Economist 7/31/15

1. The rise of Emaar (builder Burj Khalifa )of has been just as vertiginous—and similarly influenced by Dubai’s ruler. Since it was founded by Mr Alabbar in 1997, the firm has grown to become the emirate’s biggest property developer by market value. Its profits rose by 30% in 2014, to $912m, and its spectacular buildings and planned communities have helped put Dubai on the map.Emaar has undoubtedly benefited from the right connections. About 30% of it is owned by a sovereign-wealth fund.When Dubai’s property market collapsed, sales fell to “nothing”, says Mr Alabbar.Emaar, meanwhile, increased its investment in fancy hotels and shopping centres, which now account for most of its revenue.Emaar has distinguished itself not just with the size of its projects—it also has the world’s largest mall—but also with their quality.Emaar is hoping that more of its growth will come from abroad. Its international projects now account for around 11% of revenues, a number the firm would like to double in the next few years.t has other big projects in Egypt (where it recently floated its local subsidiary), Jordan, India and Turkey.But Emaar’s track record abroad is spotty.
2. THE OLIVE oil industry is in a bad way. World output is expected to fall by a third to 2.3m tonnes this year, its lowest level since 2000. The shortfall is largely due to arid weather in Spain, the world’s biggest producer, and Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterial disease which is ravaging olive trees in Italy. Production in those countries has fallen by around 50%. To add to these troubles, last week the bug reached Corsica, a French island off the west coast of Italy. The French government has burnt plants near the infected bush to isolate the outbreak, which was previously contained in Southern Italy.Around 300 plant species are vulnerable and it has previously devastated citrus-fruit trees in Brazil and vineyards in California.
3. This vaccine, developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada, and called rVSV-ZEBOV, smuggles one of the Ebola virus’s coat proteins into a person’s body in a Trojan horse called a vesicular stomatitis virus. This is a horse and cattle virus, and does not cause human illness, but its presence is enough to activate the immune system. This then learns to recognise and react to the Ebola coat protein—and thus, the vaccine’s inventors hope, to clobber Ebola, should it arrive in the vaccinated person’s body.The trial that the Lancet reports was conducted on more than 7,600 people in Guinea by a group of researchers led by Marie Paule Kieny of the World Health Organisation and John-Arne Rottingen of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.Ebola’s incubation period is ten days, and no one who had been vaccinated in either arm of the trial contracted the disease once that ten-day period was up.
4. IN 2022 the Winter Olympics will be held in a place with no snow. On July 31st the International Olympic Committee awarded the games to Beijing, to be held in the city ofZhangjiakou, 250km (150 miles) north of the capital. The resort beat Almaty in Kazakhstan, the only other remaining city left in the bid.Beijing has already hosted a successful summer Olympics—making it the first city ever to host both. More worrying is China’s ambition to stage the winter Olympics—and launch a winter sports industry—in an arid desert (Zhangjiakou is near the Gobi). Almost every winter Olympics venue uses artificial snow to supplement their own supply, and to ensure a plentiful supply of the best kind. But most have far more of their own to start with.Of greater concern to environmentalists than a two-week party in 2022 is the broader attempt to launch China’s own domestic ski industry. The sport is still very much in its infancy.
5. “Ugelstad spheres”, named for the Norwegian scientist who invented them in 1976, are used in cancer research, HIV treatments and the manufacture of flat-panel televisions. Only in the past decade has the cosmetics industry discovered how useful they are for scrubbing teeth and faces. New Yorkers now rinse 19 tonnes of microbeads down drains each year. Too tiny to be caught by municipal water filters, they easily flow into the world’s oceans, lakes and rivers. In water they can break down, releasing toxins, or become coated with other poisons, such as PCBs.Scientists had assumed that they floated in fresh water and were flushed downriver to the sea. Yet Mr Ricciardi has shown that some sink to the bottom of lakes and rivers, where they are eaten by bottom-feeding fish, which then develop diseases.On July 30^th Canada’s labour minister declared by the shores of Lake Ontario that microbeads will be considered a toxic substance. The government now plans to prohibit the manufacture, import and sale of “personal-care” products that contain them. Eight American states have already enacted bans, starting with Illinois in 2014.Public pressure has forced some manufacturers to take action on their own. Unilever has stopped using microbeads; Proctor & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Johnson & Johnson say they will follow in 2017.

