Tag: United Kingdom

Economist 7/16/15

  1. Several American cities, including Portland, have ordered Uber to suspend operations, while whole countries, such as Germany, have outlawed it. Objections tend to fall into one of two camps. The first is that, because the platform works out fares dynamically, it is a de facto metred service and so requires licensing.The latest report by Certify, which tracks business-expense claims, found that for the first time the majority of “ground transportation receipts” were for rides in Uber cars. In the second quarter of 2015, 55% of such business expenses emanated from that single company, compared with 43% on all other taxi services. According to Certify, whose respondents are overwhelmingly American, the cities in which businessmen are most likely to use an Uber car is San Francisco (79%), followed by Dallas (60%) and Los Angeles (54%).
  2. The protest in Westminster against government plans to relax the ban on fox hunting was in full swing, news came through that the vote in Parliament had been cancelled.The last-minute change on July 14th followed an announcement by the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) that it would vote with other opposition parties against the amendment. This was unexpected: the ban applies only in England and Wales, and the SNP claims to avoid votes not affecting Scotland. The about-turn put the Conservatives—their slender majority eliminated by rebels on their own benches—on track for a defeat.Cases like the hunting amendment, where Scottish MPs might have altered a decision not directly affecting Scots, are rare, because Scotland elects just 59 of Parliament’s 650 MPs. Between 2001 and 2015 Scottish MPs tilted only 25 of 3,773 votes. And most of these affected the entire United Kingdom. Yet as the government devolves new powers to Edinburgh to curb the pro-independence surge there, the number of such votes will probably rise.
  3. At the opening of this week’s Addis Ababa Financing for Development conference,the shift of focus from giving aid to helping countries generate jobs and investment has been broadly welcomed.But economic growth and tax reform take time—and the conference was short of pledges of resources to fill the gap.Donor countries are doing even less. But there is one way they could boost development that would not cost them anything: they could make sure that their money is going to the right places. The cost of lifting everyone in the world out of extreme poverty (living under $1.25 a day) is just $66 billion a year at the moment, according to the UN. Donor states currently spend $180 billion per year on bilateral aid. But only 5% of it goes to the poorest fifth of countries—and even this paltry share has been declining
  4. WHEN Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in 1886, he would not have predicted his hero’s appearance on the stamps of Nicaragua, South Africa and Canada, or his role inspiring themed flashmobs in St Petersburg. Nor indeed would he have foreseen Holmes’s eventual appearance in the Guinness Book of Records.Yet Holmes has once again been successfully reborn, this time in “Mr Holmes”, Bill Condon’s latest film. Based on “A Slight Trick of the Mind”, a book from 2005 by Mitch Cullin, the plot follows a beaky Ian McKellen as a senescent Holmes during the winter of his life in post-war England.This reincarnation has been controversial, too, because of a lawsuit. Though the majority of Conan Doyle’s “Case-Book” stories are now in the public domain, later work published between 1923 and 1927 is still protected by American copyright laws. The Conan Doyle estate recently filed a suit against the film’s co-distributors Miramax and Roadside Attractions, Penguin Random House, which published Mr Cullin’s book.
  5. The Mexican government had hoped that its first-ever auction of shallow-water exploration blocks in the Gulf of Mexico would successfully launch the modernisation of its energy industry. In the run-up to the bidding, Mexico had sought to be as accommodating as its historic dislike for foreign oil companies allowed it to be.The results fell well short of the government’s hopes and underscore how residual resource nationalism continues to plague the Latin American oil industry. Only two of 14 exploration blocks were awarded, both going to the same Mexican-led trio of energy firms. Officials blamed the disappointing outcome on the sagging international oil market, but their own insecurity about appearing to sell the country’s oil too cheap may also have been to blame, according to industry experts.Mexico’s auction comes at a time when other Latin American countries—even socialist Venezuela—are rethinking their gut hostility to foreign oil firms, though still hesitantly.The rot started in Venezuela in the early years of this century when Hugo Chávez, its late leader, turned PDVSA, a world-class state oil company, into a piggy bank for his free-spending populism, and then scared off foreign investors.

