The PRC@LSE, Niall Ferguson and Me

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,, at 6/30/2011 12:03:00 AM
From left to right: your humble IPE blogger (in need of a haircut), Li Fan who is Deputy Director of the Department of Policy Planning at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Niall Ferguson who is Philippe Roman Chair for 2010-2011"Emmanuel, let's take a photo with Professor Ferguson before the LSE IDEAS sign!" said my colleague from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Dr Li Fan at our farewell party yesterday for The Ascent of Money guy. Despite being somewhat miffed at the Chinese government at the moment for largely unexplained strong-arm tactics over the South China Sea--or the West Philippine Sea as our local media...
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Countering Rising Food Prices at the G-20 (Sort Of)

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,, at 6/30/2011 12:01:00 AM
In case you missed it, the G-20 recently held a meeting of agricultural ministers in gay (as in happy) Paris. Given the wide range of global governance problems, focusing on things other than finance is welcome even if they ultimately return to matters of Mammon. France being the current head of the G-20 as well as the EU's largest agricultural producer and the world's second largest exporter of such products--its interest in the matter is evident. That said, we too came to an impasse over two important agricultural matters at the aforementioned meeting.First, government subsidies for the production of biofuels remains a hot...
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Perhaps We Should Cheer the Rising 'China Price'

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 6/29/2011 12:01:00 AM
Uh-oh, here we go again with another one of these "China is pricing itself out of the cheap labour market" stories. Having recently made a mini-roundup of these, let me stick with what's supposedly new in this latest TIME story. At the national level, things are undeniably on the way up:In what is supposed to be a land of unlimited cheap labor — a nation of 1.3 billion people, whose extraordinary 20-year economic rise has been built first and foremost on the backs of low-priced workers — the game has changed. In the past decade, according to Helen Qiao, chief economist for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, real wages for manufacturing...
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Potpourri: $ Losing Global Status, $100B AAA Loss

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 6/28/2011 12:00:00 AM
A few hours ago we received word that River Plate, the most storied of Argentinian football clubs which has helped spawn many global footballing legends, was relegated from the first division for the first time in its 110-year history. This resulted in riots in Buenos Aires. How the mighty have fallen! It of course got me thinking about another tarnished has-been in the United States of America. Yes it's falling quite fast in various global league tables, but when will it finally be banished from the commanding heights of the world economy? As you'd expect, the dollar being the leading reserve currency and US Treasuries' AAA...
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Will Airbus Lose PRC Orders on Emissions Regs?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 6/27/2011 12:01:00 AM
Environmentalists usually applaud countries or regions where regulations are most stringent for obvious reasons. Aside from encouraging better fuel economy or lower emissions, there can be substantial knock-on effects. Consider America. The United States remains the world's second largest car market after China. With the state of California leading the nation in regulatory standards for automobile emissions--some vehicles sold in the 49 other states don't meet California regulations--auto manufacturers often just adopt the standard mandated by California. End result? Even if other states' lawmakers are not as concerned with...
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Mexico Norte: Futbol & Hispanicization of the USA

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,, at 6/26/2011 01:31:00 PM
CONCACAF should be ashamed of itself. I think it was a f***ing disgrace that the entire post-match ceremony was in Spanish. You can bet your ass if we were in Mexico City it wouldn't be all in English - Team USA goalkeeper Tim Howard after losing to Mexico 4-2 in Los Angeles during the Gold CupSour grapes, Howard? This assertion is untrue. Watch the footage. Yet I suppose I too would be miffed if I allowed my toughest rivals four unanswered goals. Race riots aside, something that really blows apart the myth of the United States as a melting pot is when the Mexican national football (soccer) team El Tricolor plays its United...
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Paul Martin, Father of the G-20 & Other Stories

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 6/24/2011 12:03:00 AM
Due to an unfortunate circumstance, I have had yet another miserable experience of coming across pseudo-anti-globalization figure Naomi Klein's typically inaccurate ramblings on how Larry Summers was the creator of the G-2o. In some scribblings prior to last year's G-20 gathering in Toronto, she wrote the G-20 is "a global menace invented by Larry Summers." As you would expect from a habitually factually challenged individual, this assertion is not true. Instead, the G-20 is the brainchild of a comparatively lesser known Canadian.Is Larry "Wooden Racquets" Summers indeed the father of the G-20? I beg to differ. To be sure,...
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Why PRC-Led Global Rebalancing is Unlikely

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 6/23/2011 12:03:00 AM
How can we transition into a more balanced world economy? Today, Jean-Michel Severino joined the man generally associated with the topic, Martin Wolf, in trying to suggest ways of doing so at the LSE. Martin Wolf's take is generally well-known as he regularly issues commentaries in the Financial Times where he is the chief economics commentator. However, Jean-Michel Severino, formerly of the World Bank and late of the French development agency Agence francaise de developpement (AFD), was something of a revelation to me.Severino argues that, considering postwar history, the stand-out example of economic development remains that of export-led development. However, this poses an obvious quandary: while almost every sensibly run nation on earth professes increasing exports to be desirable, global markets represent finite demand. In other words, unless we can export to, say, Mars, we are bumping up against logical limits to what can be absorbed if developing countries continue to...
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Come 2050, Half of the World Will Live in Slums

