Political Economist

1.

"Heterodox Economics Newsletter," online webzine circulated among various types of non-mainstream (non-neoclassical) economists, including Marxian, Post Keynesian, Institutionalist and Feminist economists in English speaking countries (mostly US and UK).

Frederick Lee, a Professor of the University of Missouri Kansas City in the US organized this online journal a couple of years ago, and it soon became one of major communication channels in the US.

Main sections include conference information, new books and journal, etc.  

http://l.web.umkc.edu/leefs/htn.htm

2.

Progressive web magazine

www.zmag.org/weluser.htm

The following webpage contains the World Bank Research Evaluation Report published last December.

The report was aimed at evaluating whether the research programmes initiated by the World Bank and its activities during the time period from 1985 to 2000 were organized well so as to achieve the Bank's goals and objectives.

According to this report ,and to the Financial Times news articles regarding this report, previous World Bank researches were biased toward "exaggerating the benefits of trade and investment liberalization", without considering potential problems and macroeconomic instability in the developing countries. 

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/84797-1109362238001/726454-1164121166494/RESEARCH-EVALUATION-2006-Main-Report.pdf

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January 12, 2007

Bush’s Plan for Iraq Runs Into Opposition in Congress

By THOM SHANKER and DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 President Bush’s call to increase the American military commitment in Iraq ran into intense Congressional opposition Thursday from Democrats and from moderate Republicans who expressed profound skepticism.

A day after the president set out a new strategy for bringing stability to Iraq, the White House found few allies on either side of the aisle when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The reception she received suggested that Mr. Bush’s prime-time address to the nation on Wednesday had done little to build political support for sending additional troops to Baghdad.

“I think what occurred here today was fairly profound, in the sense that you heard 21 members, with one or two notable exceptions, expressing outright hostility, disagreement and or overwhelming concern with the president’s proposal,” the committee’s new Democratic chairman, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, said at the conclusion of Ms. Rice’s testimony.

Republicans were more supportive in the House, where the new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Armed Services Committee.

But Democrats were scathing in their criticism, and in both the House and the Senate, Democratic leaders moved ahead with plans to oppose Mr. Bush’s plan through nonbinding resolutions. While saying they do not plan any immediate effort to try to thwart the Bush plan by cutting off funds, some Democrats said they would continue to consider placing limitations on the administration when Congress considers a war spending measure later in the year.

Despite the decision by many members of his party to break with the White House over the troop increase, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said he would use parliamentary tactics to try to thwart the Democratic effort to adopt the Senate resolution opposing the plan.

In Baghdad, Iraq’s Shiite-led government responded tepidly to Mr. Bush’s announcement that he would send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq to bolster the effort to curb rampant sectarian violence.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki failed to appear as scheduled at a news conference and did not make any public comment. 

Meanwhile, President Bush and his top cabinet officials spent Thursday traveling and testifying in support of his new Iraq strategy. Early in the day, in an emotional ceremony at the White House, Mr. Bush awarded the Medal of Honor to the family of Cpl. Jason Dunham, a marine from Scio, N.Y., who was killed in Iraq in 2004 when he threw himself on a grenade to save the rest of his unit.

The president began crying during the ceremony. It was the second Medal of Honor proceeding to come out of the Iraq war. Afterward, he traveled to Fort Benning, Ga., where he spoke to Army soldiers about the Iraq plan. He said his approach would not produce an immediate reduction in violence but represented “our best chance for success.”

Some of the troops based at Fort Benning have already served twice in Iraq and are scheduled for a third deployment. Ms. Rice appeared on morning news programs before joining Mr. Gates at a news conference in the White House. Both then moved to Capitol Hill for a first substantive showdown with the new Democratic majority and an encounter with the shifting politics of the war.

At the House Armed Services Committee hearing, it was standing-room-only, with some spectators sprawled on the floor and others spilling out the door. In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican who has been critical of the administration’s handling of the war, drew applause when he described the president’s proposals as a “dangerous foreign policy blunder,” and vowed to oppose them.

Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and a vigorous opponent of the war, spoke of it as “quite possibly the greatest foreign policy mistake in the history of our nation.” Expressing doubt about whether Iraqis “are done killing each other,” Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, said, “Why put more American lives on the line now in the hope that this time they’ll make the difficult choice?”

Several Republicans questioned the Bush plan without rejecting it outright, but their call for greater detail made it clear they remained unconvinced. Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire agreed that approving new legislation in Iraq on sharing oil revenue would be central to weaving estranged Sunni Arabs into the political process, but he said no United States government official could describe the law to him.

