1 Three reasons why the US is getting stronger (David Brooks in The New York Times) The creative dynamism of American business is astounding and a little terrifying. Over the past five years, amid turmoil and uncertainty, American businesses have shed employees, becoming more efficient and more productive. According to The Wall Street Journal on Monday, the revenue per employee at S&P 500 companies increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2011.Tyler Cowen in his article in The American Interest, points to three trends that will boost the nation’s economic performance. First, smart machines. China and other low-wage countries have a huge advantage when factory floors are crowded with workers. But we are moving to an age of quiet factories, with more robots and better software. That reduces the importance of wage rates. It boosts American companies that make software and smart machines.
Then there is the shale oil and gas revolution. In the past year, fracking, a technology pioneered in the US, has given the nation access to vast amounts of energy that can be sold abroad. Finally, there is the growth of the global middle class. When China, India and such places were first climbing the income ladder, they imported a lot of raw materials from places like Canada, Australia and Chile to fuel the early stages of their economic growth. But, in the coming decades, as their consumers get richer, they will be importing more pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, planes and entertainment, important American products.
2 ADB says rapid growth fuels Asian inequality (BBC) Asia's rapid economic growth may undermine stability because the gap between the rich and poor is widening, the Asia Development Bank has warned. Releasing its annual report, the bank said a key inequality measure increased to an average reading of 38 in Asia. And while that is less than the average found in Latin America and Africa, Asia's figure is climbing as it declines in the other regions. China, India and Indonesia have seen significant growth in inequality.
“People are asking for more. Not only are they asking for bread, but they are asking for a more even distribution of bread”, says Changyong Rhee of ADB. During the 1960s and 1970s, Asia was better at ensuring that growth did not marginalise large chunks of the region's population and was actually reducing the gap between the rich and the poor. However, over the past decade the sudden explosion of growth and rapid enrichment of many people has seen the rich-poor divide grow. The ADB estimates that currently in most Asian countries the wealthiest 5% of the population now account for 20% of total expenditure.
3 Making $1bn in two years, the Instagram way (The Guardian) Only in Silicon Valley can a couple of 20-somethings turn less than two years of work into a $1bn fortune. Kevin Systrom, 28, joined the long line of technocrats turned plutocrats on Monday when he sold Instagram, a profitless photo sharing app that’s less than two years old, for $1bn. He sold it to that other wunderkind, Mark Zuckerberg, 27, the Facebook founder whose social network is now worth an estimated $100bn. Systrom, a former Google employee, is understood to own about 40% of Instagram, which is now worth $400m. His co-founder Mike Krieger, 25, is believed to have about 10%. The rest will be shared with investors and the company's other employees – all 11 of them. Even by Silicon Valley standards, it's a remarkable haul for a company that's been around for less than two years.
Instagram wasn't the first, or the only, mobile app offering people a way to share their photos on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr. Nor was its use of filters to add visual effects to those shots a new idea. But what made it stand out was its success. Instagram might not make a cent but it is the hottest mobile app in the world and Facebook is preparing for the biggest IPO in tech history.
Launched in October 2010, Instagram was an instant hit. Over 30m people have downloaded the app now. When the firm launched an Android version earlier this month, it attracted 1m downloads in 12 hours. People love sharing their photos online and making them look like their Dad took them in 1980 with a camera he borrowed from his dad. And the app they want to do it with is Instagram.
4 Dying lonely in a megacity (Kumiko Makihara in Khaleej Times) My friends in New York City laugh at me when I tell them of my latest fear: dying alone and not being discovered for weeks. It doesn’t seem like such a far-fetched possibility to me. I have high-blood pressure and thus a greater chance than normal of having a stroke. I live alone in a large high-rise and don’t know my neighbours. What got my anxiety levels up were some widely reported instances of such deaths in Japan that I heard about during a recent visit home. There’s even a term for the phenomenon there: “kodokushi,” which literally translates as “lonely death.”
Of course, not every death alone should be classified as “lonely.” In fact, Japanese government and academic papers tend to use a more emotionally neutral term, “koritsu shi,” which means isolated death. The media frenzy likely reflects the country’s ongoing struggle to fill the void in the safety net left by the breakdown of once-strong family and neighbourhood ties. There is also confusion about how to get a population that often wants to keep personal difficulties private to reach out to social services.On a recent morning when I was trying to get some sleep while battling jet lag, my 13-year-old son, who was home from boarding school, kept coming into my room and disrupting my periodic slumber. I finally asked him sharply why he was bothering me. “I didn’t want you to be dead or anything,” he said. It was a precious moment when someone was looking over me.
5 Race still divides US (Khaleej Times) Once upon a time, millions of people seemed to believe that electing Barack Obama as president would automatically improve race relations in America. But nearly four years into the ‘Age of Obama’, many Americans are coming to the conclusion that choosing a black man as commander in chief has done little to speed up racial progress or soothe racial tensions. A new Newsweek poll puts this remarkable shift in stark relief. Back in 2008, 52% of Americans told Pew Research Center that they expected race relations to get better as a result of Obama’s election; only nine per cent anticipated a decline. But today , according to the Newsweek survey, only 32% of Americans think that race relations have improved since the president’s inauguration; roughly the same number (30%) believe they have gotten worse. Factor in those who say nothing has changed and the result is staggering: nearly 60% of Americans are now convinced that race relations have either deteriorated or stagnated under Obama.
