interest aspect. This isn't about North Dakota, it's much bigger than that. The section that starts with Jaffe's comments is the real story.
Why Africa doesn't make more stuff has been an enduring mystery of the global economy. As wages rose in manufacturing powerhouses such as China, many economists predicted that factories would flock to cheaper pools of labor in Africa, helping to spur the same sort of rapid industrial growth that lifted living standards across Asia.
Africa's industry isn't so different from the modest roots of China's own industrial revolution. In the 1980s, Chinese farmers invested in factories to make goods for rural consumers. Multinationals arrived later to fuel an export boom, according to Zhang Chunlin, an economist at the World Bank in Pretoria who specializes on private-sector development.
China's challenge was "to develop in an imperfect environment," says Mr. Zhang, who once worked at a village brick kiln in the northern China. "That is also Africa's challenge."
But Birbal was unable to find a bride in Haryana, which has the most unbalanced sex ratio in the country, with 877 women for every 1,000 men. Among under sevens, that ratio drops to just 830 girls for every 1,000 boys.Think about what happens when someone "imports" a bride from a place where sex ratios are more balanced: he simply "exports" the imbalance somewhere else. This is a zero sum trade. The pain is simply going to be passed down the income scale, to be fully absorbed by the poorest, who will find themselves incapable of forming families. Ever.
The scale of that number evokes the genocidal horrors of the 20th century. But notwithstanding the depredations of the Chinese politburo, most of the abortions were (and continue to be) uncoerced. The American establishment helped create the problem, but now it’s metastasizing on its own: the population-control movement is a shadow of its former self, yet sex selection has spread inexorably with access to abortion, and sex ratios are out of balance from Central Asia to the Balkans to Asian-American communities in the United States.Forget the politics. Everyone--Chinese, American, liberal, conservative--should recognize that this is tragic.
In 1940, Pittsburgh was America’s 10th largest city. It had 672,000 inhabitants. In 2007, the Census Bureau estimated its population at 311,000. Detroit’s decline has been even more dramatic, from a height of 1.85 million in 1950, to 916,000 today.Only two of the nation’s 10 largest cities in 1950 have more people today: New York and Los Angeles. The growth of Los Angeles is no puzzle. The city practically defines sun and sprawl, which are two of the biggest correlates of population growth in the postwar era. The puzzle is New York City, which — alone among the country’s older, colder cities — has managed to grow.
Read the whole article.
Edna Waga went abroad to teach in a pre-school in Thailand when former co-teacher who recruited her, instructed her to go to Brazil to meet an anonymous person, who would give her a package to bring back to Thailand.I have to add, though, that when something "might have happened" it's not really much of a news story. File under "could've been bad, and it's a slow news day anyway."
“I got so afraid that I left my hotel room and went to a police station, where I asked for the address of the Philippine embassy (in Brazil),” Waga told reporters, saying she was promised with hefty amounts of money to do the job. “Do not trust anybody, even your own friends (when you’re traveling abroad). Big amount of money is not worth it,” she added after foreign officials told her she could have been used as a drug mule.
In one study conducted in two regions of China, researchers offered randomly selected poor households a large subsidy on the price of the basic staple (wheat noodles in one region, rice in the other). We usually expect that when the price of something goes down, people buy more of it. The opposite happened. Households that received subsidies for rice or wheat consumed less of those two foods and ate more shrimp and meat, even though their staples now cost less. Overall, the caloric intake of those who received the subsidy did not increase (and may even have decreased), despite the fact that their purchasing power had increased. Nor did the nutritional content improve in any other sense. The likely reason is that because the rice and wheat noodles were cheap but not particularly tasty, feeling richer might actually have made them consume less of those staples. This reasoning suggests that at least among these very poor urban households, getting more calories was not a priority: Getting better-tasting ones was.
It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which mumbo-jumbo has permeated academe. The problem is especially egregious in the humanities, but it exists everywhere in the modern university. Mumbo-jumbo takes many forms, but it is closely associated with the desire of far too many academics to be perceived as sophisticated at the cost of clarity or meaningfulness in the most fundamental sense. Four years before it dissolved its Department of Physical Education completely in 1997 (“P.E.” not being terribly sophisticated anymore), the University of California, Berkeley, renamed it the Department of Human Biodynamics. But terminology-inflation is only the tip of the mumbo-jumbo iceberg.
Thus critics are calling for less governmental control and for policies that would ensure sustainable development and growth. If people’s incomes were not directly tied to the government budget and spending, traditional paternalism would be gradually overcome. That requires a fair business environment, regulated by law and due process, and mechanisms of public accountability preventing, or at least tempering, abuse of office.
Vedder drove home the point that much of the problem with college — probably the core factor leading to a “higher-ed bubble” — is simply that ”number of graduates is growing faster than the number of jobs.”You'd simply find more productive people in those same jobs, and that would raise the value of education in line with its price.
students are studying less and don’t learn very much more by their third or fourth year than when they started. But within the institutions themselves, he argues there are no incentives for institutions to be efficient.(Link to the video, here.)
New data from the 2011 Indian census show that there are now 914 girls aged 0-6 years old for every 1,000 boys of the same age, or 75.8m girls and 82.9m boys.What does it mean for India's future? For that of other countries?
Newspapers aren't dying. Advertising is dying, and taking newspapers down as collateral damage.
Some interesting findings from Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution on economic mobility in various countries, here.
Like a lot of the more interesting web content I find on management and economics, a post on Greg Mankiw’s blog led me to this study.