Economist 1/12/15

  1. NEARLY 22m people took a cruise in 2014, according to the Cruise Lines International Association, an industry body. It reckons around 200 people die each year on cruise ships. According to the Telegraph, it all starts with an announcement. “Operation Bright Star”, for example, signals a medical emergency. “Operation Rising Star” means a passenger has passed away. Every cruise ship is legally required to include a morgue, and these must be away from food storage areas.Bodies are removed discreetly, often at the next port, and repatriated.A behind-the-scenes documentary profiling British Airways last year was revealing on the subject. Where possible, the dead are upgraded. According to the person in charge of training BA’s cabin crew, if there is a spare seat in first class, the body is strapped into that, covered to the neck with a blanket, and the passengers around it are informed.If there are no spare seats at the front of the plane, room is made in the economy section and a flight attendant has the dubious pleasure of sitting next to the corpse for the remainder of the flight.
  2. So it seemed after German officials leaked to Der Spiegel, a weekly, their assessment that Grexit would not only be bearable but might even make the euro stronger.On January 5th Steffen Seibert, Mrs Merkel’s spokesman, insisted that German policy had not changed: it still aimed to hold the euro zone together. Yet all sides are now debating Grexit.Carsten Nickel at Teneo Intelligence, a risk consultancy, thinks Mrs Merkel is trying to “send a strong signal to Athens” that aid would still be tied to reforms, but that she will be flexible. A deal with Mr Tsipras could include lower interest or longer maturities for Greek debt. But politics limit her room for manoeuvre.This is the tightrope Mrs Merkel must walk after January 25th. Until then, she is likely to keep quiet.
  3. Over 1m people, and perhaps as many as 2m, took to the streets for a peaceful “republican march”, after three days of terror in and around Paris that left 17 innocents and three terrorists dead.Leaders from across the world joined François Hollande, the French president, on the march.Equally important, the march was a moment in which France, a country marked in recent years by self-doubt, seemed to rediscover national pride. Now that the march is over, however, questions will start to crowd in. In particular, there are concerns about the capacity of French intelligence services to cope with radical Islamists, given the scale of the networks they are now facing. There are also doubts that Mr Hollande, the most unpopular president under the Fifth Republic, has either the political strength or the credibility to curb the rise of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
  4. At yesterday’s vast demonstration in Paris of world leaders and ordinary folk, there was no top-level representative of the Obama administration, and on both sides of the pond, some people regretted that.One of the first American responses to the Paris shootings was something like: the Europeans brought this on themselves through their weak-minded appeasement of Islam, and their unwillingness  to defend free speech in a robust way.s evidence of hypocrisy and softness, it is recalled that only a few years ago, President Jacques Chirac put heavy pressure on Charlie-Hebdo not to republish cartoons of Muhammad. But the American administration faced a broadly similar dilemma, and made a broadly similar response, when Pastor Terry Jones was threatening to burn copies of the Koran. Constitutional principles like free speech and church-state separation made it impossible to prevent Mr Jones from doing as he planned; but he came under massive pressure to desist from his plans, from such figures as General David Petraeus (not usually seen as an appeaser) who said the act would endanger American lives.n one instant, and on balance correct response to the Paris shootings, a respected American observer of religious freedom, Nina Shea, argued that Europe must not respond to the atrocity by succumbing to its already entrenched habit of  curbing free expression through “hate-speech” laws.
  5. On November 17th United Airlines, one of the three giant American carriers, and Orbitz, an online travel agency, filed a federal lawsuit demanding damages “in excess of $75,000” against Aktarer Zaman, a recent college graduate and the creator and owner of the website Skiplagged. The service enabled users to discover cheap airfares that did not appear on competing engines’ searches by utilising a tactic known as “hidden-city ticketing”, which takes advantage of occasional anomalies in airlines’ pricing algorithms.Ever since America deregulated air travel in 1978, the leading carriers have developed “hub-and-spoke” route networks, which require passengers to connect through a few strategically located airports en route to most destinations.A side effect of this model is that each carrier tends to dominate the market at its hubs, which gives it significant pricing power. Delta, for example, transports three-quarters of passengers at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International, a big reason why that airport is the most expensive to fly through in America.In contrast, non-hub cities, as well as markets so big that no airline can afford to ignore them, such as New York and Los Angeles, tend to offer much more competitive fares.Seeing a problem that called out for automation, Mr Zaman set up Skiplagged, which listed hidden-city options alongside conventional fares (with a “NO CHECKED BAGS” disclaimer), and linked to Orbitz to reserve them.

