Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields
WASHINGTON, April 12 — For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.
But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.
Source: New York Times
Calcutta's Industrial Ambitions Clash with Tradition
Not directly about China, but they do mention how India, seeing China as a thriving example, would like to create similar export processing zone (EPZs) in hopes of spurring development. Yet a strong faction of Indian citizens are resisting.
Source:
National Public Radio
Bulldozers break China stand-off
Authorities in China have torn down a stubborn couple's house after a three-year stand-off that hindered a construction project and captivated the nation, a witness and state media said.
Wu Ping and Yang Wu have been fighting off bulldozers in downtown Chongqing since 2004, when they were one of 280 households asked to make way for a redevelopment project in the booming southwestern city of nearly 28 million.
Source:
Sydney Morning Herald
Stolper-Samuelson Theorem
The original paper (cited below) is
here.
Stolper, W.F. and P.A. Samuelson (1941). "Protection and Real Wages." Review of Economic Studies, 9: 58-73.
A recent paper that explains the theorem is
here.
THE SCHWARTZ CENTER FOR ECONOMIC POLICY ANALYSIS RELEASES A NEW STUDY ON WORLD TRADE
The World Bank underestimates the risks and overestimates the benefits of multilateral trade liberalization, according to a powerful new study released this month by the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. Written by Lance Taylor, the Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development, the study comes as many economists and policymakers are debating the future of the Doha round, the world trade talks that began in Doha, Quatar, in November 2001 but have repeatedly collapsed.
Some commentators have cited intractable differences between poor and wealthy countries regarding protection and development policies as a salient reason for the collapse. Yet any possible Doha agreement, Taylor shows, would offer developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, only limited gains, given the variability of such macroeconomic indicators as employment, income, government deficits, and trade deficits.
“When the analysis allows for a changing rather than a fixed government budget deficit,” he observes, “the African public balance often deteriorates, whereas the rest of the world’s fiscal position improves. Our study finds that if employment and income are variable, they may increase in sub-Saharan Africa, but in tandem with mounting trade deficits and foreign debt, rendering such advances temporary.” Taylor's conclusion is therefore that “developing countries would be ill-advised to follow the radical recommendations of the World Bank’s liberalization strategy insofar as it rests on results from the current trade models. At this point, there is every reason to demand serious revisions to proposals from developed countries prior to any revival of the Doha process.”
SCHWARTZ CENTER FOR ECONOMIC POLICY ANALYSIS is
here.
Multivariate Regression
The Basic Regression Model Multivariate regression is the primary statical toolfor applied statistics in the social sciences. Consider two applications:
here.
Employment, wages and income inequality in the internalization of China's economy
An excellent case study of Chinese wages.
Download
here.
Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in China
Excellent paper, commissioned by the BLS, assessing the quality and usability of avaliable stats on China's manufacturing employment and labor compensation, and estimating annual, monthly, and hourly labor compensation for China's manufacturing employees.
Download
here.
Bargaining Power and Foreign Direct Investment in China: Can 1.3 Billion Consumers Tame the Multinationals?
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has become a much desired commodity by nations, regions and cities throughout the world. Indeed, governments bid for FDI because it is commonly thought to be an important engine of economic growth, job creation, and technological upgrading. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), the developing world’s largest recipient of FDI and one of the world’s fastest growing economies, is often cited as evidence for the beneficial effects of FDI. Given the PRC’s size and the huge allure of its cheap labor force and customer base, one would think that if any country had the bargaining power vis a vis multinational corporations to benefit from FDI, it would be China. But does FDI really deliver these commonly perceived benefits? To answer this question, we study the impact of inward FDI on wages, job creation, investment and tax generation in the PRC from 1986-1999 by running panel regression analysis on provincial level data. An innovation of our analysis is to distinguish the impact of FDI inflows from that of economic liberalization, per se. We find that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, inward FDI has a relatively small positive impact on wages and employment, while having a negative impact on domestic investment and tax revenue. We suggest that the decentralization of the FDI bidding process in China contributes to these negative outcomes, and argue that the limitation on FDI management tools associated with China’s WTO entry is likely to further reduce the benefits of FDI for Chinese workers and citizens.
Download
here.
Section 301 Petition
Section 301 Petition of American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations concerning Chinese labor practices.
MIT OpenCourseWare: Chinese
Free audio/video lectures, notes, sample tests, etc of
different levels of Chinese taught at MIT.
M.I.T. Education in China, Minus the Degree
LUCIFER CHU, a 31-year-old from Taipei, Taiwan, is as good an example as any of the shrinking distances between East and West.
Mr. Chu has become a millionaire by creating Chinese translations of fantasy novels. Using much of the $1 million in royalties from his versions of “The Lord of the Rings,” Mr. Chu says he devotes himself to distributing free translations of material from a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Web site.
When M.I.T. introduced its OpenCourseWare project six years ago, it was a radical departure. The project was intended to make virtually all of the institute’s course materials available online — free — over a 10-year period at the cost of $100 million. (The material is provided under a Creative Commons license, which, among other things, forbids its being used for commercial purposes, but allows it to be copied and used for other purposes.)
The university’s good intentions came with some concerns: it’s not easy to share the lecture notes, slide presentations, sample tests, syllabuses and reading lists that go into an M.I.T. course. First, faculty members have to agree to go along. Also, the 25 people who work on OpenCourseWare have had to obtain permission to use other people’s creative work that crops up in the slides and lectures.
Source:
New York Times
Re-education
Can China create schools that foster openness, flexibility and innovation? And what happens to China if it does?
Source:
New York Times
Homeowner Stares Down Wreckers, at Least for a While
CHONGQING, China, March 23 — For weeks the confrontation drew attention from people all across China, as a simple homeowner stared down the forces of large-scale redevelopment that are sweeping this country, blocking the preparation of a gigantic construction site by an act of sheer will.
Chinese bloggers were the first to spread the news, of a house perched atop a tall, thimble-shaped piece of land like Mont-Saint-Michel in northern France, in the middle of a vast excavation.
Newspapers dived in next, followed by national television. Then, in a way that is common in China whenever an event begins to take on hints of political overtones, the story virtually disappeared from the news media after the government, bloggers here said, decreed that the subject was suddenly out of bounds.
Still, the “nail house,” as many here have called it because of the homeowner’s tenacity, like a nail that cannot be pulled out, remains the most popular current topic among bloggers in China.
It has a universal resonance in a country where rich developers are seen to be in cahoots with politicians and where both enjoy unchallenged sway. Each year, China is roiled by tens of thousands of riots and demonstrations, and few issues pack as much emotional force as the discontent of people who are suddenly uprooted, told that they must make way for a new skyscraper or golf course or industrial zone.
Source:
New York Times
Ant Fraud Yields Death Sentence
YINGKOU, China -- To hear Chinese authorities tell it, Wang Zhendong is a danger to society, the worst kind of person, one who took advantage of his fellow citizens' naivete and trust. Last month, a court here gave him the death penalty for his crimes.
Wang's misdeed: selling overpriced ant farms to the public.
As China moves fitfully from a planned economy to a free-market system, cracking down on fraud, embezzlement and other financial schemes has become a major priority for the government. Among the cases taken most seriously are ones that harmed common people.
In Wang's case, for instance, investors shelled out 10,000 yuan, the equivalent of about $1,300, for cardboard boxes full of black ants, purportedly rare ones sometimes used in China to make medicines and wine but actually worth about $25.
Source:
Washington Post