The question now is why. The reason for this divide is simple but often overlooked: most blacks know how it feels to experience racism; most whites do not. This is the dilemma Obama inherited: a white America eager to be convinced that racism is a thing of the past and a black America still painfully aware that it is not.
6 India helmet law that takes female lives (Dawn) Priya Mahindroo, 25, zips through New Delhi traffic on the back of a motorbike every day to get to work. While the law mandates a helmet for her male driver, as a woman she can legally go without. Some see this as a sad reflection on patriarchal Indian values: that women are men’s inferiors, their lives simply worth less in a country with a culture of celebrating sons over daughters. For women such as Mahindroo, however, the considerations are mostly aesthetic and unless she is forced to wear a helmet by law, she’ll continue to ride some of the world’s most dangerous streets with her head unprotected. “It ruins my hair,” she told AFP as she arrived for work at her newspaper’s office in the busy central area of the city.
India’s federal Motor Vehicles Act of 1988 stated that every person driving or riding a two-wheeler had to wear a helmet, but this sparked an uproar from the Sikh community which raised religious objections. Sikh men were later exempted, largely because of the religious demand for them to wear turbans. The local New Delhi government decided it was impossible to tell a Sikh woman from a non-Sikh and so made helmets optional for all female motorcycle riders. About 133,938 people or 366 a day died on India’s roads in 2010, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, more than any other country.
7 Oil bill is economic challenge for India (The Wall Street Journal) Indian oil and gas minister Jaipal Reddy said the nation's soaring energy import bill is becoming a growing economic challenge. He said India has seen its oil costs increase drastically in the past year amid a jump in global prices, creating an unprecedented strain on the government at a time when economic growth is stoking energy demand. "The world experienced oil shocks before. India did not experience it to this degree as it is today," Mr. Reddy said.
India imports about three-quarters of its oil, most from countries in the Gulf region. The country spent $128 billion on crude imports through the first 11 months of the fiscal year that ended on March 31, a roughly 40% increase over the period in the previous fiscal year. Annual Indian subsidies of about $30 billion that keep fuel prices low for consumers are a drag on the exchequer. India has begun reducing gasoline subsidies but hasn't yet touched diesel. "India has a very distorted system of subsidies," Mr. Reddy said. "But how in a vibrant democracy like India do you change the system suddenly?"
8 Despite sops, MNCs leave Indian bourses (Financial Chronicle) In the past decade, as many as 32 of India’s ‘foreign’ companies have gone off stock market listing in this country. On Thursday, this number will go up by one, when yet another multinational company, Sweden’s Alfa Laval, will stop trading on both BSE and NSE. Together, they are estimated to have taken away over Rs 350bn of market capitalisation from Indian bourses. Contrast this with the following: in the past decade, just one foreign company has got listed, Standard Chartered bank.
Clearly, the government’s efforts to get more and more MNCs to list in India, even if it is in the form of Indian depository receipt (IDR), has not worked. To be sure, the companies have not left India. They are very much here and continue to invest big time in their Indian businesses. Some of the big names that have exited the Indian stock market are Cadbury, Wartsila, Philips, Panasonic, GE Cap, Otis, Yokogawa, e-Serve (originally a Citigroup’s BPO, before being acquired by TCS), Atlas Copco, Sulzer, Micro Inks, Lotte India, Bosch Chasis and Electrolux. “MNCs are delisting because it helps them evade compliance under the listing rules,” said Hinesh Doshi, vice-president of Investors Grievance Forum, a Sebi-registered investor body, which is fighting what it says “unfair tactics” by management of delisted Micro Inks to force out minority investors.
+++
Most tormenting read of Tuesday:
1 Ethiopian migrant suicide: 'I can't tell my daughter that her mother is dead' (The Guardian) Alem Dechasa, an Ethiopian migrant, was beaten in the streets of Beirut by men who allegedly worked for the company that recruited her in Lebanon. Later she was found dead in hospital, having apparently killed herself. Alem's partner, Lemesa Ejeta, explains why he cannot bring himself to tell their two children that she is dead. Ethiopia is lobbying Lebanon to investigate fully the death of the housemaid who killed herself after being beaten on the street in Beirut. Video footage of Alem Dechasa being attacked outside the Ethiopian consulate in Beirut was broadcast on Lebanese television two weeks ago, causing outrage in the country about the mistreatment of the thousands of migrant workers in the country. In the video, Dechasa is seen being violently dragged along the street by a man and forced into a car. One man screams at her, "Get into the car" while another is seen helping to force Dechasa into the back of the vehicle. She was taken to the Pyschiatrique de la Croix hospital after the incident, and was found dead there last Wednesday morning, apparently having hanged herself using strips torn from her bed sheets.
2 Another one that comes close is from the Sydney Morning Herald about a 10-year-old mother from Colombia.
3 And a third one from The Hindu: Angered at their friend being caught cheating in an exam, two Indian youths ran their car over a 37-year-old teacher in Haryana’s Sonepat district.
4 Sorry – a fourth one, too, from The Hindu: In a suspected female infanticide in Bangalore a 3-month-old is battling for her life after being beaten up, allegedly by her father. The infant was brought to hospital with severe head injury as well as deep bite marks on the thigh and buttocks, and is in a coma. The father of the child confessed to police he wanted a boy and not a girl child. The baby, Neha Afreen, died at a Bangalore hospital today (Wednesday).
Moral: News can be chilling. Ensure that kids are not exposed to news.
No comments:
Post a Comment