1 Italy vote
rattles Europe (Alessandra Galloni & Giada Zampano in The Wall Street
Journal) In a national election meant to push Italy further down a path of
economic reform, voters delivered political gridlock that could once again
rattle Europe's financial stability. Markets in Europe and the US gyrated even
in response to early returns. The Dow Jones Industrial Average swung nearly 300
points, ending with its worst day in almost four months, as the prospects of a
stable government appeared to drop.
A majority of
voters endorsed parties that had promised to tone down or even reverse the
financial sacrifices Italy has promised its European partners, giving surprise
lifts to both the center-right coalition of former premier Silvio Berlusconi
and a party of protest led by a former comedian. Late Monday, the left-wing
coalition led by the Democratic Party's Pier Luigi Bersani appeared to have
gained a razor-thin victory in the lower house of parliament over the
center-right coalition headed by Mr. Berlusconi—29.6% to 29.2% with 99.9% of
the ballots counted.
The election surprise poses a challenge
for euro-zone creditor nations such as Germany, which have demanded that
financially stressed euro-zone countries overhaul their economies in exchange
for supporting the European Central Bank's pledge to save the currency union if
necessary. A public rejection of austerity policies could rapidly spread to
Spain and beyond, forcing European authorities to accelerate their response to
the regional crisis or risk another round of the kind of contagion that
effectively closed a host of euro-zone credit markets.
Italy's unclear election results are in
large part due to the country's electoral law, which was introduced in 2005 and
has been dubbed "porker" law because of all its critics. The law
awards the majority of seats in the lower house of parliament to the party that
wins the most votes at a national level, even if the victory is by one vote.
2 In India,
missing school to work in mines (Gardiner Harrris in The New York Times) Just
two months before full implementation of a landmark 2010 law mandating that all
Indian children between the ages of 6 and 14 be in school, some 28 million are
working instead, according to Unicef. Child workers can be found everywhere — in
shops, in kitchens, on farms, in factories and on construction sites. In the
coming days Parliament may consider yet another law to ban child labour, but
even activists say more laws, while welcome, may do little to solve one of
India’s most intractable problems.
“We have very
good laws in this country,” said Vandhana Kandhari, a child protection
specialist at Unicef. “It’s our implementation that’s the problem.”
Poverty, corruption, decrepit schools and absentee teachers are among the
causes. India’s Mines Act of 1952 prohibits anyone under the age of 18 from
working in coal mines, but enforcing that law would hurt families.
While the
Indian government has laws banning child labor and unsafe working conditions,
states are mostly charged with enforcing those laws. The country’s police are
highly politicized, so crackdowns on industries sanctioned by the politically
powerful are rare. Police officers routinely extract bribes from coal truckers,
making the industry a source of income for officers.
3 Will new
technology mean end of cash? (David Wolman on BBC) Like forecasts of flying
cars, predictions of a cashless future have a history of failure. This is in
part because progress is incremental, and in part because physical money is a
time-tested technology. Yet powerful forces are aligning against cash.
Together, they provide a glimpse of what a cashless or mostly cashless future
might look like, and illuminate the promise of digital money, irrespective of
whether cash is ever kaput or just increasingly marginalised.
The battery
against cash is coming from three fronts - new technologies, scepticism about
the stewardship of sovereign currencies and increased enthusiasm for
alternative currencies, and greater scrutiny about cash's myriad costs. Digital
money innovations, particularly tools anchored to mobile phones, offer faster
and cheaper ways to pay bills, buy and sell goods, send and receive money and
make bank transactions.
Angst about
government currencies has traditionally sent people flocking to gold, and for
many devotees of the shiny stuff, gold remains the one and forever answer. But
gold is not value incarnate. It's just another commodity, albeit a historically
pivotal and impressively hefty one.
Digital tools
are already providing millions of people worldwide with the opportunity to
avoid cash. And avoid it they do. They are storing value and transacting by way
of electronic accounts "on" their mobile phones.For the first time,
people who were trapped in the informal economy can steer clear of usurious
local moneylenders, save precious time and money, and benefit from the basic
financial services that you and I take for granted.
And no, looping
people into the formal economy isn't a clandestine Valentine to banks and
bankers. The fact is that a bank account, online bill, person-to-person
payment, access to credit, insurance - all of these tools for building economic
stability depend on money in electronic form. If you don't have that, it's far
more difficult to climb permanently out of poverty. The truth is that it
doesn't matter all that much whether cash's further marginalisation ever leads
to extinction. What matters far more is the potential for digital money
innovations to improve the welfare of so many.
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