Category Archives: Countries

Impressions of India

India remains a mys­tery to me. I spent two weeks in south­ern India in Jan­u­ary, in Chen­nai and Ker­ala. It was the first time I had vis­ited any part of the coun­try although, in the past decade I’ve spent some time in all of the states that bor­der India bar Nepal. I expected to find …

July 2, 2012 – 9:50 pm | By pwg | Posted in Countries | Comments (0)

No spring for shiite Syria

Robert Fisk’s unsen­ti­men­tal analy­sis of Assad’s strengths As long as Syria can trade with Iraq, it can trade with Iran and, of course, it can trade with Lebanon. The Shia of Iran and the Shia major­ity in Iraq and the Shia lead­er­ship (though not major­ity) in Syria and the Shia (the largest com­mu­nity, but not …

February 7, 2012 – 8:05 pm | By pwg | Posted in Countries, Foreign policy | Tagged | Comments (0)

Zoellick on China’s choices

A dis­cur­sive account by Greg Sheri­dan in The Aus­tralian of a con­ver­sa­tion with World Bank Pres­i­dent Robert Zoel­lick on, among other things, China’s devel­op­ment conun­drum and the growth of emerg­ing economies as an anti­dote to pes­simism. Zoel­lick has a team of World Bank econ­o­mists work­ing closely with the Chi­nese lead­er­ship to help them move on …

August 13, 2011 – 6:47 am | By pwg | Posted in Countries, Policy | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Standard and Poor’s reasons

It’s dif­fi­cult to argue with the Stan­dard & Poor’s assess­ment of the U.S. fis­cal out­look, or with their down­grade of the U.S. long-term sov­er­eign credit rat­ing: We low­ered our long-term rat­ing on the U.S. because we believe that the pro­longed con­tro­versy over rais­ing the statu­tory debt ceil­ing and the related fis­cal pol­icy debate indi­cate that …

August 7, 2011 – 11:18 am | By pwg | Posted in Countries | Tagged | Comments (1)

Professional services reform in Italy

The Berlus­coni gov­ern­ment has announced a pack­age of emer­gency mea­sures to lib­er­al­ize the Ital­ian econ­omy that includes a “con­sti­tu­tional” change to speed up the lib­er­al­i­sa­tion of pro­fes­sional ser­vices. The mea­sures included a plan to amend the con­sti­tu­tion to make a bal­anced bud­get manda­tory, a sec­ond con­sti­tu­tional change that would force “closed pro­fes­sions” to lib­er­alise ser­vices, …

August 7, 2011 – 9:58 am | By pwg | Posted in Countries, Policy | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The limits of WTO litigation

Good sense from a for­mer Chair of the WTO Appel­late Body.

“It is in the best inter­est of both coun­tries to con­tinue nego­ti­at­ing on the cur­rency issue rather than resort­ing to lit­i­ga­tion at the WTO. On this issue espe­cially, lit­i­ga­tion should be the last resort.” Extract from James Bac­chus in the WSJ


Alhougth I’m sure a lot of trade law geeks like me would like to see Arti­cle XV lit­i­gated, nev­er­the­less … just to see what it means.

March 27, 2010 – 10:43 am | By pwg | Posted in Countries | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Another small step

But it’s impos­si­ble to ignore the sig­nif­i­cance of this con­tin­u­ing inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of the remminbi.

“Although it has no short-term impli­ca­tions for the full con­vert­ibil­ity of the ren­minbi, the announce­ment pro­vides bal­last to the vol­ley of polit­i­cal sig­nals Bei­jing has been send­ing in recent months over its dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the US dol­lar.” Extract from Finan­cial Times
July 3, 2009 – 4:51 pm | By pwg | Posted in Countries | Tagged , | Comments (0)