Economist 9/19/14

  1. ALIBABA’S shares were priced at $68 on September 18th, giving China’s e-commerce behemoth a market capitalisation of $168 billion as it started trading on New York’s Stock Exchange. The flotation will raise $21.8 billion, narrowly missing the record for the world’s biggest stock offering, held by Agricultural Bank of China with its $22.1 billion listing in 2010. But if some of the remaining options are exercised by their owners, Alibaba’s could yet be the largest.Transactions last year over its websites totalled nearly $250 billion, compared with $116 billion for Amazon, a rival online retailer. Data from this year suggest that with every second that passes, Alibaba handles almost 500 orders, altogether worth more than $9,000 on average. Amazon’s equivalent transaction value in 2013 would be less than $3,700 per second. An average buyer on Alibaba’s websites spends over $1,000 a year, whereas the figure is less than half that at Amazon.
  2. THE Union flag will still fly. By a margin of 55% to 45%, and on a vast 85% turnout, Scots voted to stick with the United Kingdom on September 18th. hey also preserved the British identity which over a third of Scots, English, Welsh and Northern Irish consider of primary importance. The No vote held up surprisingly strongly in most of Scotland’s 32 councils.Dundee—dubbed by the SNP’s leader, and Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, as the “Yes City”—gave him a rare victory, but on a relatively low turnout, of 79%, and by a narrower-than-expected margin.he campaign had been gruelling, especially on the Yes side. Though designed and steered by the SNP, the Yes Scotland banner was carried by many different groups—including Radical Independence, Women for Independence and the Scottish Greens—many of them locally based, and all hugely motivated. By any measure, they outgunned the cross-party Better Together campaign, knocking on more doors, delivering more leaflets, placing more advertisements in newspapers and on billboards.r. Only a strong turnout by Scottish pensioners—the only age-group thought likely to have voted mainly for the union—foiled them.
  3. Another Great Leap Forward is planned ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. The governor of Tokyo, Yoichi Masuzoe, has pledged to make it the planet’s number one city, using the games as a launch pad. In addition to 22 new Olympic venues, the plans include new roads and railway lines, a huge waterfront redevelopment and rebuilding chunks of the city centre.The 1964 event cost many times more than its predecessor in Rome four years earlier, and added to the Olympics’ spendthrift reputation—not a single games since then has met its cost target. The Tokyo Olympics also triggered the start of Japan’s addiction to bond issuance, which continues unabated today.
  4. DESPITE winning only 31.2% of the vote, Sweden’s Social Democrats were jubilant on September 14th. Stefan Lofven, their leader, declared that the voters’ rejection of the centre-right alliance under Fredrik Reinfeldt marked a return to Social Democratic solidarity and the egalitarian Swedish welfare state.As he faced the daunting task of forming a coalition government. He brusquely rejected the ex-communist Left (with 5.7%) and began negotiating with the Greens (6.8%). But the two parties are a long way short of a majority, and they have big policy differences. The Greens want two of Sweden’s ten nuclear reactors closed immediately.Making everything harder are the far-right Sweden Democrats, who took 12.9% of the vote to become the third-largest party. The Sweden Democrats’ leader, Jimmie Akesson, made clear that his party must be reckoned with. It won votes by playing on fears of immigration and attacking the government for spending taxpayers’ money on immigrants and asylum-seekers instead of on native Swedes.
  5. It has been a hard summer for Jews in Germany. Provoked by fighting in Gaza, many Germans have demonstrated against Israel and for the Palestinians. One synagogue was set on fire. Some Jews were beaten.Yet, at the same time Germany, especially Berlin, is a favourite place for young Israelis to emigrate to; this is made easier because the government gives Jews German passports if their grandparents had them.Although there is still a remnant of anti-Semitism among Bio-Deutsche , the recent wave of anti-Semitism in Germany is largely a phenomenon among those “with a migration background”, to use the modern argot. Perpetrators, in other words, have tended to be young Muslims of Arab or Turkish descent. They inherit a collective identity not of German guilt, but of victimhood and marginalisation at the hands of both Israel and their adopted country.