“It’s the most remarkable law that no one has ever seen,” he said. Away from the Congressional hearings, White House and Pentagon officials held a series of private meetings with lawmakers on Thursday in an attempt to blunt the criticism, especially from Republicans. Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new American commander in Iraq, waved off reporters as he shuttled between the offices of Republican Senators John W. Warner of Virginia and Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

“Please, guys. Can I just make the rounds up here?” he said, declining to answer further questions. During their testimony, Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice declined to specify a time limit on the troop increase and were cautious about predicting rapid improvements in security in Baghdad, where most of the additional troops will be positioned, saying progress is likely to come gradually.

“I think that we all know that the stakes in Iraq are enormous and that the consequences of failure would also be enormous not just for America and for Iraq, but for the entire region of the Middle East and indeed for the world,” Ms. Rice said.

The deployment schedule, in which more than 20,000 fresh soldiers and marines would roll into Iraq over several months, was intended to give the president time to reconsider the increase should the Iraqi government fail to provide its share of security forces as promised, Ms. Rice said.

“I have met Prime Minister Maliki,” she said. “I was with him in Amman. I saw his resolve. I think he knows that his government is, in a sense, on borrowed time, not just in terms of the American people, but in terms of the Iraqi people.” Still, she spoke directly about Mr. Maliki’s failure to come through on his past promises to bring additional Iraqi troops into Baghdad.

“They haven’t performed in the past and so the president is absolutely right, and we have all been saying to them, ‘You have to perform,’” she said. Mr. Gates would not say when asked whether the planned American troop increases over the next few months could be withheld if additional Iraqi units promised for Baghdad failed to materialize.

 “We are going to have a number of opportunities to go back to the Iraqis and point out where they have failed to meet their commitments,” he said, adding, “I think our assumption going forward is that they have every intention of making this work.”

Pressed repeatedly by members of both parties about what steps the Bush administration would take if Iraq continued to balk, he added, “We would clearly have to relook at the strategy.” Mr. Gates said the Pentagon was revising rules governing mobilization of Army National Guard and Reserve members so troops who had already done a tour in Iraq in the past five years could now be sent back to Iraq if their units was remobilized.

But the new policy would aim to shorten the time Guard members were mobilized to a maximum of a year. He also announced a large permanent increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, a repudiation of the approach of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who argued for keeping ground force levels low and insisted that authorization for any additional troops be done temporarily.

Under Mr. Bush’s plan, the active duty Army total manpower over the next five years would grow to 547,000, an increase of 39,000 over the current level. In addition, the Marine Corps would grow to 202,000, an increase of 23,000.

The expansions would have to be approved by Congress. Democrats in both the House and Senate would not rule out eventually putting limitations on financing for the war if Mr. Bush continued on a course they contended defied the will of Congress and the American public.

But they say that possibility, which could open them to Republican attacks, will have to be faced later when an emergency spending request and Pentagon spending are considered in the spring and summer.

Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, the Democratic chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that sets military spending and a leading party critic of the war, is exploring ways to attach conditions to a Pentagon measure.

Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said “a wide variety of ideas are bubbling forth,” for how the party should respond to the president.

But beyond voting on a resolution to symbolically oppose the Iraq plan, he said it remained unlikely that Democrats could block the troop increase to Baghdad. “If you were going to have a so-called surge, part of that is supposedly by keeping people there longer,” Mr. Obey said. “It’s pretty hard to shut off funds for troops who are already there, so it gets very, very complicated.”

Late Thursday, James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group, whose report in November the Bush administration largely spurned, said in a statement that some of its recommendations were reflected in Mr. Bush’s plan and urged the White House to give “further consideration” to the panel’s remaining ideas.

At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Mr. Biden issued a sharp warning to the administration after Mr. Gates discussed recent raids against Iranians in Iraq, including one in Erbil early Thursday, and described them as part of a new effort “to root out the networks” involved in bringing Iranian-supplied explosive devices into Iraq.

Mr. Biden responded by saying that the vote to authorize the president to order the use of force to topple Saddam Hussein should not be used as a vehicle for mounting attacks inside Iran, even in pursuit of cells or networks assisting insurgents or sectarian militias.

“I just want the record to show and I would like to have a legal response from the State Department if they think they have authority to pursue networks or anything else across the border into Iran and Iraq that will generate a constitutional confrontation here in the Senate, I predict to you,” Mr. Biden said.

Also, the State Department announced on Thursday that Timothy Carney, a retired Foreign Service officer who served as a senior civilian American authority in Iraq for three months in 2003, is the new coordinator for Iraq reconstruction.

Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

Comment

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Low wage competition isn't to blame for western job losses and inequality

US and British business culture is creating our widening pay gap, not the impact of sub-contractor economies like China

Will Hutton

Tuesday January 9, 2007 The Guardian

Mention globalisation and a curious mist descends that prevents straight thinking. It is now a given on left and right that billions of low-paid workers are going to take away western jobs and make European welfare and taxation levels unaffordable luxuries. The only options are trade protection or a Darwinian low-tax, low-welfare fight to the finish - equipped with whatever education and training we can get. We must all accept our fate.

The problem is this nexus of givens is wrong. Globalisation and trade have greatly enlarged the world's economic cake and our economic options, rather than narrowing them. The problem is that too much of the world is an excluded onlooker, because the rules of the game are massively tilted in the west's favour. It is alarmist, intellectually mistaken and plain counterproductive to blame foreigners for our problems.

Even China, portrayed as the Big New Threatening Thing, has not managed to change the rules. Close to 60% of its exports, nearly all its hi-tech exports and more than half its patents come from foreign companies. In essence it is a subcontractor to the west, boosting the profits of our multinationals and the real incomes of our consumers.

China has not a single brand in the world's top hundred, despite the projection that it will become the world's largest exporter in 2008. Buying Rover, and shipping some of the plant back to China, was viewed as an act of strength; in fact it was an act of economic desperation. By lending $200bn a year to finance the US trade deficit, China underpins the international dominance of the dollar. In the upper echelons of the Communist party and the state council there is anguished debate about why so many goods are made "in China" and not "by China", and why indigenous innovation is so disastrous. In 1995 China set a target of having 50 companies in the world's top 500 multinationals by 2010. It will be lucky to have any.

Subcontractors tend to have a limited impact on contractors' employment. So it proves with China. The most hawkish, protectionist thinktank in the US is the Economic Policy Institute. It believes Chinese imports have cost the US 2.24 million jobs between 1989 and 2005 - but the overall job churn over the same period exceeded 400m. The impact of offshoring, which attracts so much venom from the American left, is even smaller. The US bureau of labour's survey of mass layoffs identified 884,000 job losses in 2005, of which 12,030 went overseas - two-thirds of this to China and Mexico. In Britain it is a similar story. From April 2003 to July 2006 we lost 390,000 jobs - only 19,000 went abroad. A TUC unit set up to monitor offshoring four years ago has closed because there is so little to monitor.

The reason is simple. Manufacturing represents only a small proportion of the value in any good - there is invention, design, financing, marketing, transporting, warehousing, advertising - and even then wage costs are not decisive. A Chinese worker may earn 4% of the wage of an American or British worker, but is only 4% as productive. The consultants McKinsey, for example, estimated that only a quarter of Indian engineers and a tenth of Chinese engineers are equipped to work in multinationals. In a McKinsey survey of California, the savings from offshoring to China ranged from 13% in textiles to a tiny 0.6% for hi-tech companies. Cheap labour is not everything.

Western companies can still compete against low-wage Asian businesses, as a study of 500 multinationals by Susan Berger, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has confirmed. They tend to be better organised and embedded in better institutional networks. Nor, finds Peter Lindert, of the University of California, has globalisation hit the industrialised world's capacity to sustain its welfare states; on the contrary well- targeted high social spending is good for growth. Affluence begets affluence, as new forms of economic activity emerge driven by a combination of more discriminating, better educated and affluent consumers wanting new sophisticated services that western companies are more capable of delivering via new technologies- although they need to be physically close to their markets. This is the knowledge economy. Both the network of institutions that support it and the need for market proximity make western economies less vulnerable to globalisation. The US is world leader in technology, brands, universities and patents. In Britain the knowledge- economy programme of the Work Foundation (of which I am chief executive) has found that exports of knowledge-based services trebled from 1995 to 2005, while knowledge-based employment has risen from 30% of employment in 1990 to 41% today.

For the less developed countries it seems a magic circle that is ever harder to break into; if even China is no more than a subcontractor to the west's knowledge economy, what chance has it to break the western armlock in the process? And yet the west is hysterically convinced it is the loser - the reason for both the collapse of the Doha round of trade talks and no less than 20 anti-China trade bills in the US Congress.

