Results for “sri lanka” 63 found
Average annual change in total factor productivity between 1990 and 2014
Here are the estimates from Penn World Tables, only selected countries are presented:
Sri Lanka 2.48
China 2.40
Poland 1.70
Uruguay 1.61
Romania 1.61
United States 0.89
Brazil -0.12
South Africa -0.53
Mexico -0.82
Ukraine -1.20
A few points. First, I still believe Sri Lanka is an undervalued development story, in spite of recent developments. Second, the economy of Poland is not discussed enough. Third, other sources confirm similar numbers for Mexico, arguably because misallocations of capital and labor have increased due to the growing size of the informal sector. Fourth, there are far too many other nations in the negative column.
Those numbers are reproduced in “Productivity in Emerging-Market Economies: Slowdown or Stagnation?”, by José de Gregorio, in the new and interesting volume Facing Up To Low Productivity Growth, edited by Adam S. Posen and Jeromin Zettelmeyer.
The culture that is (some of) Indian science
The organisers of a major Indian science conference distanced themselves Sunday from speakers who used the prestigious event to dismiss Einstein’s discoveries and claim ancient Hindus invented stem cell research.
The Indian Scientific Congress Association expressed “serious concern” as the unorthodox remarks aired by prominent academics at its annual conference attracted condemnation and ridicule.
The distinguished gathering of Indian researchers and scientists hosts Nobel laureates, but in recent years has seen Hindu mythology and faith-based theories edging onto the agenda.
At this year’s congress, the head of a southern Indian university cited an ancient Hindu text as proof that stem cell research was discovered on the subcontinent thousands of years ago.
“We had 100 Kauravas from one mother because of stem cell and test tube technology,” said G. Nageshwar Rao, Vice Chancellor at Andhra University, referring to a story from the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
Rao, who was addressing school children and scientists at the event, also said a demon king from another centuries-old Hindu epic had two dozen aircraft and a network of landing strips in modern-day Sri Lanka.
“Hindu Lord Vishnu used guided missiles known as ‘Vishnu Chakra’ and chased moving targets,” added the professor of inorganic chemistry.
Event organisers tried to hose down the remarks, saying it was “unfortunate” the prestigious event had been derailed by controversy.
Here is the full account, via Anecdotal. My point here is not to make fun of India, which I am a big admirer of. Rather, successful science requires many, many cultural dimensions, not just a few, and those dimensions must be applied consistently. India has an active and mostly successful space program, is a world leader in cheap and effective heart surgery, and in general the country is teeming with innovation, including in the culinary realm I might add.
So many of you take the cultural prerequisites of science for granted, and yes Max Weber still is underrated.
The forthcoming Chinese charter city?
From Bloomberg BusinessWeek:
The government intends to ring-fence Port City from Sri Lanka’s legal system to facilitate currency movement and create favorable tax and investment incentives. Harsha de Silva, a state minister who once campaigned against the project but is now one of its most vocal supporters, is involved in drafting the separate legal structure. “This must be a top-10 city for doing business in the world,” he says. “Otherwise, what’s the point?” Sri Lanka is currently ranked 111 out of 190 nations on the World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business index.
And here is the take on one of the nearby port projects:
Today, Hambantota handles about one ship a day, not enough to make it commercially viable, and wild elephants regularly breach the perimeter fencing. At a nearby airport, which CCCC also helped build during Rajapaksa’s administration, the only commercial flight was canceled in June because of frequent peacock strikes and low demand.
Is it fair to call all this a “hegemon charter city“?
Ji Haan, Minister
One of the unfortunate legacies of British colonial rule in India is a permanent civil service that tends to subvert any change that it deems against its interests, even when such change is promoted by elected officials. This is one reason why change in India is often two steps forward, 1.9 steps back. A case in point is India’s newly passed Goods and Service Tax (GST).