Economist 7/30/15

1. IT IS little more than a week since Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and perpetual irritant to his country’s authorities, was given back his passport, marking the end of a four-year travel ban. Mr Ai has already made arrangements to visit Europe, stopping first in Germany. But on July 30th it emerged that the visa for his proposed onward trip to Britain would be unexpectedly limited, after Mr Ai received a letter from a bureaucrat saying that his travel would be restricted because of a failure to own up to his “criminal” past. Mr Ai is used to such interference. The surprise was that the letter came not from the Chinese authorities, but from the British.Rather than be given the six-month visa for which he applied, Mr Ai has been given permission to be in Britain only between September 9th and 29th. That means he will be safely out of the way by October, when London is expecting another Chinese visitor: Xi Jinping, the president.
2. The bicameral system under which Britain is governed today dates back to the 14th century, when knights representing shires and boroughs (the Commons) began to meet separately from religious leaders and nobles (the Lords). The Lords was initially the mightier of the two houses, but by the 17th century, and in the aftermath of Britain’s 11-year period without a monarchy, the Commons’ pre-eminence was formalised. Over the centuries the Lords evolved into a body made up of senior members of the clergy, political appointees and aristocrats who had inherited their places there, as a check on the legislative decisions taken by the more powerful lower house. It lost most of its veto powers in the first half of the 20th century, and in 1999 saw the expulsion of all but 92 of the hereditary peers. Today the House of Lords, now dominated by political appointees,Rather than receive a salary, each of the over 800 members is paid a £300 ($468) allowance for each day he or she attends. 
3. Recent estimates put the number of low-cost private schools in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, as high as 18,000. Hundreds more open each year. Fees average around 7,000 naira ($35) per term, and can be as low as 3,000 naira. By comparison, in 2010-11 the city had just 1,600 government schools. In the developed world private schools charge high fees and teach the elite. But Ken Ade is more typical of the sector, not just in Nigeria but worldwide. In 2010 there were an estimated 1m private schools in the developing world.But the fastest-growing group are small low-cost schools, run by entrepreneurs in poor areas, that cater to those living on less than $2 a day.One reason for the developing world’s boom in private education is that aspirational parents are increasingly seeking alternatives to dismal state schools.Many poor countries have failed to build enough schools or train enough teachers to keep up with the growth in their populations. Half have more than 50 school-age children per qualified teacher.State schools are often plagued by teacher strikes and absenteeism.
4. Choosing a private school can be a perfectly rational personal choice, but have only a limited effect on overall results.One such failure is that parents often lack objective information about standards. Countries where state schools are weak rarely have trustworthy national exam systems.Chile’s voucher scheme, which started in 1981 under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, aimed to enable poor students to move from bad public schools to good private ones and to raise standards by generating competition between the two. Today 38% of pupils are in state schools, 53% in private ones that accept vouchers and 7% in elite institutions that charge full fees.
5. The new standard-bearer for market-based education reform is the Pakistani province of Punjab. .Shahbaz Sharif, the brother of the prime minister, Nawaz, has decreed that the government will not build any of the new schools needed to achieve its 100% enrolment target for school-age children by 2018. Instead money is being funnelled to the private sector via the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), an independent body with a focus on extremely poor families.One scheme helps entrepreneurs set up new schools, particularly in rural areas. Another gives vouchers to parents living in slums to send children who are not in school to PEF-approved institutions. All the places in some schools have also been bought up. Those schools cannot charge fees and must submit to monitoring and teacher training.Crucially, the province is also improving oversight and working out how to inform parents about standards. It has dispatched 1,000 inspectors armed with tablet computers to conduct basic checks on whether schools are operating and staff and children are turning up.PEF now educates 2m of Punjab’s 25m children, a share likely to grow by another million by 2018.A promising development is the spread of low-cost for-profit school chains in big cities in Africa and south Asia.Bridge International Academies, which runs around 400 primary schools in Kenya and Uganda, and plans to open more in Nigeria and India, is the biggest, with backers including Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. Omega Schools has 38 institutions in Ghana.Bridge’s cost-cutting strategies include using standardised buildings made of stacked shipping containers, and scripted lessons that teachers recite from hand-held computers linked to a central system.

Economist 7/30/15

1. IT IS little more than a week since Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and perpetual irritant to his country’s authorities, was given back his passport, marking the end of a four-year travel ban. Mr Ai has already made arrangements to visit Europe, stopping first in Germany. But on July 30th it emerged that the visa for his proposed onward trip to Britain would be unexpectedly limited, after Mr Ai received a letter from a bureaucrat saying that his travel would be restricted because of a failure to own up to his “criminal” past. Mr Ai is used to such interference. The surprise was that the letter came not from the Chinese authorities, but from the British.Rather than be given the six-month visa for which he applied, Mr Ai has been given permission to be in Britain only between September 9th and 29th. That means he will be safely out of the way by October, when London is expecting another Chinese visitor: Xi Jinping, the president.