The argument is false everywhere you look. Higher inequality is not caused by low-wage competition driving wages to the bottom or ever higher rewards for the skilled. What has changed is the new super-rich. Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon, of Northwestern University, show that in the US, incomes of the 99.99th percentile have grown outlandishly, rising 497% between 1979 and 2002. This is the principal cause of American inequality. It is the same in Britain; 20 years ago the average CEO of a FTSE 100 company earned 25 times the average worker's wage; today the multiple is close to 120 times.

China is not to blame. In Britain and America a business culture has developed where the share price is the be-all and end-all. Under desperately weak and unreformed corporate governance arrangements, CEOs have in effect written their own pay deals.

To deliver higher share prices, they have embarked on the world's biggest takeover boom. In hard cash, the cumulative value of deals in the US between 1995 and 2005 was over $9 trillion. In Britain over the past three years there has been a no less astonishing £500bn worth of deals. These are the chief driver of job losses and downsizing - and typically for negligible productivity gains. The "enlightenment" obstacles to this - regulation, a sense of long-term ownership, media scrutiny, competition rules, strong trade unions and a belief in equality - have been progressively weakened. Western capitalism is losing its embedded checks and balances, its morality and, ultimately, its legitimacy.

Instead of demonising China as a threat, we should see it for what it is - both an opportunity and a country in trouble that we need to help make the transition to a more viable economic structure, in its interests and in ours. It needs to develop a soft "enlightenment" infrastructure; and we need to nurture and protect our own rather than throw it to the wolves because, allegedly, globalisation makes it too expensive. In fact, it has never been more important. We need to recapture the argument about globalisation from those who use it to serve their own interests - and fast.

· Will Hutton's The Writing on the Wall is published next week at £20; to pre-order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875 will.hutton@observer.co.uk

Bernanke calls for renminbi revaluation

 By Krishna Guha in Beijing Published: December 15 2006 06:06 | Last updated: December 15 2006 09:11

Ben Bernanke, chairman of US Federal Reserve, stepped into a political minefield on Friday when he released remarks branding China’s undervalued currency an “effective subsidy” for its exporters which was distorting patterns of production and trade. In what looked to be a last minute bid to avoid controversy, Mr Bernanke then dropped the phrase from his speech to the Chinese Academy of Social sciences, using the less inflammatory term “distortion” instead.

Mr Bernanke’s original text talked about “the effective subsidy that an undervalued currency provides for Chinese firms that focus on exporting rather than producing for the domestic market.” This phrase – even though not finally uttered by the Fed chief – is likely to be seized on by US manufacturers who have long pressed US government agencies to make the same determination in trade cases.

A Fed spokeswoman said Mr Bernanke’s decision to drop the word “subsidy” was “a spontaneous decision” aimed at enhancing the clarity of his remarks. She said the Fed had not been asked to drop the term by anyone in the US administration delegation in Beijing for the final day of the high-level strategic economic dialogue.

The Fed is standing by the language of the original text, which is posted on its website, and has not repudiated the view that the currency regime does amount to an “effective subsidy.”

As in the prepared text, Mr Bernanke called on China to embrace “further appreciation of the renminbi, combined with a wider trading band and with the ultimate goal of a market-determined exchange rate.”

He said this would “allow an effective and independent monetary policy” that would help promote “growth and stability.” The Fed chairman’s references to the currency were made in the context of a measured speech, in which he said that while currency appreciation would be “helpful”, the “most direct and probably the most effective way to reduce the external surpluses and increase the welfare of Chinese households” would be to reduce the incentive for households to save by improving the social safety net.

However, he insisted that a more flexible exchange rate was in China’s own national interest. Mr Bernanke said the ever-increasing amount of sterilisation bonds needed to mop up excess reserves would crowd out other financial assets.

But he suggested that the bigger danger is that China is channeling investment into export industries “whose economic viability depends on undervaluation of the exchange rate.” These projects could turn bad if and when the currency does appreciate, resulting in “an increase in non-performing loans.” In order for China to “enjoy the fruits of its growth” it would be necessary for the economy to shift more resources towards production for domestic consumption rather than export and investment.

“To create incentives for this you are going to need real effective exchange rate adjustment,” he said. Elsewere in his speech, Mr Bernanke warned that continued high levels of investment in industries such as steel which already showed “signs of excess capacity” suggested “capital misallocation” was currently taking place. He said greater competition in the financial sector would result in more efficient pricing of risks and “reduce the risk that uneconomic investments could exacerbate the problem of non-performing loans.”

Mr Bernanke said this misallocation of capital – “the result of an undervalued exchange rate and of capital markets that…remain distorted and underdeveloped” – was the “principal risk” to China’s prospects, and could lead to “slower growth and future financial stress.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006