Category Archives: A Few Euros More

All AFEM Blog Posts

IMF Continues Debt Relief

Posted on by

Today’s news is of course welcome news for everyone who cares about poverty in the third world, but going back to my Evo Morales post during the week, this policy will only really bring the benefits it could do if it is combined with a systematic drive to change the demographic profile of these countries, and this means, as well as writing-off debt, more expenditure on health and on education (and in particular on equality of opportunity female education). Really, what I think has been wrong with the IMF approach in the past has been a ‘one ring to fit them all’ policy. What we can see I think now is that this is inadequate: we need a two speed globalisation. One speed for the countries like Argentina, Chile, Turkey, Thailand etc, which are on the ramp and ready to take off, and another for those countries which need help with social spending (in order not to provoke an explosion in the political subsystem) while they get the demographic imbalances straighter. So we need a debt-pardoning-plus approach.

The International Monetary Fund’s board on Wednesday approved 100 per cent debt relief on $3.3bn owed to the fund by 19 of the world’s poorest countries.

In a statement issued after the board meeting, Rodrigo Rato, managing director, said: “This is an historic moment, which will allow these countries to increase spending in priority areas to reduce poverty, promote growth and to make progress towards achieving the millennium development goals.”

Continue To Denationalise Tamiflu!

Posted on by

Following up on my spoof post about the complexity of making bets when it comes to new pharma products, worries about Tamiflu continue. The original issue was one of unexplained deaths in Japan, which were, more or less, subsequently explained. Now there are questions about its efficacy in the case of the H5N1 flu strain, and this is important since Tamiflu is known to have side effects. All in all, something to treat with caution.

The study raises new questions about the drug, which more than 50 governments have ordered in significant quantities in recent months to stockpile as a potential prophylactic and treatment in the case of a flu pandemic.

An accompanying article in the Journal reinforced calls for alternative approaches to treatment for a pandemic, including the stockpiling of the rival drug zanamivir, or Relenza.

Dr Anne Moscona wrote that individuals’ stockpiling of Tamiflu was “potentially dangerous” because it could lead to insufficient doses and inadequate courses of therapy, in turn accelerating the development of resistance.

So maybe Brad Delong’s hypothetical government would have been better off nationalising Zanamivir (or maybe not). The thing is it is really hard to know in advance, and that is an in-principle problem. At the end of the day this is why the private sector solution may be better, because at least you have different horses in the race.

France and Globalisation

Posted on by

Consultants KPMG and French employers’ group Medef have just published a survey on attitudes to globalisation and outsourcing. Interestingly a higher percentage of employers than previously said they saw no benefit in moving jobs to countries with cheaper labour markets (56% compared with 29% last year), while 74 per cent said broader foreign investment had helped safeguard jobs in France. Is this an example of ‘double entendre’? Is it a real reflection of attitudes to globalisation, or a ‘packaging’ exercise where it is easier to advocate something as ‘new investment’ rather than ‘moving jobs’. At the same time the FT says,

But for those SMEs with a low turnover, or which lacked innovation, the lower-cost economies were still seen as a danger.There is a growing gulf between the strategies of such companies and larger or more innovative rivals, the report said.

Youth Unemployment in the UK

Posted on by

The FT today has an article about how long-term youth unemployment is now back at 1998 levels despite a 5 billion pound benefits-to-jobs programme . Now if you go to this url, and have a look at the population pyramids for the UK you might begin to see part of the explanation for why this is happening. The cohorts now entering the UK labour market are slightly thicker than the previous ones. Coincidentally I have just put up a post on Afoe which mentions Richard Easterlin’s disadvantaged cohort theory. What is happening in the UK at the present time would, IMHO, be a good example of the Easterlin effect at work.

Long-term youth unemployment has returned to about the level it was when the government’s flagship New Deal was introduced in 1998, casting doubt over the value of the £5bn benefits-to-jobs programme.

The sharp rise in long-term youth unemployment, which has increased by 60 per cent since its low point two and a half years ago, was revealed by figures from the Office for National Statistics yesterday.

One Laptop Per Child

Posted on by

Well some may be laughing, but Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab people really do seem to be moving this project forward. More power to their elbow!

Taiwan’s Quanta, the world’s largest maker of notebook computers, will manufacture an ultra-low-cost laptop developed by Nicholas Negroponte, the chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.

Negroponte, who is also chairman of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit group, has said he expects the laptops to be available to governments next year at a price of $100 each. A prototype of the laptop was unveiled at the recent U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis.

Under terms of an agreement with One Laptop Per Child, Quanta will devote engineering resources to develop the $100 notebook design during the first half of the year, according to a statement issued by the group. At the same time, Quanta and the non-profit organization will explore the production of a commercial version of the laptop.

Corporate Alzheimer Threat?

Posted on by

Sun Microsystems really do seem to have an important point here. If there aren’t some common underlying standards then reading todays documents fifty years from now could become just like trying to read Linear B today:

Speaking to a group of reporters, Sun’s top open-source executive said that a format like OpenDocument (ODF) is needed to prevent a permanent condition of what he dubbed “corporate Alzheimer’s.”

“I want to make sure that when my grandchild studies history at university, that they can study source documents,” said Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps. Phipps said that without a standard that remains stable and is widely adopted, documents won’t be able to be opened decades later.

How Reliable is Wikipedia?

Posted on by

Well, pretty damn reliable apparently. Or at least that is the view expressed by the scientific journal Nature who have just carried out the first peer based comparative review of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica in terms of their science coverage. Clearly cases like the Seigenthaler one are the exception rather than the rule, and Britannica itself is not without its problems since of the eight “serious errors” reviewers found – including misinterpretations of important concepts – four came from each source, the journal reported. Maybe people should be thanking John Seigenthaler for raising Wikipedia’s profile. Well done Wikipedia.

One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

…..an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

In other Turkish censorship news

Posted on by

The Comics Reporter reports:

A court of appeals in Turkey has thrown out a fine against a cartoonist who depicted Prime Minister Reycip Erdogan as a horse. Sefer Selvi’s cartoon appeared in April 2004 and led to an approximately $7500 fine — although I admit I’m guessing on that latter fact, what with their being multiple Turkish currencies and my having a general conversion incompetence that usually only rears its ugly head whenever I buy DVDs from Hong Kong.

Erdogan has cases or threatened cases out against Musa Kart and Erdil Yasaroglu for animal-related cartoons they made that would be mild by US publishing standards but nonetheless honked off Erdogan. Erdogan’s habit of checking the press by lawsuit has come under fire throughout Europe as a potential issue that could keep Turkey from becoming a bigger economic partner with the West.

German Inflation On the Way Down

Posted on by

The latest inflation eport from the Federal Statistical Office in Germany says this:

The harmonised consumer price index for Germany, which is calculated for European purposes, rose by 2.3% in November 2005 compared with November 2004. Compared with the previous month, the index was down 0.5%. The estimate of 25 November 2005 was thus slightly corrected downwards.

Inflation threat, what inflation threat?

Orhan Pahmouk on his trial

Posted on by

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

In Istanbul this Friday—in Şişli, the district where I have spent my whole life, in the courthouse directly opposite the three-story house where my grandmother lived alone for forty years—I will stand before a judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The prosecutor will ask that I be imprisoned for three years. I should perhaps find it worrying that the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was tried in the same court for the same offense, under Article 301 of the same statute, and was found guilty, but I remain optimistic. For, like my lawyer, I believe that the case against me is thin; I do not think I will end up in jail.