Economist 7/29/15

1. Yemen is only the latest of many theatres in which Saudi Arabia and Iran have sparred over the three and a half decades since an Islamic revolution ended Iran’s own monarchy. The Saudis and their Gulf allies funded Saddam Hussein when he invaded Iran in 1980, while Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hizbullah, battled Saudi-backed militias during the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war. In 2011 Saudi Arabia and its allies poured troops into the neighbouring kingdom of Bahrain to help quell a popular revolt. The demands for democracy in a country that is 60% Shia were seen as an Iranian plot to gain power.. The Saudi coalition’s foothold in Aden may presage a redivision of Yemen, a country only united in 1990, into southern and northern halves, an arrangement Saudi Arabia prefers.Rather than seeing the reduction of an Iranian nuclear threat as an advantage, the Saudi government frets instead that its oldest ally, America, is poised to abandon the kingdom and appoint Iran as its new regional policeman.
2. IN THE three decades since the restoration of democracy in Brazil, the centrist Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB) has rarely been out of power. The two presidents with no PMDB ministers in their cabinets had cause to regret it.The PMDB is an indispensable part of the coalition led by Dilma Rousseff, who belongs to the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT). Her vice-president, Michel Temer, is the PMDB’s chairman; the presidents of both houses of Congress are members.If numbers were all that mattered, the PMDB would be the most powerful party by far. Besides having more seats in Congress than any other, it outguns its main rivals, the PT and the centre-right opposition Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), in state and local governments.. To maintain its broad appeal, it kept its ideology flexible. Asked what the PMDB stands for, grandees start with freedom of speech—then clam up. Its programme brims with platitudes: its only firm position is against the death penalty. It is more pro-business than pro-market, often lobbying for local and industry-specific benefits.
3. London is a popular destination for money launderers, especially those from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. (Latin Americans still prefer Miami.)Mr Cameron will call for the Land Registry to publish data on which foreign companies own which land and property titles in England and Wales. The government will also consult on whether any foreign company bidding on a government contract should be made to reveal its “beneficial” (ie real as opposed to legally registered) owners.Transparency International, found last year that one in ten properties in Westminster, a central London borough, is owned by an offshore firm, the most popular domicile being the British Virgin Islands.Britain is working to create the world’s first nationwide public register of company owners and is urging others to follow suit. The prime minister stresses the need for co-ordinated global action, and links progress to reform of Britain’s offshore dependencies in the Caribbean and Channel Islands.
4. WHEN a monopoly on casinos in Macau ended in 2002, American gambling firms rushed into the former Portuguese colony, eager to set up in the only part of China where casino gambling was legal. The bet paid off, and the world’s gambling centre of gravity shifted to Asia. By 2006 Macau’s gambling revenue had exceeded that of Las Vegas. Today eight of the world’s ten highest-grossing casinos are in Macau, with the other two in Singapore. No casinos in America even crack the top 15. A crackdown on corruption by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has stemmed the flow of mainland Chinese gamblers into the tiny enclave. Worldwide, gamblers have also held back.
5. When Britain set a new minimum wage in 1998 doom-mongers forecast that jobs would vanish. Employment proved resilient. Minimum wages help offset firms’ bargaining power over employees reluctant to risk moving elsewhere.Encouraged by this evidence, many are clamouring to make minimum wages far more generous. In America campaigners want the federal minimum wage more than doubled from today’s stingy $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour.By moving towards sharply higher minimum wages, policymakers are accelerating into a fog. Little is known about the long-run effects of modest minimum wages (see page 66). And nobody knows what big rises will do, at any time horizon.One danger is that a high minimum wage will push some workers out of the labour force for good.This is the worst time to be raising the cost of workers. Technological advances are enabling firms to replace more and more people with computers and robots, imperilling jobs.The Congressional Budget Office reckons that only one-fifth of the income benefits go to those beneath the poverty line.Tax credits (income top-ups for low earners) are a much more efficient way for governments to help the poor—about three-quarters of the benefit ends up with employees. To the extent that firms benefit, they are encouraged to employ low-skilled workers rather than automate jobs.

