Covered in Bees dot Org - trade

The union bosses are gonna shut you down

dan — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 01:23:03 +0100

Australian telly is a wonder to behold. One of the recent highlights has been an advertising campaign funded by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and the Business Council of Australia. Both now available on youtube, the first ad starts:

It hasn't been easy, but over the past two decades, we've gone from a system designed in 1904 to a system where employees and employers are now choosing to work in smarter, more flexible, more productive ways.

We're treated to a list of statistics - my favourite being that 'Australia's economy has grown by nearly 4%', accompanied by entirely disconnected, sky-rocketing graph. Everything is better, apparently: 300,000 more jobs, 10% more exports - and 'higher dividends are being paid to ordinary shareholders.' The pleasantly surprised-looking lady who opens her shares statement certainly looks pleased. That's what I like to see: an ad campaign defending the ordinary shareholder.

Official: biofuel will make global warming worse

dan — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 01:30:15 +0100

The Grauniad reports today on a study that shows shifting to biofuels 'will release between two and nine times more carbon gases over the next 30 years than fossil fuels'. This is because forest will generally be cleared to grow it. That forest, combined with the fossil fuel the biofuel would have replaced, equals less carbon than no forest and biofuel production. Also:

Britain is committed to substituting 10% of its transport fuel with biofuels under Europe-wide plans to slash carbon emissions by 2020... Around 40% of Europe's agricultural land would be needed to grow biofuel crops to meet the 10% fossil fuel substitution target.

So, of course, there'll be enormous pressure to outsource it. One author of the study noted: 'Brazil, Paraguay, Indonesia among others have huge deforestation programmes to supply the world biofuel market.'

Monbiot's been saying this for a while, but its still interesting to see more evidence. The authors point out that it means going the biofuel route is 'a mistake in climate change terms.' The thing is, evidence isn't likely to stop the biofuel juggernaut. In the US, for example, it'll be the same farming lobby growing it that also quite happily gets the US government to buy its surplus crop and ship it to developing countries, buggering up their local markets in the process, with 'a gift from the American people' stencilled on the bags.

Though perhaps combatting climate change isn't the main motivation: maybe its simply pre-empting the oil running out so that our economies can carry on regardless, while maybe getting out of the Middle East. It makes the relationship between powerful and weak countries considerably more transparent, though, doesn't it? You stick to farming and grow our fuel for us, because there's no way we have the land to do it ourselves.

The economics of it is entirely sound, of course. It just means that some places have a comparative advantage in growing car-food because they have more land. Then they'll have dollar and can afford to buy some food for themselves. That is, if they can afford to buy any because human-food crops have rocketed up in price, in line with car-food crops. Ah, but it'll be OK, coz the US can carry on dumping its unwanted grain on them.

Pro - trade, anti - 'free' trade

dan — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 05:45:39 +0100

This article in Prospect by Ha-Joon Chang is a great summary of the history of selective protectionism in the success of growing economies - and the failure of the Washington Consensus in Africa and Latin America. There's one sublime quote in it:

There is a huge difference between saying that trade is essential for economic development and saying that free trade is best. It is this sleight of hand that free-trade economists have so effectively deployed against their opponentsâ€”if you are against free trade, they imply, you must be against trade itself, and so against economic progress.

Polaroid vs Kodak

dan — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 04:22:05 +0100

So I'm in the process of hammering out the spec for my first agent-based economic model, and have been gettin' down with another Econ 101 textbook - a much less patronising one than Mankiw's, though I'm amused by just how much Mankiw seems to have lifted directly from this older undergrad workhorse.

Anyway, the authors - William Baumol and Alan Blinder - end a chapter on demand and elasticity with an example: the 1989 court case between Polaroid and Kodak where Polaroid sued Kodak for patent infringement. Kodak had put out their own instant pic camera. Baumol himself was a witness in the case, testifying on behalf of Kodak. Polaroid were after something like $9 billion in lost sales. Kodak conceded the point, but thought the amount should be closer to $450 million. How were these figures arrived at?

Yorkshire Forward: all the way to Japan, US, Australia...

dan — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 01:05:16 +0100

The Independent and e-politix.com tell of a report from the Commons trade and industry committee on UK Trade and Investment (or UKTI). The fascinating part of this report, though, is its take on the Regional Development Agencies (of which Yorkshire Forward is one.)

It turns out the RDAs have all been setting up permanent trade promotion offices abroad - 42 in total, spread across the US, Japan and Australia. The committee sees this as a 'bizarre' duplication of effort, confusing potential investors. They think the job of trade promotion for the UK should be done by UKTI alone. A member of the committee said:

There is confusion about who is actually responsible for trade promotion, and an extraordinary situation when it comes to offices abroad, which are competing with each other, confusing investors and wasting taxpayers' money.

Its a lovely little window onto the peculiar nature of the UK's 'market state'. A previous post on epolitix told how the Institute of Directors thought the RDAs were doing too little to make themselves relevant to businesses in their areas. Now the poor sods are getting berated for going all the way overseas to help bring business in.

The obvious response to the committee's complaints is, well, what did you expect? Every region and city has been encouraged to promote this notion that they can be 'world class'. The point, surely, is competition, isn't it? Why should any RDA expect that a national body is going to promote their interests - especially when that body is London-based? And how is it a 'bizarre' duplication of effort? Could the same be said for all these pesky supermarkets we have, confusing the poor consumer? If not, why not? Because its tax-payer's money? Well, that doesn't make any difference, does it? Market efficiency is market efficiency, ain't it? Choice! Choicity-woicity-woicity CHOICE!

