Posts of April 2014

Bhutan, Gross National Happiness & Human Rights Issues

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in South Asia at 4/30/2014 12:07:00 AM

Oh my, I hereby declare April 2014 "Bash Bhutan Month." Having criticized the small country for catering to wealthier tourists via its minimum spend requirements to obtain a visa despite purportedly pursing anti-materialistic "gross national happiness," I offer another criticism along similar lines. Rest assured that I feel guilty pointing out Bhutan's flaws since it's but a small developing country. However, just as I regularly bash Yanqui blowhards over hoary American exceptionalism--us stupid colored people would be so much better off if we were more like the US--Bhutan also has it coming with all this "gross national...

Japan's Kei Cars & Idiotic US Trade Complaints

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Cars,Japan,Trade at 4/29/2014 12:27:00 AM

Adorable Chuki feels bad when meanies call her a "non-tariff barrier" [sniff]. So the gifted orator (or BS artist depending on your POV) Barack Obama came to Japan, saw his nominal allies, and failed to conquer their hearts and minds concerning removing trade "impediments" to concluding the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Purported intra-industry trade barriers in automobiles reared their ugly head again, with the US complaining about Japanese certification of sub-660cc (that's below 0.66 liters) kei cars being a sore point. These vehicles enjoy tax and parking privileges, the latter being a key selling point in crowded...

Google Maps & Cartographic Discrimination Against Africa

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Africa,Hegemony at 4/28/2014 12:01:00 AM

Oh, the burdens of having ignorant Westerners relate to Africa--a continent that is largely a mystery to them. US television network CBS received much flak for playing Toto's hit "Africa" over mournful footage of Nelson Mandela's funeral. Aside from "Africa" being a composition of an LA band, Toto had never even been to the continent when it released the song back in 1982. Surely there are African performers of note known even to the least curious of Westerners such as Youssou N'Dour, Hugh Masekela, King Sunny Ade or Ladysmith Black Mambazo? Whatever the case, the example of paying "tribute" to South Africa's deceased leader...

Ranking the World's Top Outsourcing Destinations

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Outsourcing at 4/26/2014 06:04:00 AM

At the end of last year, "services globalization and investment advisory firm" Tholons released the 2014 edition of its annual outsourcing destination rankings. The rankings have received limited attention outside of business process outsourcing (BPO) hubs, so it's time I brought it to wider attention here. Because of its head start and agglomeration or clustering effects, India still dominates the list. That said, Manila has displaced Mumbai as the #2 rated destination by moving up a place, as has Krakow, Poland which overtook Dublin, Ireland to take #9. Call it the "Catholic Work Ethic" in action once more exemplified...

Quantifying Effects of Sanctions on Iran's Economy

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Middle East at 4/25/2014 06:01:00 AM

Rouhani at WEF: not exactly the Taliban at TEDx (now that'd be something, wouldn't it?) Political risk analysis is an interesting IPE-related field which gauges how political factors can disrupt foreign investment. For obvious reasons, Iran has been the modern exemplar of a high risk, high return destination. That is, if you can invest in the country in the first place. Obviously the United States has long prohibited all trade and investment with Iran, so the more interesting thing has always been how other countries react to pressure from the US to do the same. For instance, it was only in 2010-2012 that the EU imposed...

After OLPC: Ten Commandments of ICT for Education

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Education,Technology at 4/24/2014 06:00:00 AM

Is tech the global education solution? I have an continuing interest in the information and communication technologies for education (ICT4E) field having worked on education reform and written an article on the ill-fated One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project for UC Berkeley's California Management Review. For the record, it was not an article I found pleasant to write about--these folks were well-intentioned, after all--but we need to explore why they failed. Isn't the appeal of the Internet obvious to all? Doesn't the Internet automatically promote development? Especially with OLPC, failure to read the political-economic...

Achtung Baby: Real Dangers of German Denuclearization

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Energy,Environment,Europe at 4/23/2014 06:02:00 AM

Chalk this one up as a victory of politics over common sense. Imagine adopting an energy policy that (1) leaves you vulnerable to the whims of vainglorious and unreliable energy suppliers, (2) raises the costs of energy provision, and (3) pollutes the environment more as you return to coal burning, and (4) opens you up to litigation for forsaking agreed-to contracts to maintain nuclear power plants. As it so happens, one of the most rational nations on Earth, Germany, is doing precisely that. In the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan, European countries have reassessed their use of nuclear power. The French...

Asia Fun Club: PRC Seizes Japanese Cargo Ship

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in China,Japan,Security,Trade at 4/22/2014 03:50:00 PM

The Japanese have literally been, ah, Shanghaied. Us Asians generally have a longer-term perspective than Americans (whose planning horizon is near-zero as evidenced by all sorts of things ranging from the negligible savings of its retirees to the $17.5 trillion plus they will dump on future generations). However, it can go to ridiculous lengths as we bear grudges against each other stretching for decades and decades. The archetypal example is of remembering wartime atrocities committed during Japanese occupations of WWII. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and all that stuff. Just recently, the Japanese Prime Minister...