Economist 7/28/15

1. The proportion of single people in Seoul more than doubled between 1990 and 2010, and they now account for 16% of households. Four in ten South Korean adults are unmarried, the highest share among the 34 OECD countries. In Seoul over a third of women with degrees are single.One reason is that wedding expenses, mostly met by the groom and often including the couple’s first home, have become prohibitive for many. Another is that Korean families used to be so desperate to have sons that in the 1980s they aborted lots of daughters. Now one in seven men of marriageable age lacks a potential partner.Also, some women want to “marry up”, which is harder now that so many women have degrees and good jobs.The mean age at which women marry has risen from 25 in 1995 to 30 today. Only 0.2% of Korean households consist of unwed couples, compared with 10% in Britain and 19% in Sweden. But rather than getting hitched, many women remain single. And many married couples are having only one child: the number of children beyond a first fell by 37% between 2010 and 2013.
2. WHEN patients are prescribed a drug, they might assume it had been subject to the closest scrutiny. They would be wrong. The results of about half of all clinical trials are never published. Companies are allowed to run many tests and publish only the ones with results they like.Legislators in America and Europe want the problem of missing trials fixed (see article). New legislation comes into force in Europe in 2016 that will require the registration of clinical trials and the prompt publication of results. The question is how tightly these rules will be enforced. America laid down similar requirements in 2007, but they have been more observed in the breach.Even if all new trials are registered and published, the problem remains of what to do about the evidence base for drugs already in use. There is no legal obligation on researchers to publish data from old trials, but there is a moral one.
3. OVER the past six years, long-term unemployment in Europe has swelled. Around half of Europe’s 25m unemployed have been jobless for over a year. Over 12% have not worked for more than four years.Skills are forgotten, confidence drains, fertility slows and the risk of poor health increases. The challenge for policymakers is to stop this cyclical unemployment from becoming structural.Unsurprisingly, the problem is most acute in southern Europe. More than 60% of jobless Italians have not worked in over a year; in Greece the rate is over 70%.The problem is also acute in the new EU member states of eastern Europe. But unlike southern Europe, many of these countries have recent experience of high long-term unemployment after recessions in the late 1990s and early 2000s.In the richer parts of Europe, both long- and short-term unemployment is less of a concern. Germany, alone in the EU, has reduced both its overall rate—as well as that for the long-term jobless—since 2009, due in part to its more flexible labour market.The EU’s three Nordic states have its lowest long-term unemployment shares, ranging from 19% to 25% of total unemployment. Such low levels are due partly to shallower recessions, and partly to labour-market measures.
4. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, once considered his father’s heir apparent, learned of his fate somewhere far from the Libyan capital.Mr Gaddafi was last known to be held by militiamen in the north-western town of Zintan, where he was taken after his capture by rebels in the latter stages of the 2011 uprising in which his father was killed. From there he joined three of the 24 trial sessions by video link.The court in Tripoli ordered that Mr Gaddafi face a firing squad for charges relating to attempts to quash the rebellion that eventually ended his father’s 42 years in power.The man some once hailed as a possible reformer is not likely to be executed anytime soon: the Zintanis believed to be currently holding him do not recognise the court in Tripoli nor the Islamist-backed government currently controlling the city and claiming, in defiance of international powers, to rule the country. There are other reasons why Zintan would not readily give up such a high-value prisoner; by holding Mr Gaddafi, the small mountain town has become a powerful player in Libya.
5. All the activity notwithstanding, the initial rush to reconnoitre Cuba and Iran will slowly but surely give way to a more measured approach for most. It will be months, if not years, before the sanctions on both countries will be lifted.But Cuba and Iran do have one thing in common: they are developed enough that they could thrive once the restrictions are lifted. Iran in particular ought to be able to attract much more foreign direct investment, given its size.Some early moves in Cuba have been promising.Airbnb executives say some 2,000 people have listed space in their homes via the online agency, charging up to ten times the average $25 monthly salary per rental.In the next five years Iran needs an estimated $230 billion-$260 billion of investment in oil and gas, according to analysts. Infrastructure badly needs an overhaul. Iran Air, starved of investment since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, wants to buy several hundred planes.Big food companies are hungry to enter Cuba, but the embargo prohibits them from using American banks to get letters of credit in order to make the deliveries. Even industries with permission to trade with Cuba, such as agriculture, medicine and telecoms, find obstacles in their way. The biggest is finance. Though the Obama administration removed Cuba from its “state-sponsor-of-terrorism” list in April, easing restrictions on banking, the response has been slow.The biggest obstacle to post-sanctions growth may be the two countries’ own governments. Cuba’s embrace of private enterprise has been halting, to put it kindly.

