Monthly Archives: May 2010

Chinese wage pressures

Straws in the wind? “For­eign investors are under pres­sure to increase wages as the country’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor shakes off the effects of the global finan­cial cri­sis.” Extract from FT.com — Strike forces Honda to shut Chi­nese plants

May 28, 2010 – 8:50 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)

Positions diverge on Doha negotiations

Another cold shower for WTO: last week’s attempt in Geneva to sketch out some ‘com­mon ground’ failed. National nego­ti­at­ing teams were said to be shocked (yes, ‘shocked’) by the size of the gaps between national posi­tions. “… nine years into the mul­ti­lat­eral trade talks, it remains unclear whether the invi­o­lable ‘red lines’ of promi­nent WTO …

May 27, 2010 – 9:22 am | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Did the ‘stimulus’ work?

In the bud­get papers (Box 4 of Bud­get Paper No.2) , the Trea­sury says that there is robust sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence from the IMF that the economies apply­ing the stim­u­lus expe­ri­enced an upside growth sur­prise of 3.3 per­cent for every addi­tional 1 per­cent of GDP devoted to fis­cal stim­u­lus. But they made this up, as Sin­clair …

May 15, 2010 – 10:06 am | By pwg | Posted in Policy | Comments (0)

Failure of the ‘Third Way’

John Kay describes Gor­don Brown as a “redis­trib­u­tive mar­ket lib­eral, hold­ing, like other adher­ents of Blair’s ‘Third Way’, that …[t]he eco­nomic role of gov­ern­ment should be lim­ited and con­fined to a short list of issues described as mar­ket fail­ures. Redis­trib­u­tive mar­ket lib­er­als believe, how­ever, in a big role for the state in review­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion …

May 6, 2010 – 11:28 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Resources tax mess

Henry Ergas explains what’s wrong with the Brown­ian ‘Resources Super Prof­its Tax’ (apart from the appalling, ide­o­log­i­cal snip­ing at for­eign investors). “Unfor­tu­nately, we have a long his­tory in this coun­try of inter­ven­tions that, were they capa­ble of per­fect imple­men­ta­tion, might increase wel­fare. Typ­i­cally, when real­ity hits, they have the oppo­site effect. The sci­en­tific tar­iff, which …

May 6, 2010 – 12:59 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged | Comments (0)