1 Greek PM in new debt deal proposal (BBC) Greek
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says he has issued "a realistic
proposal" to the country's international creditors in an attempt to secure
a deal over its debts. He said the plan included "concessions that will be
difficult".
A €300m (£216m) payment from Greece to the IMF is
due on Friday. There are fears Greece does not have the necessary funds to pay
and could default on the debt, ultimately leading to its exit from the
eurozone. Friday's payment is the first of four totalling €1.5bn that Greece is
due to pay to the IMF in June, and it is understood that the payments could be
all bundled together and repaid in a single transaction at the end of the
month.
If Greece decides to repay the funds in this way, it
would have to notify the IMF, but it has not yet done so. The country remains
in a four-month long deadlock with international creditors over the release of
€7.2bn in remaining bailout funds. European lenders as well as the IMF are
pushing for greater austerity reforms in return for the cash, which the Greek
government has so far refused to make.
2 The school myth and slowing growth (Ricardo
Hausman in Khaleej Times) Education’s importance is incontrovertible. But
whether it constitutes a strategy for economic growth is another matter. What
most people mean by better education is more schooling; and, by higher-quality
education, they mean the effective acquisition of skills (as revealed, say, by
the test scores in the OECD’s standardised PISA exam). But does that really
drive economic growth?
My Harvard colleague Lant Pritchett has pointed out,
the long-term payoff has been surprisingly disappointing. In the 50 years from
1960 to 2010, the global labor force’s average time in school essentially
tripled, from 2.8 years to 8.3 years. This means that the average worker in a
median country went from less than half a primary education to more than half a
high school education.
How much richer should these countries have expected
to become? In 1965, France had a labour force that averaged less than five
years of schooling and a per capita income of $14,000 (at 2005 prices). In
2010, countries with a similar level of education had a per capita income of
less than $1,000.
In 1960, countries with an education level of 8.3
years of schooling were 5.5 times richer than those with 2.8 year of schooling.
By contrast, countries that had increased their education from 2.8 years of
schooling in 1960 to 8.3 years of schooling in 2010 were only 167 per cent
richer. Moreover, much of this increase cannot possibly be attributed to
education, as workers in 2010 had the advantage of technologies that were 50
years more advanced than those in 1960. Clearly, something other than education
is needed to generate prosperity.
Make no mistake: education presumably does raise
productivity. But to say that education is your growth strategy means that you
are giving up on everyone that has already gone through the school system –
most people over 18, and almost all over 25. It is a strategy that ignores the
potential that is in 100% of today’s labour force, 98% of next year’s, and a
huge number of people who will be around for the next half-century. An
education-only strategy is bound to make all of them regret having been born
too soon.
This generation is too old for education to be its
growth strategy. It needs a growth strategy that will make it more productive –
and thus able to create the resources to invest more in the education of the
next generation. Our generation owes it to theirs to have a growth strategy for
ourselves. And that strategy will not be about us going back to school.
3 Tanzania elephants diminish 60% in five years
(Karl Mathiesen in The Guardian) Tanzania has emerged as the epicentre of
Africa’s elephant poaching crisis after a government census revealed it had
lost a “catastrophic” 60% of its elephants in just five years. The results will
pile pressure on a government that has been heavily criticised for its
inability to stop a flood of poached ivory being stripped from its national
parks.
Tanzania’s elephant population is one of the
continent’s largest. But data shows that between 2009 and 2014 the number
dropped from 109,051 to 43,330. When an annual birth rate of 5% is taken into
account the number of dead is 85,181. The census reveals a loss to Africa’s
elephants far greater than declines reported in Mozambique last week.
Steven Broad, executive director of wildlife trade
monitor Traffic, said: “It is incredible that poaching on such an industrial
scale has not been identified and addressed before now.” The losses were not
uniform, and were at their worst in the Ruaha–Rungwa, Malagarasi-Muyovosi and
Selous-Mikumi ecosystems which all lost more than two-thirds of their
elephants.
In the Selous reserve, which has previously been
identified as a poaching hotspot, the numbers dropped from almost 45,000 to
around 15,000. Last year Unesco added Selous to its World Heritage in Danger
list.
No comments:
Post a Comment