Economist 7/27/15

1. The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), based in London and previously known as the ‘Nudge Unit’, published a summary of its findings over the past two years. Five years after it started, the buzz surrounding the unit has not faded. So far the BIT has trialled over 100 policy tweaks around the world, and boasts an impressive array of results.In the field of tax collection, the BIT has helped boost revenues for cash-strapped governments. For instance, in Singapore, the BIT found that printing tax bills on the pink paper typically used for debt collection led to an improvement in the prompt payment rate of between three to five percentage points.ts trials also show what does not work. In Singapore cartoons are often used to communicate public policies. But the BIT’s experiments revealed that these cartoons reduced the effectiveness of public messages.So far, the sums the BIT talks about consist of hundreds of millions.
2. The world may be getting warmer, but it is not getting much wetter. It quaffed 249 billion litres of alcoholic drinks in 2014, a modest increase of 1 billion over the preceding year. When measured by intake per head of the drinking-age population, consumption is down a little from a peak of 56.6 litres in 2012 to 55.4 litres in 2014. People in rich countries are the ones imbibing less—a moderation that has not (yet) been matched by a corresponding binge in emerging markets. India, for instance, is the ninth-largest alcohol market, yet consumption per head is low.
3. On July 24th, the price of a barrel of oil in America reached a low of $48. In spite of this, governments are still splurging on subsidies to prop up production. Fossil fuels are reaping support of $550 billion annually, according the International Energy Agency (IEA).The International Monetary Fund’s estimates are substantially higher. It said in May that countries will spend $5.3 trillion subsiding oil, gas and coal in 2015, versus $2 trillion in 2011. That is equivalent to 6.5% of global GDP.Rich countries subsidise too—the IMF says America is the world’s second biggest culprit, spending $669 billion this year—but mostly by “post-tax” systems which fail to factor the costs of environmental damage into prices.The IEA believes that only 8% of subsidies accrue to the poorest fifth of the population. That money would better spent on roads, hospitals and schools instead.
4. UST a day after Turkey at last went on the attack against Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria, it turned its guns on its longstanding foes the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The PKK has fought intermittently for decades to establish Kurdish autonomy in Turkey, but had observed a tentative cease-fire for the past two years while its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, negotiated a peace deal with the government. The PKK was the first to break the ceasefire when it killed four Turkish policemen last week. On July 25th Turkish jets retaliated, bombing PKK camps in Iraq.Meawhile, the Turkish attacks clearly have domestic political motivations. The ruling Justice and Development (AK) party lost its governing majority in elections on June 7thwhen, for the first time, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) cleared the 10% threshhold for representation in parliament.Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
5. The inspectors have come to villages like Gaucin to tackle the Spanish government’s difficulties in collecting revenue, in the face of economic problems that have driven much of the country’s business activity into the shadows. Spain’s economy has been growing lately, creating 411,000 net jobs in the second quarter according to figures released on July 23rd by the national statistics agency. But while unemployment fell 1.4 percentage points, it is still an agonising 22.4%, having remained above 20% for five years.While northern European countries now promote electronic transactions, shopkeepers and housecleaners in Spain are happy to accept cash in order to dodge value-added tax of 21%. The grey economy is estimated to make up between a fifth and a quarter of Spain’s GDP.The government’s tax crackdown has netted almost €35 billion ($38.5 billion) extra for the state’s coffers in the past three years. But the tax agency (or Agencia Tributaria) sees scope to improve that take.Meanwhile, among 16- to 24-year-olds, the unemployment rate is nearly 50%. Members of this generation are referred to as ni-ni (“neither-nor”), because they neither work nor study.