The GST was supposed to solve a long-standing problem of Indian intra-national trade. Unlike say the US common market, Indian states erect tariff and non-tariff barriers against the products of other states. As a result, production is allocated inefficiently–Indian firms with high costs hide behind barriers and produce too much while Indian firms with low costs can’t expand sales to other states and so produce too little.
(Canada, by the way, also has this problem. It’s often cheaper for a Canadian firm to ship to the US than to another province in Canada. You can find similar problems in Southern Africa where it is cheaper for South Africa to import produce from South America than from Zambia, as this excellent video discusses.)
In addition to the inefficient allocation of production, barriers to internal trade have also raised India’s transportation and logistics costs.
At the Walayar checkpoint in southern India, lines of idle trucks stretch as far as the eye can see in both directions along the tree-lined interstate highway, waiting for clearance from tax inspectors that can take days to complete.
Delays are so bad that textile entrepreneur D. Bala Sundaram has stopped sending his trucks to the international container terminal at nearby Cochin, instead diverting them hundreds of kilometres to a smaller regional port and onwards via Sri Lanka…
Two-thirds of India’s freight travels by road. But only 40% of the travel time is consumed by driving, according to the World Bank. The rest is spent on waiting at state border checkpoints, paying state government levies and dealing with regulatory bureaucracies that vary from state to state.
The sad irony is that India spends billions improving its roads only to force its trucks to stop at state border checkpoints, sometimes for days, undermining the gains from the investment in roads.
The GST was going to simplify all this with a single umbrella tax creating one-tax, one-nation. Alas, the dream is being subverted. The law created a GST council of federal and state ministers and through this council the GST is rapidly becoming more complex and convoluted. First, one-tax was changed into four and with numerous exemptions the final number may end up being more like seven or eight.
Second, as I witnessed traveling between Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan recently, the trucks are still lining up and may continue to do so:
The revolution the proposed goods and services tax (GST) promised might not be all that rosy because it would be hobbled by the need for an e-permit to be flashed at inter-state borders as the states insisted the old analogue practises continue.
The states seem to have gotten their way and will continue with the old ‘permit raj’ system, undermining one the biggest gains of GST.
The E-permit, by the way, sounds modern but don’t be fooled. Like India’s e-visa there is really nothing e about it–it’s just modern labeling for an old system.
Eventually the GST will be beneficial to India but it’s two steps forward, 1.9 steps back.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. Good arguments all around, and he covers climate change too. My worry is a political economy one: if we can’t handle small amounts of immigration or trade competition from China without flipping out, how will we fare with forthcoming environmental problems?
2. John Gimlette, Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka. An informative and entertaining look at an under-covered country. (If you’d like a critical review instead, try this one, but I followed up on some of the criticisms and was not persuaded by the attempted takedown.) This NYT article suggests (correctly) that now is the time to visit Sri Lanka.
3. Sally Denton, The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World. A good history of one epicenter of crony capitalism. I had not known what an important role Bechtel played in the early construction of nuclear power plants. Here is a good T.J. Stiles NYT review of the book.
4. Joanna Masel, Bypass Wall St.: A Biologist’s Guide to the Rat Race. Darwin plus Fred Hirsch on positional goods as applied to finance and portfolios. Unorthodox, interesting.
5. Stephen Stigler, The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom. What are the seven foundational pillars of statistics? Beautifully written.
And:
Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution. More of a browse so far, but I have positive impressions of this new Yale University Press book.
Jeff Gramm’s Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism is a very useful and well-researched book, focusing on shareholder rights and control issues in the earlier history of corporate America.
Cecil E. Bohanon and Michelle Albert Vachris, Pride and Profit: The Intersection of Jane Austen and Adam Smith, my blurb refers to it as a “tour de force [which] ties the worlds of economics and literature together, leaving the reader delighted and informed along the way.”
A free trade agreement for South Asia?
Are free trade agreements contagious? The negotiations for TPP seem to be coming to a close, but there is the potential for a much more beneficial arrangement, namely for the subcontinent and thereabouts, can we toss in Ethiopia too?