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 6/22/2011 12:01:00 AM
Having published in a geography journal sometime ago, I take a natural interest in urban studies as a field of study. To be honest, I cannot determine what distinguishes a social science work from one in human geography. Being ever so pedantic, I like pointing out that social science research is inescapably grounded in spatial coordinates, hence the near-automaticity of it being "geographic."That qualifier aside, urban studies should be of great interest to practically everyone interested in the social sciences. Sometime in 2008, more than half of the world's population lived in urban areas for the first time in human history....
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Change 'South China Sea' to 'Southeast Asia Sea'

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 6/21/2011 12:04:00 AM
Here we go again, another South China Sea entry after I'd written about the issue in recent months [1, 2, 3]. I am of two minds about this new petition circulating among those of us from Southeast Asia to change our term for the 'South China Sea' to the 'Southeast Asia Sea'. (This one comes from the US-based Nguyen Thai Hoc Foundation named after the Vietnamese nationalist executed by French imperialists.) It comes amidst new quarrels between China on one hand and the Philippines and Vietnam on the other over dominion over these strategically important waters. To be sure, Southeast Asia is emerging on the global stage in its...
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Zhu Min or China's Faustian IMF-Lagarde Bargain

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 6/21/2011 12:01:00 AM
In Chinese, gweilo (鬼佬) is a traditional epithet against "foreign devils" that, due to its common use, has lost much of its condescending tone. Indeed, Westerners often describe themselves as such in the PRC to deflate suspicion about themselves. Today, however, we have a potential Faustian bargain with the many (sorry) gweilo who run international financial institutions that may see to it that China sticks the knife into its fellow LDCs when it comes to the matter of IMF succession. Merde!--as Lagarde might exclaim in her less guarded moments.I've just attended a very interesting talk by Yves Tiberghien who should be familiar...
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Of Arctic Oil Grabs and Greenland's Independence

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 6/20/2011 12:01:00 AM
Some rich men came and raped the land; nobody caught 'emPut up a bunch of ugly boxes and Jesus people bought 'emAnd they called it paradise--the place to beThey watched the hazy sun, sinking in the sea [NOTE: I almost missed this one, but it's better late than never. Might as well cue up "The Last Resort" by The Eagles while you're at it.] There's something profoundly distasteful about the whole process of warming over Mother Earth to exploit her oil and gas resources in the Arctic. Which, when used, will further worsen global warming. As most of you know, melting of ice up North has prompted all sorts of manoeuvring to secure...
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Zen and the Art of Soccer Moneyball Maintenance

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 6/19/2011 02:57:00 PM
What constitutes knowledge? Questions of epistemology underpin many of the debates in the social sciences--especially the supposed divide between the "objective" and the "subjective": Should we focus on the generalities of several cases or the particularities of each? Are there universal laws governing behaviour or is it relativistic? These are hard questions to answer that surround any number of human endeavours. The global financial crisis is certainly one, when many attributed the desire to blandly generalize Anglo-Saxon assumptions as leading many into temptation. Hence Greenspan's (semi-)confession that the self-regulating...
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Belarus is Forever IMF's (Unfaithfully)

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 6/16/2011 12:01:00 AM
[NOTE: It's been a long time since I've had a semi-trademark sing-along post, so without further ado, here's one.] With apologies to Journey:Currency run, amid plunging sumsDebts go round and roundIMF's on my mind...One of the most insightful books I've read concerning the remarkable durability of anti-developmental regimes is Nicolas van de Walle's African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979-1999. Why is it that so many regimes are able to cling to power despite providing so little in terms of delivering a higher standard of living? Foreign Affairs provides a cogent summary of this book's main idea that international...
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Turkish EU Accession or Why I Miss Strauss-Kahn

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 6/16/2011 12:01:00 AM
Well sort of. I've just come from an event hosted by our research centre (LSE IDEAS) on "Turkey In the World" discussing that country's foreign policy. Straddling Orient and Occident, religiosity and secularism as well as several other divides, let's just say Turkey needs to contend with forces pulling it in different ways. Professor Sevket Pamuk of LSE and Fadi Hakura of Chatham House gave a most interesting talk about the subject matter. Being LSE IDEAS' resident migration issues guy, I just had to ask whether Turkey's diminished prospects for EU accession at the current time are temporary based on souring European sentiment....
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Trichet@LSE: EMU as Viable a Currency Area as US

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 6/15/2011 12:01:00 AM
Flashing sirens, extra security guards, financial journalists baying for blood, and the incessant chatter of students and faculty debating the virtues of "EU bonds" and "haircuts": Where else could it have been but at the LSE in eager anticipation of the ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet delivering an address? And so it was last Monday afternoon that Europe's Bulwark Against Market Pandemonium came to speak before our central London institution. With various commentators predicting the imminent breakup of currency union--or at least the removal of some of its more recalcitrant members alike Greece, Ireland, and Portugal--this...
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