Economist 7/24/15

1. AFTER a year of hesitation, Turkey has come off the fence and joined the American-led coalition’s military operations against the Islamic State (IS). On July 24th Turkish F-16s carried out airstrikes for the first time against IS jihadists inside Syria.Also on July 23rd, Turkey announced it will let coalition aircraft use the NATO airbase at Incirlik to hit IS targets.On Friday Turkish police raided more than 100 properties in Istanbul and detained 252 people thought to be linked to IS.But the Turks had resisted, demanding in exchange that America declare a no-fly zone over Syria, help establish a safe haven on the Syrian side of the border and give as much military priority to removing Bashar Assad from power as to combating IS. A safe haven would help prevent further refugees from coming to Turkey, already home to nearly two million Syrians displaced by the conflict.
2. But the immediate cause for the reversal appears to be Turkish fears that its reluctance was deepening America’s friendship with the Syrian Kurds. The People’s Defence Units (YPG), a Syrian Kurdish militia, has become America’s top partner against IS inside Syria. This worries Turkey because the YPG is closely linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the rebel group that has been fighting on and off for decades to establish Kurdish self-rule in Turkey.
3. LAST week, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland, announced the discovery of a new particle called the pentaquark. Back in 2012 the same machine provided evidence for the Higgs boson—the final missing piece in what is called the Standard Model. This is essentially a cupboard of ingredients for the stuff that makes up the universe, a neat set of all the known fundamental particles and all the forces that mediate interactions among them.The phrase “atom-smasher” conveys the crux of the answer: with lots of energy.Depending on just how a collision occurs and how much energy ends up as mass, a host of processes can occur. Some well-known particles can be produced, decaying quickly into other “daughter” particles or flashes of light, all whizzing off at great speed with some of the energy of the collision.Proving one such particle has been created is tricky. Elusive beasts such as the pentaquark are never caught directly, like an animal in a trap; rather, they leave only tracks. A collider has layers of different kinds of detectors around the point of collisions, each designed to detect different kinds of tracks.
4. As a country Singapore, it was acutely short of space. One solution has been to add some: since independence Singapore has expanded by over one-fifth, from 58,000 hectares (224.5 square miles) to nearly 72,000, by filling in the sea with imported sand. Marina Bay Sands itself, a number of massive office blocks and a golf course are all on land that used to be sea. The government expects the land area to grow by a further 8%, or 5,600 hectares, by 2030. But there is a natural limit to this growth. Wong Poh Kam, an economist at the National University of Singapore’s business school, points out that Johor, the Malaysian state just over the strait, could be to Singapore what southern mainland China has been to Hong Kong, offering land and labour at far lower prices. Every day an estimated 50,000 Malaysians commute to work in Singapore from Johor Bahru, the state capital. Nearby Indonesian islands also provide room for Singaporean investment.
5. The shortage of land is compounded by government policy on how it is used. One-fifth of the total, mainly secondary jungle, is reserved for the armed forces. Once space is allocated for industry, reservoirs, housing, roads and parks (including golf courses, which cover about 2% of the country), the squeeze is obvious. Yet the population, of about 5.5m now, has doubled in the past 30 years and is still expanding.By 2030 the population of long-staying “permanent residents” would climb from about 500,000 now to around 600,000, and the number of “non-resident” foreign workers would increase from the present 1.6m to 2.3m-2.5m.Already, probably more than half the people living in Singapore were not born there. That proportion seems likely to rise.The government argued the proposed levels of immigration would be necessary to maintain even moderate growth because Singaporeans are not reproducing themselves. Last year the “total fertility rate” (TFR), a notional estimate of the number of babies a woman will have over her lifetime, was 1.25, way below the replacement rate of about 2.1.From 2020 the number of working-age Singaporeans will decline, and by 2030 there will be only 2.1 workers for every citizen over the age of 64.

Economist 7/23/15

1. American capitalism has a new hub in the west. Wall Street used to be the place to seek fortunes and make deals; now it is increasingly the Valley.Today’s firms are staying private for longer. Tech firms that went public in 2014 were on average 11 years old; back in 1999 they waited only four years before listing their shares.Staying private allows entrepreneurs to avoid the headaches that come from being quoted: the nuisance of activist investors, the drudgery of compliance etc.But staying private has risks, too. One is that firms under no obligation to make public a full set of audited accounts will remain veiled from the scrutiny of analysts and short-sellers and so act irresponsibly.
2. There is nothing secret about the nativist views of Donald Trump, a dyspeptic business tycoon running for the Republican presidential nomination. His finger-jabbing speeches about Mexican rapists and murderers, flowing across the border “like water”, and American jobs being shipped to China have taken him to the top of most polls.The Trump technique involves confiding in unhappy Americans that they are victims of a plot—and a plot, what is more, that could be easily thwarted. In his telling, scheming foreign governments have outwitted a soft political elite in Washington and preyed on America’s openness and generosity. He is tapping into a political tradition with deep roots.Pundits disagree on what happens next. But Mr Trump’s fall will have to be steep and swift to keep him off the stage at the first Republican TV debate on August 6th, an important showcase reserved for the ten candidates doing best in national polls.
3. SAN Francisco, Silicon Valley and the strip of land that runs along the shore of the Bay between them have had a tremendous decade as the hub of the global technology industry.It used to be extremely rare to find a startup valued over $1 billion, but today there are 74 such “unicorns” in America’s tech sector, valued at $273 billion in total. And as the fortunes of startups have moved upwards, so too have their physical locations. In the 1990s most of the activity was to the south, in areas like Palo Alto and Mountain View, which is still where the area’s big public companies are mostly based.
4. Expense-claims have long been a sticky issue for politicians.Booze is another thorny issue. Road warriors have a reputation for propping up hotel bars, but in their defence there is often little else to do once you have flicked through all the news channels in hotel room. Again price is a factor. Claiming for beers that cost less than a dollar in Beijing hutongs seems petty, but expensing a drink costing twenty times as much in pricier locations like Tokyo or Stockholm feels justified.. Nonetheless, some companies object outright to processing a stack of bar receipts, even compared with the pricier alternative of a three-course dinner with wine.Receipts are the final travel-expense pitfall. In theory they are necessary to any claim, but the reality can be different.
5. There is an inevitability about the march of the smoke-free zone. The mission of those enforcing them has already crept. Originally the ethos for much anti-smoking legislation was that second-hand smoking harmed others. But as the legal antipathy towards e-cigarettes and outdoor smoking shows, now it is rather about trying to stamp out the habit for good. Even countries in which a cough and a drag are an accepted way of life are clamping down. France is adopting some of the most draconian anti-smoking measures in the world, making some locals fume—or, rather, not fume. And new laws in China outlaw smoking not just in workplaces, hotels and public transport, but tourist hotspots too, including the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.