India has said that all South Asian economies need to speedily work towards a free trade area within the region with a defined time-line, preferably 2020, as the first step towards achieving the joint vision of a South Asian Economic Union.
“I am confident that consensus can be achieved for a defined time-line for 100 per cent tariff liberalisation with special and differential treatment for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and vulnerable economies,” Commerce & Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said at the South Asia Economic Conclave organised by the Commerce Ministry and industry body CII on Tuesday.
While India has already allowed duty-free access to goods from LDC countries of South Asia as part of the South Asia Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA), it is ready to go to 100 per cent for non-LDCs, too, as per the Safta roadmap agreed by India with Pakistan in November 2012, Sitharaman said.
…At least four of the eight SAARC countries — which include India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan — are looking at a free trade area by 2020. India is willing to take asymmetric responsibility towards achieving the goal, she added.
The full story is here.
“One Belt, One Road”, or the New Silk Road for China?
That is the new China initiative to rebuild the Old Silk Road along modern principles. The plan is a bit of a grab bag, but seems to include the following:
a. A deepwater naval base in Pakistan, plus a $42 billion aid/investment package for Pakistan. Here is some background on what already has been done.
b. A Chinese route to the sea through Myanmar and Bangladesh.
c. Northern shipping routes to Europe, through the Arctic, as the ice melts.
d. A rail line from Zhengzhou through Russia to Hamburg (already running, a 17-day trip).
e. Power stations and manufacturing plants for the Central Asian republics, in return for gas supply. This infrastructure transfer is also supposed to limit excess capacity in China by sending infrastructure abroad.
f. A railway and highway to connect China to the Arabian Sea.
Arnold Kling, telephone! Are these sustainable patterns of trade and specialization? Or are they slated to be proverbial white elephants? Does anyone know? Bueller?
A few points are striking here.
1. Much of this seems to be defensive geopolitics. Most of China’s oil supply, and much of China’s trade, runs through the Straits of Malacca. This plan, assuming it can be well-executed, affords China a good deal of protection. Yet that insurance does not add growth on top of the status quo, which currently is an open, well-functioning (mostly), trade channel at the Straits. At best it would hold a future catastrophe at bay for China.
2. The gravity equation in international trade economics suggests that countries trade much more when they are “near each other.” But what does proximity in this context mean exactly (pdf, an interesting trade paper by the way, on the “death of distance” theme and where it fails)? The most successful gravity models cite “distance between national capitals” rather than “distance between closest borders.” For evaluating this plan, that difference matters a great deal! I say distance between capitals is likely the more relevant variable, all the more for an economy dominated by state-owned enterprises.
3. The idea of easing excess capacity by sending infrastructure to other countries seems unlikely to succeed. Other than gas, how much do these countries currently have to offer China? And how much infrastructure can be transferred how quickly?
4. China’s economic growth has been dominated by the coasts, and the Great Canal, for approximately one thousand years; today Xi’an is a backwater for instance, although in the Tang dynasty it was possibly the most advanced city in the world. Can this now-deeply entrenched pattern — water transport beats land transport — be reversed by a lot of government spending?
5. To date China’s main external ally is North Korea, even though China is the world’s second largest economy. How well will relations with all these other nations evolve, and what does that mean for the value of those investments? Sri Lanka already has decided to redo its deals with China, and it doesn’t seem China can bully them out of that, though read this update.
During my China visit, I heard repeatedly that this New Silk Road plan will limit the pending decline of China’s growth rate. Each time I expressed skepticism about that prospect, my words were met with great dismay and, I felt, disbelief. Yet I do not see how these pieces are supposed to fit together as a growth-boosting enterprise. They do seem well-designed to extend China’s political influence in the western direction, and to transfer more contracts to state-owned firms. But to raise living standards for most of the Chinese people? I don’t see it, or even see it coming close.
Is Scarborough, Ontario the dining capital of the world?
