Following points made by both Frans and Elliott in the comments sections, the Netherlands may well in fact breach the 3% growth and stability pact limit next year. I bet Zalm is blogging away more furiously than ever. But who will be the object of his wrath this time?
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Author Archives: Edward Hugh
Fiscal Tickery
Thanks David for the link. I haven’t commented on this because like Dutch finance minister Zalm (who I imagine working away weblogging into the early hours under a dim light provided only by his mobile phone) I am tired. I can’t help feeling that everything that needs to be said has already been said, and many times over. Now all we can reasonably do is wait and see the consequences.
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Moore’s Law As Applied To Humans
Sorry, I’m back. I’ve been keeping myself kinda busy over the last two weeks. On my travels I met what you could consider to be a pretty bright programmer: he writes spider programmes. Now if you were silly enough to want to sit in the first few rows of a concert from some mediocre but popular pop star, you would probably want to be cursing him: for his boss and his spider programme would already have the tickets. He works for an entrepreneur in a nameless but extremely large country, who buys up all the tickets for 250 dollars and re-sells them at around a thousand a go. He told me that at first this work was easy, but recently things have gotten more difficult. The concert organisers have tried to overcome the practice by having an image inserted to which you have to manually type some given response. Problem solved you might think. Well no: this is where ingenuity and globalisation come in to guarantee that ‘real’ entrepreneurship will not be thwarted.
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Interesting Take on Yukos
A very interesting take on the Yukos situation from the Moscow Times. And one which relates directly to some of the privatisation issues we were debating recently. Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalization Studies, argues basically that given that the Russian economy is dominated by an oligarchic structure of raw materials quasi-monopolies, and given that a majority of the population seem to want these monopolies returning to state ownership, the only ‘democratic’ solution is an authoritarian one. Khodorkovsky had another idea, and hence off he went to prison. Any comparisons with or lessons for Iraq here? Can democracy be introduced like this? Off you go.
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The Country That Has it All
Posting under the header: ‘More Signs That We Are In the Twentieth Century After All’ my young Argentinian co-blogger notes crypically “I don’t know what a XIXth (or XXth) century englishman would say, if we told him that English unions would one day protest against losing skilled jobs to India”……… adding…………”and, in the heels of our previous post about Sekhar Kapur interview, today the blogsphere is buzzing with news of the P2P network Kazaa’s agreement to distribute (in a pay-per-view fashion) the indian film Supari. If this works out economically, the sidelining of traditional distribution channels might very well enhance the global reach of Bollywood productions, specially among the growing Asian diaspora in the developed world. We are truly living in interesting times”. (BTW: I owe the post on Kapur to Marcelo: completely. If it wasn’t for Argentina, what would I know about India!).
In the comments I respond “Absolutely, there is another big push going on, Google’s innovative share offer is another example, maybe blog portals will be another. Something is really happening out there”. So it’s wakey wakey time. For the first time since the mid-ninetees the thing is really humming. First-movers, creative destruction, defining moments: get tighly back in your seats. Hold on for the bumpy ride.
And meantime, exceptionally, and on a boring grey Saturday morning: news from the country that has it all: problems, problems, problems.
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The Strange Case of Odysseas Tsenai
In the news today the Comission and Spain/Poland are still haggling over the price of the constitution. Meantime from another pole of Europe, a curious story of one young Albanian, and the struggle to assert his elementary rights in his new homeland: Greece. My feeling is that in our current preoccupations, our conception of Europe lies too far to the North and too far to the West. I also think, that when we come to look at the contribution and participation of immigrants in Europe, we all too often forget the adversity they face.
Background: in 1990 the Greek Alabania border opened. Over the mountains and across the sea the Albanians started arriving in Greece. Their numbers were large but never counted: their number still constitutes material for scare stories on popular Greek TV. The actual number is unknown but it might be as high as a million all over Greece (if you include the ethnic Greek Albanians ). The first arrivals came from a country whose isolation was proverbial. They were destitute, blinded by the city lights and the consumer goods, and clueless as to what they could do to earn a living.
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If You’re Surprised By This You Shouldn’t Be
Really, much as I would like to see a marked and rapid improvement in the democratic climate in Iraq, forgive me if I can’t help considering most of the discussion about the possibilitiesof this occuring in the near future a bit like a contemporary revamp of ‘innocents abroad’. At the end of the day all these endless ‘corruption indexes’ that you see published from time to time in the press do actually mean something. Having lived in a society that was relatively less corrupt (the UK) and one that is relatively more (Spain), I do get to note some important differences. One of these relates to the social standing of politicians.
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Like You, Like Me: Like Me, Like You
I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before, but it was only while talking with a colleague this afternoon, and being asked what I thought about the unwillingness of the candidate countries to reform that it came to me: with all this coming and going on the Pact, what kind of message is being sent to the new members? Obviously if you give the impression that agreements are not to be complied with, you can get reactions you aren’t expecting, and that you don’t like. The Financial Times article you can find below, begins to give an idea of the size of the looming problem, whilst this one informs us that Standard and Poor’s has just downgraded the Polish currency rating because of concerns about deficits and rapidly growing government debt.
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Privatisation and Market Imperfection
Today I’m posting a link to my Singapore friend and colleague, Eddie Lee. The story behind this link is a strange one – almost surreal – and more or less directly related to my ‘friendster’ post last Saturday. I met Eddie back in February while I was Googling the net looking for some material to blog. I was looking for something on the Italian economy, and I found a link to an article in Singapore’s Straits Times, which, apart from touching on Italy, seemed also to talk about my favourite topic – ageing – to boot. Now I have the unfortunate habit of scan-reading a lot of material quickly, and as I scanned I found an argument I really liked. I’m going to post this I thought to myself.
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The Minister for Weblogs
So the Dutch Finance Minister – Gerrit Zalm – has a weblog. Not understanding too much Dutch it’s hard to make a very thorough assesment, although it does look rather austere. However, unlike Howard Dean and Wes Clark, it does appear that he is posting himself. But it is not for the fact that he has a weblog that Finance Minister Zalm is making headlines at the moment. Rather it is for some of his statements on the French government and the stability pact. According to Frans he announced last week “that he gave up trying to get the European Commission to act against France’s repeated breaching of the rules”. Now Frans understandably is scratching his head trying to determine what this might mean.
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