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World economy 27th March 2014

Chinese state-owned oil firms head into uncharted waters

BEIJING | By H.Kaixi, W. Xiaobing and Y. Ning via Caixin | Since February, state-owned oil majors have taken steps toward pilots in mixed-share ownership, following central government calls for reforms to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In a previous round of SOE reforms launched in 1998, the top three oil majors, CNPC, Sinopec and China National Offshore Oil Co. (CNOOC) underwent asset restructurings and went public abroad. But shortly thereafter reforms came to a halt. The competition that policymakers wanted to bring about never happened.

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World economy 26th March 2014

Yes Janet, by all means “mind the gap”

SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | In “Mind the (spending) gap,” Atif Mian and Amir Sufi of Princeton and Chicago, respectively, are on the right track but go about it the wrong way and so arrive at a wrong conclusion. They wonder: We all know that households cut back on spending dramatically during the Great Recession. Are they spending now? Has spending caught up to the trend the United States was on before?

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World economy 25th March 2014

Pimp economics

WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo | Prostitution is coming out of the closet.  Not by getting any official credit -it’s still an illegal activity-, but thanks to the Internet. According to a study recently released by the U.S. Urban Institute, the Web is disrupting the pimp industry, causing a supply shock followed by a demand reaction. Sex workers don’t need middlemen to find clients anymore. 

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World economy 21st March 2014

U.S. progressive budget reminds us that government can create jobs

NEW YORK | By Nell Abernathy via Next New Deal |Unemployment is still a major problem in the U.S., and the best solutions involve a more aggressive government response. The skeptics will argue that the government is too inefficient and bureaucratic to effectively create middle class jobs and support economic growth. But the 2009 stimulus package provides a prime example of effective government intervention: it was designed to create 2-3 million jobs, and it succeeded.

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World economy 21st March 2014

China: The mirage of the ‘new economy’

SHANGHAI | By Andy Xie via Caixin | The current Internet boom and the new economy, centered around social networking, e-commerce and online gaming, has not produced a significant productivity boost for the economy and likely will not in the future. The boom is mostly about redistributing existing demand from offline to online.

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World economy 19th March 2014

Fed kicks can down the road

SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | That’s the image that came to mind when I saw this chart from Bank Paribas that Binyamin Appelbaum reproduced in his post [see above].

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World economy 19th March 2014

Fiware: EU’s challenge to build the future Internet

SEVILLE | By Ana Fuentes | When it comes to innovation and data management the U.S. is the absolute global leader. But Brussels wants to make up for many years of sitting on its hands: the cake is too yummy to allow Amazon or Google to eat it all. Fiware, a tech platform born from a public-private partnership, aims to finance an open ecosystem for SMEs to develop innovative projects. The budget for the best ideas is 100 million euros, way less than the American big firms are investing. But Spanish entrepreneurs eager to leave the crisis mood behind insist it’s worth to give it a try.

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World economy 17th March 2014

The labor market in Canada and in the US

SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | David Andolfatto has an interesting take: “The question is this: Would you expect the labor market in the U.S. border states to look more like the Canadian labor market or more like the U.S. labor market?”

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World economy 17th March 2014

Russia, an Italy with 8,500 atomic bombs

WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo | According to the IMF, Russia and Italy have about the same nominal GDP, though, if you adjust it to its purchase parity power, the Russian economy may be 50% greater than Italian. Still, Russia has two and a half times the population of Italy, which explains why its nominal GDP per capita is half of Spain’s (even in real terms, Spaniards are 60 percent richer than Russians). So, Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve for its country a global importance that, taking its economy into account, it does not deserve.