The world's biggest digital dump

dan — Mon, 21 May 2007 10:32:15 +0100

Slashdot links today to a 'photo-essay' in Foreign Policy magazine: a series of pictures showing some of the tens of thousands of people in developing countries who re-claim metals from our old computers and other tech junk. Its cheaper to ship this stuff to China than deal with it here - and a lot of it contains 17 times more gold than gold ore, and 40 times more copper than copper ore. Melting it down also releases a whole heap of evil chemicals like cadmium and lead.

"This is where your pentium 4s are made..."

dan — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 09:03:03 +0000

Just a quickie: if you a) have Google Earth installed and b) do a search for EPZ Google Earth or Export Processing Zone Google Earth, you can quickly get some links to, e.g. an EPZ in Dhaka, or an Intel factory in the Philippines.

Allegedly. They may not be - and they look like any other industrial estate from the air. But there's a lot of much smaller shack-like buildings around the edge.

Interesting to note that Google has reportedly agreed to blur some Indian sites deemed to be a security risk. This is not unreasonable, from the point of view of the Indian government. But it makes me think we need more surveillance - by the right people, of the right sort, and open to all. If more of these EPZs could be Google-earthed by a bunch of unions, along with related data, that would be wonderful.

Pry this laptop from my cold, dead hands

dan — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:28:56 +0000

The Competition Commission has let loose its interim report on supermarkets, which has duly wandered about and meewed cutely at people. Interesting comment under the Guardian's leader on it, which starts with a quote from that leader:

'But even as we hanker for the days of the local butcher and baker...' Who the fuck is 'we'? I eat to stay alive. I work damn hard in the week and I don't want to spend the weekend trailing round a succession of shops buying 4 things in each. There is more hypocrisy and bullshit talked about this subject than almost any other I can think of. I can understand it from the sparts - any successful big business is automatically a target, but when will the rest of you realise that THE REASON THAT TESCO IS SO SUCCESSFUL IS THAT LOTS OF PEOPLE LIKE WHAT IT IS DOING. And while I'm ranting, in a similar way: the reason that all British High Streets contain the same stores IS THAT THOSE ARE THE STORES THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE LIKE TO SHOP IN. Therefore they stay in business. Because people like to shop in them. This is the purpose of a shop. What's so difficult about this proposition?

A bunch of people like to do something, but it may lead to bad stuff happening collectively. Like global warming, or urban sprawl following in the wake of the car. Tragedy of the whatsisface. But actually, how do a bunch of people decide which things they know they like, but must be forced to stop in the collective interest? How threatening does it have to be? Who gets to decide? If we had a referendum on the damaging effects of laptops and the laptop-renouncers won, I'd be rather miffed, frankly. (Despite the fact that without it I may well be out digging healthy soil, getting a tan and breathing the fresh air of a man freeing from his addiction.)

Gosh, I sound like I'm gonna start getting all fetishy about choice, or slightly religiously shouty in that very particular way that US websites about libertarian freedom get. On the other hand, I might be making the same mistake Thomas Taylor made writing the 'Vindication of the Rights of Brutes'; the reductio ad absurdum actually ain't that absurd. Morally, we should do our best to divest ourselves of the vast resources we hog - including the tools us first world info-junkies use.

But I'm not gonna. Think I might change the name of this blog to 'I can see your point, now fuck off and leave me alone.'

Trust the profit, baby

dan — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 06:32:36 +0100

I failed in the last post to get at the point I was trying to get at. The Economist reckons that talking of concessions to local interests is 'economic nonsense' - and it may be, from the rarified google-earth view of the economist, who has models telling us that everyone will be better off if we follow them. But politics is interests - more or less. It's the process of these interests competing and coming to agreement, without resorting to violence.

So to argue that the interests of, say, American farmers, is just nonsense... well, that's nonsense. And to argue that we should all subsume those interests to the greater good of the economist's vision (and, in fact, to create institutions that take that choice out of our hands entirely)... well, see Monbiot below.

The interests of all outweighs the interests of the few...

dan — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 21:38:38 +0100

Currently in bed with a cold, so I'm gonna write more.

The economist recently had an issue headed 'the future of globalisation' - emblazoned with a picture of a beached and rusting tanker. (July 29th - August 4th 2006.) The issue laments the political errors it perceived led to the collapse of the Doha trade round. It sees a world where bilateral agreements are now the norm - agreements that rarely benefit the poorest - and a global trading system corroding at the seams as a result. It reckons it's 'the biggest threat yet to the global trading system'.

But it's not arguments over the merits of a global trade regime that jumped out at me. It's what the Economist said about the reasoning behind the system:

Multi-lateral liberalisation is a sort of jujistsu that uses exporters' determination to get into foreign markets to overwhelm domestic lobbies that would sooner keep home markets closed. The trade diplomat's incantation that to open his market is a 'concession' granted in exchange for an opening somewhere else is economic nonsense spouted for domestic political purposes. But it is remarkably fruitful nonsense because, within the WTO, any concession to one trading partner is automatically extended to all members. The trick has helped the world enjoy decades of prosperity.

Doha added a fiction all of its own with the idea of a 'development round', seen as a clever way of giving grubby trade some moral appeal. But both tricks have now backfired, by persuading rich-country participants that, rather than boosting their own economies, they were sacrificing their national interests to those of foreigners.