1 World Bank cuts China growth forecast
(BBC) The World Bank has trimmed its growth forecast slightly for China, citing
a "bumpy start to the year". It now expects the Chinese economy to
grow by 7.6% in 2014, down from its earlier projection of 7.7%. A slew of
disappointing figures has triggered concerns of a slowdown in the world's
second-largest economy. However, the bank said recent reforms unveiled by China
were likely to help it achieve "more sustainable and inclusive"
growth in the long term.
The Chinese government set out an ambitious
and comprehensive reform agenda in November last year, aimed at overhauling its
economy over the next decade. These include reforming the financial and
services sectors as well as the big state-owned enterprises. The bank also cut
its growth outlook for Thailand. It predicts that the Thai economy will expand
by 3% this year, down from its earlier projection of 4.5% growth.
The bank said it expected the developing
East Asia Pacific region to grow by 7.1% in 2014, slightly lower than its
earlier projection of 7.2%. However, it said the developing economies in the
region would see "stable economic growth this year, bolstered by a
recovery in high-income economies and the market's modest response so far to
the Federal Reserve's tapering of its quantitative easing". "East
Asia Pacific has served as the world's main growth engine since the global
financial crisis," said Axel van Trotsenburg, a vice president at the
World Bank.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26917864
2 Poaching tech workers at bus stops
(Kristen V Brown in San Francisco Chronicle) For a company on the hunt for top
tech talent, the corner of Eighth and Market streets in San Francisco is prime poaching ground. Every
morning, herds of tech workers gather there awaiting shuttle buses to the campuses
of Google, Facebook, Adobe, LinkedIn, among others. Corralled and stuck in
line, the tech bus crowd is a captive audience.
For the past two weeks, recruiters from
software startup Bigcommerce have taken advantage of Silicon Valley's
well-known commuting regimen. Members of its executive team, bolstered by a
small army of help-for-hire, have descended upon techie shuttle stops around
the city in a bid to win over top engineering talent. The ploy is gimmicky,
yes, but it is also apparently effective: The company has spoken with more than
1,000 potential candidates, extended offers to at least six and hired two, so
far.
West Stringfellow, the company's new chief
product officer, came up with the idea at a previous job when he commuted from
Noe Valley to Market Street, passing shuttle stops on the way. Initially, he
envisioned sauntering over to a tech bus stop and chatting people up, but it
soon morphed into a full-blown campaign with a clever hashtag (#poached). Last
week, the company set up coffee stands at stops, passed out 400 poached egg
sandwiches and 500 cups of coffee to would-be hires.
3 India’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty at risk
(Jason Burke in The Guardian) The fortunes of 400 families in Ikror in Amethi
district of India’s Uttar Pradesh state – and most of their 1.2 billion
compatriots – are deeply entwined with those of the descendants of Jawaharlal
Nehru, the country's first prime minister and architect of modern India. As
voting begins on Monday in India's general election – the world's biggest
exercise in democracy – this is truer than ever. Since 2004, the member of
parliament representing Ikror has been Rahul Gandhi – Nehru's great-grandson
and the sole face of the venerable Congress party's campaign. "The
Gandhis, Congress – the same thing, two sides of the same coin," says
Maqsud Ahmed, who at 75 is the oldest man in the village.
Since India gained its independence from
Britain in 1947, when Ahmed was eight, the Congress party – and thus the
Nehru-Gandhi dynasty – has dominated the country's politics. (There is no
direct blood relation to Mahatma Gandhi, the independence leader.) But
pollsters predict that in this election, the Congress party, which has been in
power since 2004, will record its heaviest defeat. No one foresees the
immediate extinction of the Gandhis as a political force. But great changes are
sweeping this country and one of the world's most successful political
dynasties may well be a long-term victim.
Uttar Pradesh (UP) has a population of 180
million and its socio-economic indicators are on a par with sub-Saharan Africa.
"There is the law, and then there is UP. This is the wild west of
India," says a local hotelier. Amethi and neighbouring constituency Rae
Bareli have been represented almost without break by the Gandhi dynasty since
Feroze Gandhi – husband of Indira, Nehru's daughter, who served four terms as
prime minister – won a seat in Rae Bareli in 1951 during India's first democratic
parliamentary election.
Sharat Pradhan, a veteran Lucknow-based
reporter who has been covering politics in the region since Rajiv Gandhi's
earliest campaigns in Amethi, said: "Nobody openly criticised 'the Family'
like this before. There was some sign of this at the [2009] elections but not
on this scale. This is completely new. There is this sense of empowerment. It's
astonishing." Causing some consternation locally is the new Aam Aadmi
(common man) party, which is challenging many of the fundamental principles of
Indian politics.
Yet in surveys, nearly half of voters still
express a preference for candidates who come from a political family or
dynasty, and the most acute grievance of the people of Ikror is not Rahul
Gandhi's assumption that he should be their representative, or the lack of
local development, but that he is inaccessible – a complaint that would have
been familiar to the Mughal emperors.
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