Wednesday night I was taken on a restaurant tour of Scarborough — four different places — plus rolls from a Sri Lankan locale, consumed in the office of the Dean of UT Scarborough and with the assistance of Peter Loewen.
After that eating, and lots of driving around and looking, I concluded Scarborough is the best ethnic food suburb I have seen in my life, ever, and by an order of magnitude. I hope you all have the chance to visit Scarborough, Ontario.
If you are wondering where I went, that is beside the point.
Assorted links
1. Book preview for 2015. Good stuff, including volume four of Knausgaard, a new Stephenson, a new Gaiman, a new Ishiguro, a Philip Glass memoir, perhaps the Niall Ferguson book on Kissinger will be interesting too. Here is another preview list. And who was nominated for a literary Nobel Prize in 1964.
2. The pick-up culture that is Chinese.
3. Another (right-wing?) view on why the leading public intellectual economists are left-wing. And more from Krugman.
4. Voodoo and Haitian mental health. And the culture that is Singapore.
The Amazon order test as an algorithm for evaluating books
If you read a book, how many other related or similar books does it make you order? (Of wish to order, if you are budget constrained.) If the number is at least three or four, the book you read is almost certainly very interesting and worthwhile, if not always accurate.
Andrew Roberts’s biography of Napoleon made me want to read an additional biography of Napoleon, because it made his life to me more interesting. It made Napoleon’s period more interesting too. I might read a book on cavalry tactics as well, a topic I have never read on before.
Some books pretend to be the final word on a topic, but it is unlikely they succeed. If you don’t end your read with some additional book orders, maybe you need to ask yourself what exactly went wrong.
At times it is not a book order which is the appropriate follow-up. Say you read a book on Sri Lanka and you respond by going to Sri Lanka, well that counts too. Or a biography of Beethoven may lead you to more of his music, rather than to another book on his life.
If I apply the Amazon order test, the best book for me this last year was Michael Hoffman’s Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays.
Hofmann’s book wins additional points for chain effects, namely the books I ordered, as a result of reading Hofmann, in turn made me want to order further books. But chain effects are tricky. Following my read of Andrew Roberts, and then a follow-up Napoleon biography, will I read yet another life of Napoleon? That may depend on how good the follow-up is, and Roberts should not be held liable for that. Or should he? What should you think of a book which leads you to so-so follow-ups rather than to excellent follow-ups? A blog post which does the same?
What percentage of the value of a book is derived from the quality of the follow-ups it induces? Under plausible rates of discounting, for serial readers this could easily by eighty or ninety percent or more. (Could it be that actual book reviews are not consequentialist? Horrors.) How about a book review outlet which refuses to consider the books under consideration, but rather considers and evaluates what they will induce you to read next?
I would subscribe.
Why is there not more terrorism?
Scott Sumner asks a version of that question:
But here’s what I don’t get. If America really is this weak and cowardly, then why can’t ISIS easily defeat us? They could phone in threats against movie theaters just as easily as the North Koreans can. And there must be 100 times as many Hollywood films that offend ISIS sensibilities as there are that offend Kim. Recall that women get stoned to death in ISIS-controlled areas for things like wearing a miniskirt. Then consider Hollywood films, which often show Arab terrorists as villains. So why doesn’t ISIS copy North Korea? Why does ISIS let us insult them? I don’t get it.
There is more from the Scott on the question here. This is hardly my area, but here are a few observations:
1. The United States will permit all kinds of mini-outrages against us, provided they are not seen as precedents. If we were viewed as exploitable at this margin, our reaction, from both the government and private citizens, would be quite different. In the meantime, pretending that North Korea is a fly to the American elephant may be an optimal response/non-response. When Obama told Sony it made a mistake by pulling the film, that is exactly what he was doing, namely minimizing the significance of the event on purpose. He wasn’t trying to scold Sony or even to defend free speech.
