par Pancho Villa
publié dans :
FinTi
The rotating slumps under the Euro:
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par Pancho Villa
publié dans :
FinTi
Australia's inferiority complex is not all bad
By Raphael Minder
During a recent meeting of the Group of 20 countries hosted in Melbourne, the city's leading newspaper ran the headline: "Australia makes its mark on the world stage."
Would any big European newspaper have declared such a thing about its country? Probably not. Europeans do not need to be reassured about their place in the world to the extent that Australians do.
Sure, some European countries have three times Australia's population, greater economic and military clout and far longer histories than Australia. One of those, the UK, still holds constitutional powers over its former colony.
But why is this insecurity not felt in Belgium, my most recent home, whose global relevance fails to match that of Australia according to almost all criteria?
To start with, Belgium has 10m people, half Australia's population. Australia has higher income per capita and is riding a commodities-driven boom while Belgium is sitting on a dying coal industry.
In terms of individuals, the man voted by French-speaking Belgians as the greatest Belgian of all time is Jacques Brel, a brilliant artist but one who never filled stadiums around the world in the way Australians such as the Bee Gees or INXS did. The greatest Belgian, according to the Flemish, was Jozef De Veuster, a choice that will force many readers to launch a Google search. Yes, Brussels-born Jean-Claude Van Damme is an international movie star, but what about Nicole Kidman and the rest of the Aussie armada in Hollywood?
On the business front, Albert Frère wields huge boardroom influence in France. But does that compare with Rupert Murdoch's media empire? In sports, a recent bright spot for Belgians has been women's tennis, but in how many sports do Aussies lead? Arguably the most famous Belgian is fictional: Tintin....
par Pancho Villa
publié dans :
FinTi
Transatlantic acrimony gives way to misunderstanding
PHILIP STEPHENS
The groans of European policymakers were scarcely audible this week when George W. Bush sent John Bolton to New York as America's new ambassador to the United Nations. To say Mr Bolton has few admirers in Europe is a serious understatement. In my experience, that has never much bothered him. The new-ambassador speaks his mind. Hailing as he does from the assertive nationalist school of US politics, Mr Bolton will forever scorn mushy multilateralism.
Yet the response among allies to Mr Bush's decision to override a recalcitrant Senate and press ahead with the appointment was curiously muted. You could say the decision had been widely discounted. A cynic would add that official Europe is, anyway, on vacation. There is, though, something else. The appointment is seen as yesterday's story, a codicil to a troubled phase in transatlantic relations now left behind.
You have to measure the gain against the loss, one senior European told me. As the official in charge of arms control and weapons proliferation issues at the state department, Mr Bolton had wielded considerable and, in European eyes, invariably malign influence. Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state, had understood that. At the UN, the expectation (perhaps hope?) is that Mr Bolton will implement policy rather than shape it. It is the policy that matters.
Here, albeit sometimes grudgingly, Europeans admit real changes since Mr Bush's visit to Brussels at the start of his second term. Another sign of that shift came this week with the administration's redefinition of the effort to defeat al-Qaeda inspired terrorism. Talk of a war on terrorism, the leitmotif of Mr Bush's policy after September 11 2001, has been quietly shelved. Senior officials now speak of a struggle against violent extremism and the enemies of freedom.
What difference do a few words make? Potentially a lot. Mr Bush's phrase framed the threat from terrorism in entirely military terms. The words were too easily interpreted as signifying a conflict with Islam rather than with the terrorists seeking to expropriate that faith. The new language points to a broader strategy encompassing diplomacy, politics and economics as well as security. With luck it could provide the basis for a much-needed strategic dialogue with both Europe and moderate Islam.
There have been other shifts. Mr Bush's stance on Africa and climate change at last month's Gleneagles summit fell far short of European aspirations. Yet even France's Jacques Chirac acknowledged that the US had moved. The same solicitousness was visible in the resolution of a dispute about the role of the International Criminal Court in Darfur and in stronger US support for European diplomacy in Iran.
Elsewhere there have been changes in posture if not policy. Ms Rice's frequent visits to the Middle East underline a determination to make a success of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. Washington's recent confrontation with a brutal regime in Uzbekistan points to a new sensitivity to charges of American double standards around the world.
None of this has been born of a benevolent altruism in Washington. America's re-engagement with its
allies has much more to do with a blunt reassessment of its national interest. The lesson of Mr Bush's first term, and above all, of the bloody chaos in Iraq, is that it is dangerous to exercise power without legitimacy.
There has been a rethink, too, on the European side, not least because of the capacity of transatlantic divisions to fracture European solidarity. "Old" and "new" Europe have become too much of a reality.
What we have now is an absence of transatlantic acrimony and, in many-areas (Iraq is an important exception), a predisposition towards co-operation rather than confrontation. That is a big improvement. But it would be a mistake to say it adds up to a reinvigoration of the old alliance. For much of the time Americans and Europeans still look at the world from different ends of the telescope.
The mutual misunderstanding was evident at a recent meeting of senior policymakers and scholars in Venice, hosted by the Council for the United States and Italy. To many of the Europeans present, Iraq still testified to the arrogant unilateralism of the sole superpower. Peering through a different lens, Americans saw a museum in which Europe's political leaders are at once unable to deliver prosperity to their own citizens and unwilling to share the burden of global security.