Economist 7/22/15

1. France and Britain are comparably rich countries with broadly similar approaches to human rights and welfare. Yet charities say more than 1,000 people have made the risky crossing across the English channel in recent weeks.On July 14th it announced the construction of a new “secure zone” at Calais, with room for 230 lorries, removing them from the open road where illegal immigrants can climb aboard.Britain’s attractiveness is in contrast to its accessibility. Apart from the moat of the English Channel, the sceptred isle is buffered from less happier lands by not having signed the Schengen agreement. This allows free movement between its member states, which include most western European countries. Schengen is one reason why Britain receives fewer asylum applications than other countries. More than 625,000 people applied for refugee status last year in the 28 countries of the EU (Syrians made up one-fifth of them). Only 31,745 of them applied in Britain, half the number for France and one-sixth that of Germany.
2. The 2014 Immigration Act in Britain, which gave landlords and banks new responsibilities to check applicants’ migration status, has made it harder for undocumented migrants to live and work. And the benefits for asylum seekers are very similar to those in France.Once they have lodged an appeal, single asylum seekers are given £36.95 ($58) per week, roughly the same as in France. In both countries they are offered housing, but cannot choose where. In neither are they eligible for many other benefits, although health care and some education are available. Both countries allow those with refugee status to bring their families, and both aim to give a first decision on asylum applications within six months—which often stretches to as long as 18.Though it keeps migrants out by not being a member of the Schengen group, Britain is a signatory of the Dublin Regulation, under which it is allowed to return asylum-seekers to the country where they first set foot in Europe. Officials in Italy and Greece sometimes do not fingerprint migrants, for the same reason.
3. Pathways in Technology Early College High School, an unusual school in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn which blends a public high-school education with community college courses and paid work experience.P-Tech, which opened in the autumn of 2011, was developed by IBM in partnership with New York city and the City University of New York. It aims to shake up education and change what vocational education means. Unlike most American high-schools, it is a six-year programme instead of the usual four. At the end of six years, if not before, pupils will finish with an associate degree at no cost to the student. The technology giant helped develop the curriculum, which focuses on science, technology and maths. P-Tech teaches all the usual subjects, like English and history, but its pupils learn coding.What sets P-Tech apart is how hard-headed it is. Most of the pupils in Brooklyn’s P-Tech are the first in their families to go to college. And most come from low-income and minority homes–96% of the students are black and Latino. About 80% of the students qualify for free or cheap lunches. It has an open admissions policy and operates within the existing school district budget. IBM expects more than 100 schools with 100,000 pupils, will be operating by 2016. The company gives the “P-Tech formula”, which was designed to be replicable and scalable, away at ptech.org to encourage their spread.
4. There have been 28 civilian aircraft crashes in Iran since the turn of the century, according to the Aviation Safety Network, claiming more than 500 lives. The average age of an aircraft operated by Iran Air, the country’s flag carrier, is 26 years. America will “allow for the sale of commercial passenger aircraft and related parts and services to Iran” states the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action released by the nuclear negotiating teams. As well as improving the lot of Iranian passengers, this could earn tens of billions of dollars for Western aircraft manufacturers, including American firms such as Boeing.Just as America and Iran enjoyed warm relations before the 1979 Revolution, so Iran Air and Boeing were once inseparable.Iran says the country needs to acquire 400 aircraft over the next decade—100 of which will go to the flag-carrier.
5. When the Dodd-Frank Act was passed in 2010, the so-called Volcker rule was seen as one of its key provisions. But the rule only formally became operative on July 21st this year.The pertinent clause of the Dodd-Frank Act amounts to all of 165 words (with the key points covered in 40). Two activities are banned: proprietary trading and ties (through investment and relationships) to hedge and private equity funds. Putting that into practice involved a collaboration of five regulatory agencies: the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).The aim of the rule is to stop banks (and their worldwide affiliates) with access to American government funds from indulging in speculation and conflicts of interest. In reality, distinguishing such activities from more beneficial financial operations has proved daunting.Bank examiners will not only have to judge assets and liabilities, but also intentions. Some foreign banks, judging that they simply lack the political clout to navigate through such a complex regulatory environment, have cut back their American operations.