2. Often groups such as ISIS are much more offended by what “their own” women do than by what “outsiders” do. They may even welcome the existence of a certain amount of Western and also Hollywood depravity, to aid product differentiation. Additionally, don’t forget that some of the 9-11 terrorists seemed to enjoy strip clubs and the like. Their motivations are not always strictly pious.
3. We don’t have a good understanding of why terrorists don’t attack more than they do. Perhaps terror attacks can be viewed as belonging to two groups: a) the more or less replicable (Sri Lankan and Palestinian suicide bombings), which are allocated by some set of calculating authorities, and b) the “one-off,” which are governed by a kind of multiplicative formula, under which many things have to go the right way for an attack to happen at all. 9-11 is probably an example here, but without a fixed infrastructure for providing training and motivation and coordination, most terrorists aren’t actually that well organized and they can’t pull much off. Read Diego Gambetta on 9-11. Now that U.S. troops are (mostly) out of Iraq, the replicable attacks aren’t there any more either.
4. It remains possible that the U.S. still will retaliate against North Korea, or perhaps already has retaliated in a non-public manner. It is also possible we have let news of such retaliation or pending retaliation leak to ISIS and other groups in some fashion.
And a final point: in the MR comments section Boonton wrote:
I think this illustrates a difference in perception between North Korea and, say, Al Qaeda. If Al Qaeda was offended by some movie (say the last Batman movie which featured some type of Middle Eastern prison that was nonetheless within walking distance of Gotham city), people would be up in arms about all theaters pulling the movie. Yet not so much North Korea, why?
Al Qaeda is recognized as having an actual agenda is is assumed to be a somewhat rational agent. Hence most of us will give credit to the anti-appeasement argument with them. If we pull one movie they will keep making demands.
North Korea, in contrast, is perceived as an irrational state lead by a child-man dictator. In other words, most in the west see it as essentially an entire nation that is literally mentally ill. We are willing to indulge them a bit because we are not quite sure how ill they really are and just like a deranged person may try to stab you over a napkin on the ground, this is the type of state that may start a nuclear war over a Seth Rogan movie.
Is this perception correct? Is North Korea not just mentally ill ‘on the ground’ but also at the top? Is the inner circle populated by cold rationalists cynically exploiting propaganda to control the masses or have they actually drunk the most Kool-Aid of the entire bunch?!
“Both” is a possible answer of course.
Which are the most undervalued economies?
The question refers to which economies are underrated or undervalued, not which economies are the strongest. (Along these lines, LBJ is probably the most overrated player in the NBA today, but he is still also probably the best.)
Last time I picked Pakistan and the Philippines, the latter was a good choice for sure, although now its reputation has caught up to the reality of ongoing rapid growth. I would say Pakistan remains up for grabs, but still the growth rate has been running about five percent, which you would hardly guess from a random episode of Homeland season four. The fiscal deficit is down from eight percent to 5.5 percent, a big step for Pakistan. The stock market has been doing quite well. I don’t wish to claim vindication there, but at the very least it does seem they were underrated a year ago or two and still today.
This year I am going to pick Sri Lanka as well, which has a growth rate of about eight percent, one of the highest in the world. The country receives a lot of bad press because of its vicious, decades-long civil war. Sri Lanka also practices censorship and has iffy democratic credentials and a potentially chaotic election coming up. That’s what helps make it underrated, but of course the war is over now.
The educational system is reasonably good relative to per capita income, English literacy is much higher than in India, and the Chinese are building a lot of infrastructure there. Its tourism potential will expand considerably (I loved the trip there I did with Yana). The poverty rate is down. Here is one overview of recent developments. Here are a variety of country reports, lots of positive features.
Still, you don’t hear so much positive about Sri Lanka these days. On economic terms, I don’t find this one such a tough call, it’s simply a sticky reputation because of the bad politics and previous history.
So my picks for most underrated, this year, are Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
Here are some of my quasi-predictions from 2012.