Economist 7/13/14

  1. People of Scotland will vote on independence in a referendum on September 18th.Opinion polls suggest the Scots will decide against leaving, but it is the nationalists who have fire in their bellies, and Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), is a strong finisher (see article). Even a narrow victory for the status quo would be the biggest blow to the United Kingdom since 1922, when the Irish Free State was born.On economics, the nationalists say that Scots will be £1,000 a year better-off per head if they go it alone. That number, however, is based on implausible assumptions about the oil price, Scotland’s debt burden, demography and productivity. The British government’s estimate that Scots would be £1,400 a year better off per head if they stay in is based on more realistic assumptions. Scotland’s population is older and sicker than the British average, and productivity 11% lower than that of the rest of Britain. North Sea oil could more or less cover those costs in the short term, but the oil is running out.Independence would also impose one-off costs: a new Scottish state would have to set up an army, a welfare system, a currency and much else. University education is free for Scottish students, but not English or Welsh ones; the state pays for a higher proportion of old people’s care in Scotland than it does in England and Wales; Scotland has not followed England in freeing schools from bureaucratic constraints.Edinburgh already has an independent legal system and its parliament has power over a wide range of policy areas, including health, education and housing. Its leaders have not exercised their right to vary income tax: that hardly suggests a Scottish administration straining at a leash held tight by Westminster.
  2.  THE FRENCH breathed a collective sigh of relief on July 1st when the European Court of Human Rights upheld the country’s 2010 ban on the wearing of full-faced veils in public places. It followed a separate ruling in June by a top French appeals court that a private day-care nursery was within its rights when it sacked an employee who refused to take off her Muslim headscarf at work. In France, such rules generate relatively little controversy. France adheres to a strict form of secularism, known as laïcité, which is designed to keep religion out of public life. This principle was entrenched by law in 1905, after fierce anti-clerical struggles with the Roman Catholic church. Today, the lines are in some ways blurred.. It would be unthinkable in France, for example, or for a president to be sworn in on a Bible.After a decade of legal uncertainty over the wearing of the headscarf in state schools, the French government in 2004 banned all “conspicuous” religious symbols, including the Muslim headscarf, from public institutions such as state schools or town halls.
  3. Smart cars are able to read e-mails and text messages to drivers on the move; smart fridges carefully manage the energy they use; smart medical devices allow doctors to monitor patients from afar.Many items, including mundane things like light bulbs and door locks, are being hooked up to the internet by putting tiny computers into them and adding wireless connectivity. The problem is that these computers do not have enough processing power to handle antivirus and other defences found on a PC. The margins on them are wafer-thin, so manufacturers have little scope for spending on security.Broadcom, a chipmaker, recently unveiled a microchip specially designed for web-connected devices that has encryption capabilities baked into it, and Cisco has launched a competition offering prizes for the best ideas for securing the internet of things.
  4. After a two-year lull, rockets fired from Gaza have rained down on Israel. The Israel Defence Forces have struck hundreds of sites in Gaza. The army is ready to mobilise up to 40,000 reserves. The talk is of a ground offensive against Hamas, which governs Gaza (see article). Palestinians, 70 of whom have already been killed, are sliding towards a third uprising, or intifaThe idea is that the occasional brutal show of force can buy a few more years of normality. Yet doing so is becoming harder. Even if Hamas’s rockets remain inaccurate and are rarely lethal, the latest have reached parts of northern Israel 125 kilometres (80 miles) from Gaza. In any case, the status quo on the Palestinian side looks untenable. Mr Abbas is tired and ineffectual.  Two states, one for Israelis and one for Palestinians, remains by far the greatest hope for peace. What is lacking is the conviction among reasonable people that such a settlement is needed now.
  5. In 2002 just 13% of German teenagers had never had an alcoholic drink; by 2012, that figure had risen to 30%. Among 18- to 25-year-olds, the proportion drinking at least once a week has fallen by a third since the early 1990s. America, the proportion of high-school students reporting “binge-drinking”—more than five drinks in a single session—has fallen by a third since the late 1990s. Cigarette smoking among the young has become so uncommon that more teenagers—some 23% of 17- to 18-year-olds—smoke cannabis than tobacco.Teenage kicks of other sorts also appear to be on the decline. “Teens are waiting longer to have sex than they did,” according to a report on young Americans from the Guttmacher Institute, a think-tank. America’s teenage pregnancy rate is half what it was two decades ago. What is behind this generation of hard-working, strait-laced kids? It is hard to pin down any single explanation.Today’s youth by contrast are few in number and are growing up in ever older societies. In Germany, for example, the median age is now 46.Growing equality between young men and women may also be having an effect.  The transfer of unskilled jobs to developing countries and of menial jobs to immigrants has put a new premium on education: today’s rich-world youth has far more schooling than previous generations.In America the share of people sharing their homes with their adult offspring is the highest it has been since the 1940s.Today, working mothers spend almost as much time on child care as stay-at-home mothers did a generation before.