globalization
I’m huge in Ontario…. huge, I say
The Agenda with Steve Paikin is TV Ontario’s equivalent of Charlie Rose…at least, that’s what they tell me. Anyway, I participated in their show on “The International Order” earlier this week: The search for a new international order at a time of profound global change: Is the global system established in the wake of WWII [...]
What I said at the London conference
Is summarized in https://blogs.princeton.edu/globalforum/2008/05/panel-6-the-global-economy.htmlthis blog post. And I might have been the most upbeat person on the panel!
This is funny? Really?
Look, I like ripping into Thomas Friedman as much as the next blogger — but I can’t agree with Matt Yglesias that the following video is “funny”: This is the kind of thing that accomplishes the following: A) It makes some people who dislike Friedman very happy; B) It makes people who agree with Friedman [...]
Sovereign wealth fund = greater transparency?
A common lament about sovereign wealth funds is their lack of transparency — no one knows their investment strategy. The chart below — cribbed from a Standard Chartered report summarized by the FT’s Martin Wolf — makes this visually clear: It’s generally assumed that a chief source of this opacity is that the governments chruning [...]
Your cool statistic for the day
The AP reports some pretty stunning news: The number of mobile phone users will overtake the number of nonusers this year for the first time, according to the U.N. telecoms agency. Ownership rates in developing countries are rising fastest, with Brazil, Russia, India and China alone accounting for 1 billion subscribers last year, the International [...]
So much for China’s Olympian vulnerability
I’ve blogged a few times about whether China’s hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics has increased the government’s vulnerability to domestic and external political pressure. The Christian Science Monitor‘s Peter Ford reports that in advance of the Games, China’s government is devising new ways to handcuff indigenous NGOs: Last Thursday morning, five law-enforcement agents marched [...]
So will Bali accomplish anything?
When it comes to enegy and the environment, anything David Victor writes is worth reading. In Newsweek, Victor suggests that the upcoming Bali summit won’t achieve much of anything: The effort, though noble, is largely irrelevant to the urgent task of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. The countries that care the most about successful U.N. talks are [...]
The public aims at the wrong bogeymen
What you see above you is the result of a Financial Times/Harris poll among various OECD countries about globalization (note, by the way, that the FT wierdly flip-flops the categories halfway through the graph). The associated story sums it up as follows: The depth of anti-globalisation feeling in the FT/Harris poll, which surveyed more than [...]
Coping with the global economy
In response to my last post on the rise of economic populism among Democrats (admittedly, one of a long series), Kevin Drum poses the following questions to yours truly: Thanks to many decades worth of trade agreements, trade is pretty darn free already. So while trade agreements may not be huge sources of job loss, [...]
For China Inc., it’s going to get worse before it gets better
David Barboza reports in the New York Times on another nail in the coffin that is China’s reputation for product quality: China said on Wednesday that nearly a fifth of the food and consumer products that it checked in a nationwide survey this year were found to be substandard or tainted, underscoring the risk faced [...]