Behind both analyses lies the reality that Europe is no longer at the centre of America's interests and that Europe's survival no longer rests on a US security guarantee. In this new strategic environment, Europeans crave the institutional order that comes with international law; Americans look out on a Hobbesian world in which US power is the only-effective guarantor of western values. Yet, as Simon Serfaty, a scholar at the Washington-based think-tank CSIS. shows in an excellent new book on the transatlantic relationship*, the one remains dependent on the other. Europe's ambitions for order rely on I American power. Washington's I necessary quest for legitimacy demands European partnership. The debate, Mr Serfaty rightly argues, should never have been about US power and European weakness but about how their combined strengths can contribute to global order. Here, though, on the central question of how to marry power with legitimacy, we are far from a new consensus. Vital though it is, the practical transatlantic co-operation we have seen in recent months masks the j underlying clash of strategic cultures. Many (not all) of the old shared instincts have been lost.
Mr Serfaty says the alliance can and should be rebuilt around overlapping I interests and compatible, if no longer i converging, values. The relationship j will never reclaim the intimacy of the j cold war era but it can be reinvented i as a partnership of action. I find this analysis hard to fault. Yet, looking
around at the quality of political S leadership on both sides of the Atlantic, we should live in hope rather than expectation.
*The Vital Partnership, Rowman & Littlefield
par Pancho Villa
publié dans :
FinTi
Explode the myths of global competition
Michael Lind
In today's global economy, any job can be performed anywhere. In order to compete in a global labour market, all students in advanced industrial countries need to be highly trained in science and mathematics. In order to compete in the global economy, the advanced industrial nations must downsize generous welfare states. The above represents something like the conventional wisdom about the global economy, the future job market and the welfare state. There is only one problem: every assertion in the preceding paragraph is wrong.
Let us start with the first assertion: 'In today's global economy, any job can be performed anywhere.' This is false or, at best, only a half-truth. All economies, even very open ones, have both a traded sector that is exposed to foreign competition and a non-traded sector that is insulated from it. Manufacturing and agriculture tend to be in the traded sector. A growing number of services, from accounting to telephone operations, have been outsourced as well. But according to a recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute, only about 11 per cent of the world's service sector jobs can be performed remotely. Most services, such as home construction and hospital care, must by their very nature be provided by workers in the same location as their customers.
In advanced industrial economies, the number of workers in the traded sector exposed to foreign competition tends to diminish over time. When an industry in the traded sector outsources, unemployed workers tend to get new jobs in the non-traded domestic service sector. Workers in the non-traded service sector, such as nurses, may face competition from immigrants for jobs in the national labour market but they are not competing with foreign workers in a global labour market.
This brings us to the second misconception: 'In order to compete in a global labour market, all students in advanced industrial countries need to be highly trained in science and mathematics.' This, too, is false.
According to the US labour department, the 10 fastest-growing occupations in the US in 2002-2012 are the following: 'medical assistants; networks systems and data communications analysts; physician assistants; social and human service assistants; home health aides; medical records and health information technicians; physical therapist aides; computer software engineers, applications; computer software engineers, systems software; physical therapist assistants.' The future job outlook in other industrial democracies with service economies and ageing populations is similar. It is true that four out of 10 of the fastest-growing occupations require proficiency with computers. But many of these jobs are vulnerable either to outsourcing or advances in automation. By contrast, the work of medical assistants, home health aides and physical therapists cannot be outsourced or performed by machines, barring radical advances in robotics. In the foreseeable future, nurses will outnumber computer technicians in the US and similar countries. It is absurd to tell the nurses
of tomorrow that, in addition to being literate and numerate, they need to study trigonometry in order to compete with Indian and Chinese rivals.
If particular nations can benefit disproportionately from technological progress, then it may be wise for governments to promote education and employment in scientific and technical fields. But scientists and engineers will never be more than a minority of the workforce in any country, and it is highly misleading to suggest otherwise.
The third misconception about global competitiveness is this: 'In order to compete in the global economy, the advanced industrial nations must downsize generous welfare states.' The premise is that generous welfare states prevent high-wage countries from competing with low-wage countries such as China and India in traded-sector industries. But scaling back or abolishing the welfare state would do nothing to
make the workers in a rich nation's traded sector better able to compete with labour costs in the developing world, unless workers were willing to work for Indian or Chinese wages.
Far from being handicapped by big government, the countries with the world's biggest welfare states are flourishing in the global economy. According to the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report, the most competitive economies in the world are, in order, Finland, the US, Sweden, Taiwan, Denmark and Norway. Government consumes around half of gross domestic product in all of these countries, apart from Taiwan and the US, where the combined federal-state share of GDP is slightly more than 30 per cent. (The US government share of GDP is much higher when tax deductions and exemptions for public purposes are counted.) What is more, on a per capita basis from 1990 to 2002, Sweden and Finland had the same 2 per cent growth rate as the US.
The truth is that the scale and scope of national welfare states is far less constrained by the global economy than many believe. Whether a country has a generous or stingy welfare state depends chiefly on its internal politics and traditions.
It is time, then, to replace the conventional wisdom. In the 21st century, most workers in advanced industrial nations will work in the non-traded domestic service sector. Most will not compete with workers in other countries. And a generous welfare state need not be a hindrance to competitiveness. These statements are not as familiar as the platitudes that make up the conventional wisdom. But they happen to be true.
The writer is Whitehead senior fellow at the New America Foundation
par Pancho Villa
publié dans :
FinTi
