End of Cheap China: Exhibit 1

Elsewhere I've blogged about the end of cheap China. Here's an example of this trend, the first of many I expect:

Etched into the base of Google's new wireless home media player that was introduced on Wednesday is its most intriguing feature. On the underside of the Nexus Q is a simple inscription: “Designed and Manufactured in the U.S.A.”

Stay tuned.

Africa's Singapore?

Go Rwanda!

Yet Rwanda has one huge advantage: the rule of law. No African country has done more to curb corruption. Ministers have been jailed for it. Transparency International, a watchdog, reckons Rwanda is less graft-ridden than Greece or Italy (though companies owned by the ruling party play an outsized role in the economy). “I have never paid a bribe and I don’t know anyone who has had to pay a bribe,” says Josh Ruxin, one of the owners of Heaven, a restaurant in Kigali, the capital.

Big Mac Index

Next semester I'll be teaching International Marketing and Transnational Management classes.

There's no way students will escape these classes without knowing about the Big Mac Index.

Eat to learn.

Guess the Region

In which part of the world has average income grown by one-third since 2000? You might be surprised.

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.

The emphasis is mine...when one region has 17 of the fastest growing 40 economies in the world, that's worth emphasizing.

Natural Resources and Standard of Living

Natural resource endowments help make a nation prosperous...unless you use them to the almost exclusive benefit of those in power. An example:

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?

A Big Shift

I remember as a boy reading predictions that the world would run out of oil in 10 years.

That was over 30 years ago. But what's more surprising is the prospect of a huge shift in which regions of the world control the most oil:

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.

GDP Equivalents for China's Provinces

My students know I love to drill them on GDP and GDP equivalents. This terrific Economist "country equivalents" map provides a whole new way to grasp relative sizes of economies.


It helps that many of my students come from the countries that this graphic uses to compare to Chinese provinces.

Guangdong's GDP is now larger than that of Illinois!

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.