 The direct rationale of why Africa may have a comparative advantage in production and trade of innovative goods is beguilingly simple. High quality educational skills are rather easier to acquire and maintain in the region than physical capital. The institutional and economic environment can put non-mobile capital at risk and may make acquisition of foreign spare parts difficult. Goods which have a high level of technical knowledge compared to physical capital are likely to be favoured. The argument is one based on comparative, not absolute, advantage. A developed country may innovate more cost-effectively than much of Africa, but in terms of the relative prices of innovative and capital intensive goods, the region has the advantage. Reality reasserts itself when the detailed requirements of high technology industries are examined. The Western countries where they have grown have generally had high levels of research and development expenditure, and large and liquid stock markets. The research and development expenditure ensures that innovative products are produced. The large and liquid stock markets ensure that entrepreneurs can sell companies or raise more finance once they have taken the initial risks and established the company’s success. Both appear to be necessary for the establishment of an innovative industry with a noticeable effect on economy-wide growth. A recent study (*) of the new technological sector in Europe found that research expenditures are a prime determinant of expansion in patent numbers, and stock market size does not particularly matter for the expansion. It also found that the contribution of internet and communication technologies to growth is probably more determined by the size of the stock market than research expenditures. To overstate the case, we find that no research money means no innovation, and that small stock markets mean small growth benefits. |
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An UN report on on the Extent of Chronic Hunger and Malnutrition has said that even though India has enough food to feed its one billion people, hunger and household-level food insecurity have increased since the latter half of the 1990s.
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In recent years, the governments of many Southern countries have come to realise that the international trade and investment regime is thoroughly biased in favour of the interests of the richest and most powerful countries. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is at an impasse and neo-liberalism in general is in crisis
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 We can thank moronic editors, who know the hotsie-totsiest places to eat but not the important things of life that ought to go into their publications, for list journalism. To call this genre low-grade filler is to overpraise it. But there are exceptions, and the most valuable is the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the United States. The Forbes 400, present and past, constitutes the largest and most reliable trove of data on who owns how much of America. The government does not collect information on wealth, only on income, so the annual Forbes effort is unique. I have been told by IRS people off the record that they have found the 400 a useful tool. The list is also a useful tool for anyone interested in power, the most important of the blessings great wealth confers. How much money, how much power? These 400 possess an aggregate $1.25 trillion. Imagine how many Congressmen that will buy. |
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 Millionaires are so last millennium. The new Forbes 400 list of richest Americans is billionaires only. If you're net worth is a mere $999 million, forget it. A billion means a thousand million, and that's the Forbes 400 minimum -- up from $900 million in 2005. Donald Trump and two of his kids grace the Forbes 400 cover, but ranked No. 94 with $2.9 billion, Trump's a long way from No. 1 Bill Gates with $53 billion. The combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans is a record-breaking $1.25 trillion. That's about the same amount of combined wealth held by the 57 million households who make up half the U.S. population. The economy is booming for billionaires. It's a bust for many other Americans. |
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 There are many opinions a coporation must keep to itself, that is if it's insterested in keeping a squeaky clean, or a squeaky "green" image. Sometimes, though, a corporation feels compelled to inject something unsavory into the public debate in order to protect the bottom-line - and the best way to do this is through the age-old art of ventriloquism. When it comes to the issue of climate change, no corporation has done better with this tricky little PR technique than ExxonMobil, which was castigated this week by the UK's prestigious Royal Society for funding organizations that work to spread doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change. Of course, this type of ventriloquism is not without precedent. The classic example is The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a front group that the PR firm APCO-Worldwide founded in 1993 on behalf of tobacco giant Philip Morris, specifically to question the health risks of Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS). TASSC then engaged experts to write papers in the industry’s defence. |
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 A cynical few are saying the estate tax hurts African Americans in some disproportionate way. But they’re overlooking common-sense wealth planning. Here’s the deceptive reasoning behind their statement. It’s harder for African Americans to become millionaires (true), so the estate tax hits black entrepreneurs especially hard, forcing them to sell family businesses to pay the tax. Untrue. The U.S. Small Business Administration states that the main reasons family businesses fail are lack of business viability, lack of planning, little desire by the owner to transfer the firm, and reluctance of offspring to join the firm. Note that paying the estate tax isn’t one of them. It’s great that there are more African American millionaires. I count myself fortunate to be among them. Between 1983 and 2001, the number of black households with net worth of a million or more dollars increased from 61,000 to 109,000. Many get their wealth from family businesses (funeral homes, medical practices, and real estate, construction, and service businesses). |
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 Neoliberalism as a Class Practice A trademark of our times is the dominance of neoliberalism in the major economic, political, and social forums of the developed capitalist countries and in the international agencies they influence--including the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and the technical agencies of the United Nations such as the World Health Organization, Food and Agricultural Organization, and UNICEF. Starting in the United States during the Carter administration, neoliberalism expanded its influence through the Reagan administration and, in the United Kingdom, the Thatcher administration, to become an international ideology. Neoliberalism holds to a theory (though not necessarily a practice) that posits the following: 1. The state (or what is wrongly referred to in popular parlance as "the government") needs to reduce its interventionism in economic and social activities. 2. Labor and financial markets should be deregulated in order to liberate the enormous creative energy of the markets. 3. Commerce and investments should be stimulated by eliminating borders and barriers to allow for full mobility of labor, capital, goods, and services. |
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Covert lobbying, in the UK as well as the US, has severely set back efforts to combat the world's biggest problem.
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25th September 2006, Seth Sandronsky, CounterPunch The cost of U.S. health care has climbed 43 percent over the past nine years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This price increase is close to double the over-all inflation rate of 26 percent in the same nine years. |
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