VW, GM & Toyota Vie for PRC Auto Supremacy

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Cars,China,Trade at 4/22/2014 12:11:00 AM

It's definitely not your grandfather's Buick. Having discussed the troubles Chinese automakers have selling cars at home and what it means for their export prospects, let us now turn our attention to the real battle for market supremacy in the PRC. In 2009, it surpassed the US as the world's largest market in terms of vehicle sales, so it certainly isn't small fry and represents a burgeoning market with vast possibilities relative to the saturated Western and Japanese ones. Yes, China is horribly polluted already. But no, the automakers seem to be implying that sales can continue to grow with hybrids, never mind that...

NSA Spying: A Visual Guide

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Internet Governance at 4/21/2014 12:33:00 AM

I likened the NSA to East Germany's notorious secret police the Stasi via a job placement for electro-spooks a few moons ago. Data privacy is very much a hot topic in IPE as to the appropriateness of government spying. The American debate concerns citizens' rights to privacy and their willingness to abrogate them because of purported "security" concerns over terrorism and the like. While I am sure Americans don't particularly care about their spooks spying on foreigners, the issue is even more complicated at the international level. That is, does the American government's utter indifference to privacy concerns when spying...

Bhutan's Gross National Happiness & Money-Grubbing

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Marketing,Travel at 4/20/2014 12:06:00 AM

Everybody Wangchuck [L] Tonight and Meet the Jetsun [R]. Us Asians are routinely amused by Westerners buying our dear neighbor Bhutan's schtick hook, line and sinker. You see, Bhutan is famous the world over for measuring "gross national happiness" instead of the materialistic, output-oriented measures us unenlightened folks use like GDP and GNP. King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck is certainly not averse to playing along. Especially among self-styled "progressives" this is taken as evidence for their enlightened stance in the place of mammon-worship common to the rest of us. Take, for instance, this travelogue from Canada's...

TPP Hara-kiri: Will Japan Kill Off This Trade Pact?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Japan,Trade at 4/18/2014 12:14:00 AM

Hara-kiri is defined as "ritual suicide by disembowelment." Two years ago, I described Japan joining negotiations to enlarge the existing TPP membership as a non-starter mainly because of Japan's strong agricultural lobbies blocking off any sort of liberalization of sensitive crops--especially rice. There too remains the quite frankly idiotic complaint Americans have that the Japanese car market is "protected" since they have time and again failed to sell their oversized, gas-guzzling, left-hand drive cars that are unsuitable for sale in Japan. Yet, for obvious reasons, the US has been keen on Japan joining since it's...

Cheers to Vlad Putin for Boosting My Euro Bonds

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Russia at 4/17/2014 12:34:00 AM

Ever heard of the term "financial martyrdom"? If you haven't, don't feel so bad since I just coined it at this very moment. In an earlier post, I talked about a Franklin Templeton bond fund I was offered that was full of Ukraine bonds. Let's just say I was sane enough to dodge that bullet. I have since invested my euro-denominated savings--I am not dumb enough to hold a boatload of dollars as I keep mentioning in this blog. What did I put them in? As a conservative investor, I put it into a bond fund of short duration, "just right" investments: not quite investment-grade but reasonably safe and higher yielding in comparison...

Philippine Tax Authority TKOs Manny Pacquiao

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Development,Southeast Asia,Sports at 4/16/2014 10:36:00 AM

Why are tax authorities always hate figures? The Good Book portrayed them as untouchables, and tax collectors have had something of an image problem since biblical times. While the entire Philippine nation was cheering Manny Pacquiao to victory over Timothy Bradley in last Sunday's title bout--which he won handily--someone was already seeing Philippine peso signs in her eyes. No, not Manny's manager but the country's tax collecting head honcho, Kim Henares of the Bureau on Internal Revenue (BIR). As the picture above implies, these two pugilists have had previous run-ins. Last year, the congressman accused her of "harassing"...

BRICs Guy on the EU's Road to Smurfdom

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Europe at 4/15/2014 01:40:00 AM

Jim O'Neill is known to most as the Goldman Sachs guy who termed the terms "BRICs" to represent the bloc of large developing countries Brazil, Russia, India, and China and to football fans as the would-be savior of Manchester United from the dastardly, debt-loving Glazer Ameriscum. (See anyone else buy a football team via LBO?) He also coined "MINTs" for Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, albeit their subsequent performance is even spottier than the BRICs'. Now, BeyondBRICs points us to a new report from him published by Bruegel that suggests the developed countries will lose a larger share of the world economy faster...