Economist 7/21/15

1. IT IS well known that in America, “extreme” working hours (slogging for more than fifty a week) have been getting more widespread in recent decades. But much less is known about people in Europe. New research from Anna Burger, of the Central European University, presents some interesting findings. In the Netherlands, often seen as a haven of sensible working practices, the proportion of full-time workers who slog for more than 50 hours has been rising in recent decades.What factors affect the likelihood of long hours? Ms Burger has many hypotheses; but after conducting a series of regressions she finds two things to be the most important. The first is what she calls “labour-market regulation”. This is an index for labour-market regulation (comprised of things like how difficult it is to fire people and how rigid working-hour rules are).The second really important thing, she suggests, is how much part-time employment is about. With more, she calculates, the prevalence of extreme working hours drops.
2. THE gold price, which hit a five-year low on July 20th, reflects supply and demand right now, and also expectations about the future. The yellow metal serves two purposes: it is a commodity (used in electronics, jewellery and dentistry, for example) and a store of value—especially as an insurance policy against political upheavals. But gold is unlike other assets: it brings no income, and it costs money to store it.The most immediate reason for gold’s woes is the strong dollar. Gold is priced in dollars, so if the American currency goes up, investors mark down the yellow metal accordingly. An added factor is that the dollar is rising because of the revival of the American economy,which is bringing the prospect of higher interest rates. That is bad news for gold. Higher interest rates increase the opportunity cost of holding zero-yield assets.Gold is also suffering because of a spate of unusually good political news.The nuclear deal with Iran reduces the risk of war (which tends to boost gold).That leaves pessimism as the main reason for holding gold.
3. In America, concerns about forensic evidence are well established. Dodgy forensics contribute to nearly half of all wrongful convictions there, according to the Innocence Project, a New York-based charity dedicated to overturning miscarriages of justice.Earlier this year a report by a defence-lawyers’ association found hair analysis to be untrustworthy in 95% of cases.As a result of such doubts, the use of some forms of forensic evidence has been suspended.The FBI has abandoned the use of gunshot residue.Netherlands has given up the use of handwriting analysis, for instance.Britain, on the other hand, remains keen on the Sherlock Holmes stuff. Mixed-DNA, gunshot residue and handwriting analysis are all still used in British trials, to the concern of some jurists.
4. Modern cars are becoming like computers with wheels. Diabetics wear computerised insulin pumps that can instantly relay their vital signs to their doctors. Smart thermostats learn their owners’ habits.. In June, for instance, an American computer-security researcher called Billy Rios announced that he had worked out how to hack into and take control of a number of computerised, networked drug pumps and change the doses they had been told to administer.Cyber-criminals make use of vast networks of compromised computers, called botnets, to do everything from generating spam e-mail to performing denial-of-service attacks.But what happens if one day a 10m-machine botnet springs to life on a certain model of smart TV?” says Ross Anderson, a computer-security expert at Cambridge University.. Many devices lack even the ability to be patched, says Dr Anderson—in other words, their manufacturers cannot use the internet to distribute fixes for any security flaws.Part of the problem, says Dr Steel, is that many of the firms making these newly connected widgets have little experience with the arcane world of computer security.
5. This week, President Barack Obama launched an initiative that he hopes will bring this necessity to more low-income American households. The program, called “ConnectHome”, is a partnership between government, tech companies and non-profit organisations that will provide low-cost broadband internet, digital literacy programs and other resources to 275,000 public-housing developments in 28 locations across the country.ConnectHome is the latest White House effort to bridge the so-called “digital divide”, the gap in IT access and know-how between the rich and the poor.