Category: Data Source

Gas prices around the world

by  Tyler Cowen in

The price of gas varies around the world, due to the vagaries of exchange rates but mostly because of taxes and subsidies.  Assuming your car gets 35 miles per gallon, here is how far $20 of gas will take you in various countries around the world:

Germany: 127 miles

Japan: 147 miles

United States: 342 miles

China: 385 miles

Saudi Arabia: 771 miles

Venezuela: 4,624 miles

The data are from Foreign Policy, March/April 2005, p.18.  Here is a related data set.

Where are Asia’s “Missing Women”?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In Business Week Robert Barro writes:

In 1990 my Harvard colleague Amartya Sen caused a stir by observing…that excess female mortality in China, India, and other Asian countries meant that there were 100 million women fewer in the world than there should be.  The presumption was that the excess mortality came from discrimination against women by men and governments…[this] shockingly large number became a symbol of discrimination against women in developing countries.  Many people think the reason is abortion and the killing of newborn girls.  But new research suggests another reason.  Harvard economist Emily Oster, in her PhD thesis "Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women" suggests that biology explains a good deal of the missing-women puzzle…

Oster argues that this calculation overlooked something crucial — unusually high male-female birth ratios in Asia years before abortion became widespread…Oster sees the high incidence of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) as a major culprit. There is much evidence that parents infected by HBV are more likely to have male children.

In fact carriers of hepatitis B can have boy-girl ratios as high as 1.55. Oster argues that this factor explains 75% percent of the gender gap in China, albeit only 17% in India.  For Asia as a whole, 46% of the gap can be explained.

Here is Oster’s home page.  Here is the paper.

China facts of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Percentage of Chinese workers who have no pension, private or public: Eighty percent (kind of puts our social security dilemmas in context, no?)

Expected ratio of workers to retirees, circa 2030: Two-to-one

Projected shortfall of the Chinese national pension system by 2033: $53.3 billion

Those are all reasons why China may be an overvalued economy; see Business Week, 31 January, p.47 for more information.

Addendum: Daniel Drezner offers his India fact of the day.

Sexy women

by  Tyler Cowen in

In a recent survey across 10 countries, British women proved to have the least faith in themselves – or more precisely in the way they look. Only one in five said they saw themselves as attractive, while only one in 50 described themselves as "sexy".

Here is the story, and more detail here.  The women with the most confidence in their looks are, not surprisingly, the Brazilians.

Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.  While we are on the topic, Daniel Akst directs my attention to more:    

US researchers got 149 men and women to rate the attractiveness of a series of recorded voices.  They found the most appealing voices belonged to people who had sex at an earlierage, had more sexual partners and were more prone to infidelity.  The team at the University of Albany also said there was a link between the attractiveness of the voice and body.  In the study, men with broad shoulders and narrow hips, which are related to testosterone and growth, also tended to have attractive voices.  In women voice attractiveness, which was rated between one and 10 in the study, was linked to a narrow waist and broad hips.  Report co-author Gordon Gallup, from the author Gordon Gallup, from the New York university’s department of psychology, said: "In short, ratings of voice attractiveness are correlated with promiscuity in both men and women.

Is French taxation progressive?

by  Tyler Cowen in

…French social policy is not overwhelmingly redistributive, and it is not financed with progressive income taxes, as in Denmark and Sweden, nor is it financed with a mix of progressive income taxes and payroll taxes, as in Germany, Canada, and Britain.  As in other corporatist/continental consrevative welfare states, French social spending is financed with a mix of regressive payroll taxes, regressive sales taxes, and, for a little over a decade, a smaller "general social contribution" tax…

From the 1950s until roughly 1980 France was the leader in income inequality among OECD nations….in France the top 20% of income earners received 24% of transfer payments and the bottom 20% of earners only 18%.  By 1991 French social policy was slightly more progressive, but French manual workers "remain[ed] in virtually the same relative position…"

…France remains a highly stratified society in both the social and economic sense.  The wealthiest 10% of the French income ladder are 50% richer than their Swedish counterparts and the upper quarter of the French income ladder is not brought down by the tax system the way it is in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany…today many of France’s wealthy citizens occupy privileged spots at the core of the "welfare state."  This is one of the key reasons they tend to support it.