What I’ve been Reading
1. Gendun Chopel, Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler, introduction by Thupte Jimpa and Donald S. Lopez Jr. A very learned Tibetan scholar travels to India and records his hyper-structured impressions of what is obviously a more modern and economically developed land. Yet India is also the original homeland of Buddhism and as such a source of obsession about the distant past. Brilliantly rendered, the manuscript reads like a source that would have inspired Borges. Every now and then the narrative comes to a full stop and we get a chapter like “How the Lands Were Given Their Names.” Later the manuscript was shipped back by yak, and Chopel was sent to jail in Tibet for having written it. This volume has one of the best introductions of any book I have read. A fantastic look at the culture that was Tibet, or for that matter India or Sri Lanka. Chopel is trying to incorporate modernity into the traditional Tibetan worldview, and yet throughout cannot avoid a sense of the tragic and of decay, which only the book itself is contradicting.
2. Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, graphic edition, the illustrations work very well. I have only paged through it.
3. John Sutherland, How to be Well Read: A Guide to 500 Great Novels and a Handful of Literary Curiosities. It is great fun to browse through this work. It is out only in the UK, I found it in Daunt Books, there is always reason to travel to London.
4. Ralph Nader, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. I am supposed to interview Nader soon, and so I am reading up on his history, he has become an oddly undervalued figure, remembered mainly for his spoiler role in Gore vs. Bush. Here is a piece on Nader’s ostensible “turn to the right,” that is not how I would describe it, as with Krugman I see continuity from a person who is basically a moralizing conservative with a crusading zeal. And who would have thought Nader is a fan of Wilhem Roepke?
5. Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. An excellent study of a Belgian, Paul Otlet, who in the late nineteenth century began “a vast intellectual enterprise that attempted to organize and code everything ever published.” He started by expanding the potential of the card catalog and then wished to build a mechanical collective brain known as the Mundaneum, a “Steampunk version of hypertext.” Relevant of course to the origins of the web, Wikipedia, and current sites such as Vox.com. You can read more about Otlet and his infovore tendencies here.
Swiss immigration controls are directed against those who are like the Swiss
There is in Switzerland the issue of low-skilled immigration. But arguably more problematic — from a Swiss point of view — is precisely the immigration which feels most Swiss, such as the professionals who come from Germany. Note that since the late 1990s Germans are the single largest group of immigrants coming to CH (pdf). The Swiss, of course, fear the European Union juggernaut as a mechanism for taking away their sovereignty. Having more Kosovars or more Sri Lankans in the country doesn’t strengthen the hand of the EU much. Those are not EU groups anyway, non-EU migration into Switzerland has been falling for a long time, and besides those groups can be excluded from mainstream Swiss society with relative ease, if need be. But German arrivals? Many would gladly see Switzerland join the EU and at the very least it feels like the decision is no longer under the control of the Swiss themselves. Furthermore they are not so different from German-speaking Swiss and they (sometimes) eat similar kinds of cheese. And because they are so often highly skilled, and can fit in so well, they cannot easily be excluded (pdf) from positions of influence in Swiss society.
In other words, sometimes it is the skilled arrivals the domestic citizenry wishes to limit in numbers. And you can see that the share of skilled immigrants has been increasing in Switzerland for years. Here are some recent percentages.
This study by Sandro Favre (pdf) shows that a major wage impact of EU migration into Switzerland has been to cut down high wages at the top of the Swiss wage distribution. So there is an economic motive too, and it is not the same story that is sometimes told about say southern California and Mexican competition with low-skilled American workers.
I, too, am a small country of sorts and I am glad I do not have thirty identical twins running around out there, competing against me or speaking on my behalf at meetings. I would wish to exile them to other planets.
The etymology of “serendipity”
The first noted use of “serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1797). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib. Parts of Sri Lanka were under the rule of South Indian kings for extended periods of time in history. Kings of Kerala, India (Cheranadu)were called Chera Kings and dheep means island, the island belonging to Chera King was called Cherandeep, hence called Sarandib by Arab traders.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Vivian.