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I’ve just returned from a few days in Sydney, Australia, where it is more or less the dead of winter, which means sunshine, highs in the upper 60s, and lows in the 50s. Not a snowplow in sight. Leaving aside the World Cup and Aussie Rules football and the odd murder and sex scandal, the main news story is the precipitous loss of confidence in Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party leader who became Prime Minister in 2007, soundly defeating John Howard and his center-right Liberal Party, who had been in power for the previous eleven years. Rudd, a former civil servant in the Foreign Office known mainly for his fluency in Mandarin Chinese and his geekish, technocratic look, was meant to be the antidote to Howard’s proud pro-Americanism and belligerent attitude towards darker-skinned folks seeking political asylum in the Land of Oz. Rudd was the new internationalist, prepared to identify Australia as an Asian country and to place Australia in the vanguard on such cutting global issues as climate change. Barely three years later, and with the next election no more than 10 months away, Rudd appears to be hanging on by his fingernails, facing his lowest poll ratings ever as well as grumblings within his own party that he might have to be replaced by another politician – Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, for example – if Labor is to have any chance of staying in power. What went wrong? [click to continue…]
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Rarely does a news story address three of my biggest enthusiasms at once, so if I find one I pay close attention. Today’s New York Times reports that the U.S. Justice Department is considering antitrust action against Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors (itself a joint venture between SAB Miller and Molson Coors), which jointly control about 80% of the U.S. beer market (“Rising Beer Prices Hint at Oligopoly”). To be honest, the article itself only addresses beer and competition; the emerging markets angle is mine alone. It appears, in any case, that both brewing giants are raising their prices, even as the recession makes the average working man need a beer more than ever. [click to continue…]
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global beer market,
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Heineken,
Interbrew,
Latin America,
Molson Coors,
Narragansett,
Pabst,
SABMiller
In P.J. O’Rourke’s book Eat the Rich a chapter entitled “How to Make Nothing from Everything” seeks to explain how Tanzania, a country endowed with beautiful beaches, plentiful forests, rich agricultural land, and magnificent wildlife, had contrived by the mid-1990s to become one of the world’s poorest countries in the world in spite – or, perhaps, because – of more than a billion dollars of development assistance. An even better example might have been Argentina. [click to continue…]
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by Chip Krakoff on June 29, 2009
in Africa, Asia, Competitiveness, Countries, Development, Eastern Europe, Economic Reform, Growth, Investment, Trade, protectionism
“The Vital Wave Consulting” blog has an interesting post from June 26 – “Is the Rest of the World Ready for a Unified BRIC?” - about last week’s summit in Moscow of the four “BRIC” countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The article ponts out that trade among the four countries is too small to justify talk of a new trading bloc, but remarks that they have some common interests with respect to world trade, notably reducing reliance on the U.S. dollar. The BRIC countries are hard to overlook. Together they comprise about 43% of the world’s population and 15% of its GDP, and hold over 40% of the world’s gold and foreign exchange reserves. Their economies are growing at more than double the pace of developed economies. That they are holding a summit at all indicates that they are looking for ways to throw their combined weight around for mutual benefit. [click to continue…]
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trade bloc
Several months ago I posted an article contending that decoupling – the notion that movements in emerging markets correlate minimally, if at all, with those in mature markets – was dead. The vertiginous rise in most emerging market indices over the previous seven or eight years stood in stark contrast to the anemic performance of the S&P 500 over the same period. As the financial meltdown and subsequent recession hit, there was a brief moment when it seemed that many of the emerging markets, especially in Asia and Latin America, might emerge unscathed. Subsequent events indicated that emerging markets, especially in Africa but also Southeast Asia, were suffering as much as the OECD countries, but with much less of a cushion against humanitarian catastrophe. In some parts of Africa, a five per cent drop in GDP can push millions of people into starvation. Decoupling, as I wrote, was dead. Even the miserable Congolese worker scrabbling in the dirt for diamonds or gold or the columbium-tantalite used in cell phones, was hit by the collapse in consumer and industrial demand in America, Europe, Japan, and China.
I may have been wrong. [click to continue…]
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Asia,
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