That is from Timothy Smith’s recent and excellent France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality, and Globalization since 1980.  The tale is told from a center-left perspective, and yes he also explains what the French get right.  Highly recommended, it is the best book I know on the contemporary French economy and polity.

India facts of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

According to a report by the National Council for Applied Economic Research, which is based in New Delhi and partly government financed, half of India’s 10.7 million households with an income of up to a million rupees ($23,000) are in smaller cities.

The report recorded a big rise in the number of rich households, those with incomes of 1 million rupees to 5 million rupees, in smaller cities like Vadodara, Nagpur, Ahmedabad and Vijayawada. And while in 1995 just 2.8 percent of households were counted as middle class, with income of 200,000 rupees to a million rupees, the report projected that 12.8 percent would be counted as such by 2009.

Low agricultural productivity, which implies rural poverty, has been central to India’s problems.  The country has been trying to leap into the service age, but without  having had an Industrial Revolution.  But for the first time, its smaller cities seem to be turning a corner.  Continuing…and here is the New York Times story.

Netherlands fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

In the Netherlands…half the nation’s [drug] users are now over 40, and many are in their 60s.

The Dutch government is now setting up old folks’ home for addicts —

I have been using drugs most of my adult life, and I can’t stop now," says Gert-Jan, a 62-year-old resident… "Being old doesn’t mean your addiction just goes away." 

"We do not deal drugs to the residents, but we don’t forbid them to use them either," said Alexander Hogendoorn, the home’s manager…One resident, for instance, has a set of needles for her knitting and another for injecting heroin.

Thanks to Prestopundit for the pointer.

The most thanked man in science

by  Tyler Cowen in

Apparently it is Olivier Danvy:

Danvy, a French researcher who works
on programming languages at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, says
that at first he was "stunned" to find his name at the top of the list.

But
on reflection, he puts it down to "a series of coincidences". He is
multidisciplinary, well-travelled, is involved with an international
PhD programme, and belongs to a university department that encourages
international visitors.

"It’s
a snowball effect," says Danvy, who admits to being a helpful sort of
fellow. "I encourage people a lot, and advise many students on their
papers."

Here is the full story; text-mining software was used to compile the results.  Here is Olivier’s home page, which lists his six doctoral students as well.  He has, by the way, 15,800 Google entries as of early this morning…

Brazil fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Agriculture is now a $150-billion-a-year business in Brazil,
accounting for more than 40 percent of the country’s exports and
creating what Brazilians call the "green anchor" of their economy.

Already the world’s biggest exporter of chickens, orange juice, sugar,
coffee and tobacco, according to Agriculture Ministry statistics,
Brazil soon hopes to add soybeans to the list, depending on what
happens in that volatile market.

With a grass-fed herd of 175
million cattle that is the world’s largest, it passed the United States
as the world’s largest exporter of beef last year. During the first
nine months of 2004, sales of Brazilian beef abroad rose 77 percent
over the same period last year, leading the government to predict $2.5
billion in earnings from beef exports this year.

Over all, the
agricultural bonanza, aided in part by mad cow disease in Europe and
avian flu in Asia, is likely to give Brazil a record trade surplus of
over $30 billion.

…Brazil, which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described as "an
agricultural superpower" during a visit in October, hopes to pass the
United States as the world’s largest agricultural producer.

Why?

"What’s really driving this revolution is that the Brazilians
discovered how to use tropical and savanna soils that had always been
considered poor," said G. Edward Schuh, director of the Center for
International Economic Policy at the University of Minnesota. "They
learned that with modest applications of lime and phosphorus they can
quadruple and quintuple their yields, not just with soybeans but also
with maize, cotton and other commodities."

In the 1960s, coffee was responsible for 60 percent of Brazil’s exports.  Today it is seventh on the list.

Here is the full story, NYT password required.