Já está no ar a mais nova newsletter da Creativante, cujo título é “Ásia: impressões preliminares (I)“, e que você pode acessar aqui!
Trata-se das primeiras impressões deste editor sobre sua viagem à China e à Coréia do Sul. Esperamos que tal relato seja oportuno!
Do blog do prof. Mark Perry (mjperry.blobspot.com)!
Por que pouco sabemos das razões da China e da India já terem sido super powers? Eis aí um desvio no aprendizado de história econômica “eurocêntrico” que tivemos!
Source: Network World
China is building dozens, maybe hundreds of large data centers and vast “cloud cities” — industrial zones that aim to provide the foundations to support as many as 20 data centers — to support the needs of its fast-growing online population, estimated now at close to 500 million.
The data centers will help to meet escalating demand from telecom providers, and for services such as e-commerce, online banking and e-government, and will also provide computing infrastructure for overseas firms looking to expand in China.
The boom is providing opportunities for outside firms such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM. “We have more people in China focused on data center development and strategy than, I believe, in any country in the world,” said Rick Einhorn, worldwide director for HP’s Critical Facilities Services group.
Some are skeptical that companies will pick China as a base for providing IT services internationally. “There are questions around ownership rights for data and other assets,” said IDC analyst Michelle Bailey.
A former security consultant who worked on data center projects in China said foreign companies have three main areas of risk: local employees absconding with data, traffic being monitored or interfered with, and the loss of equipment during sudden “inspections” by Chinese police.
Está cada vez mais complicado entender a economia mundial. Vejam esta notícia de The Economist (http://www.economist.com). Quero ver se o Ministro da Fazenda do Brasil vai chamar isto de “guerra cambial”!
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America and China: Is China a currency manipulator?
Oct 11th 2011, 14:17 by The Economist online
The yuan/dollar exchange rate and America’s trade deficit with China
ON OCTOBER 11th the Senate is due to vote on a bill that would lead to sanctions being taken against countries whose currencies are “misaligned”. One currency in particular—the yuan—is on the minds of legislators. But as the chart below suggests, the recent relationship between China’s currency and America’s trade deficit with China is not what China hawks in the Senate think it is. Rather than a cheap yuan leading to a flood of Chinese imports, the yuan has actually strengthened as the deficit has widened. There are many things American companies dislike about the way business is done in China: intellectual-property theft, the impossibility of winning government contracts, baffling rules on corporate ownership and so on. However the place for fixing these things is the World Trade Organisation, not Congress. President Obama’s administration has already passed on two opportunities to label China a currency manipulator, out of a well-founded fear of sparking a trade war. Senators should do the same (while hoping that China responds to their sabre-rattling by letting the yuan rise a little more, as happened the last time the Senate came close to passing a similar measure, in 2005).
Mais um post sobre a relação comercial USA e China (post de ontem do blog do Prof. Mark Perry: mjperry.blogspot.com)!
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We hear a lot about Chinese exports to the U.S., but we don’t hear as much about U.S. exports to China. Here are some facts from the U.S.-China Business Council:
China is the third largest export market for the United States ($92 billion in 2010), behind our NAFTA partners #1 Canada ($248 billion) and #2 Mexico ($163 billion), and head of #4 Japan ($60.5 billion) and #5 U.K. ($48.5 billion).
Our top five exports to China in 2010 were: Computers and electronics ($15.3 billion), farm products ($13.8 billion), chemicals ($11.8 billion), transportation equipment ($10.6 billion) and machinery ($9.3 billion). Except for farm production, the other top four export categories are all American manufactured products with the “Made in the U.S.A.” label.
Over the last decade from 2000 to 2010, U.S. exports to China grew by 468%, which was more than 8 times the 55.7% growth in exports to the rest of the world (see chart above of indexes for both series that are equal to 100 in the year 2000). On an annual basis, exports to China have been growing at an average rate of 19% over the last decade, more than four times faster than the 4.5% annual growth rate for exports to the rest of the world.
Novo post interessante do Prof. Mark Perry (mjperry.blogspot.com) no dia 09/08!
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A new paper from the San Francisco Fed “The U.S. Content of ‘Made in China’” has been getting a lot of blog attention, see Matt Yglesias, Doug Henwood and Tim Fernholz (HTs to Steve Bartin and Jonah Goldberg). One of the main points of the article is:
“Whereas goods labeled “Made in China” make up 2.7% of U.S. consumer spending, only 1.2% actually reflects the cost of the imported goods. Thus, on average, of every dollar spent on an item labeled “Made in China,” 55 cents go for services produced in the United States. In other words, the U.S. content of “Made in China” is about 55%.”
Expressed in dollar amounts, that means that of the $276 billion spent by consumers in 2010 on goods “Made in China” (or 2.7% of total consumer spending of $10,245 billion), only about $123 billion (0r 1.2% of consumer spending) reflects the contribution of Chinese content, and the other $153 billion (or 1.5% of consumer spending) actually goes to American companies and workers for value added in the U.S. from transportation, distribution, marketing, wholesale and retail activities.
For those goods “Made in the USA” with parts imported from China, the contribution of the Chinese content represents only 0.7% of total consumer spending.
Bottom Line:
1. The total share of U.S. consumer spending on: a) “Made in China” imports (1.2%, see chart) plus b) the value of Chinese inputs used to produce goods labelled “Made in the USA” (0.7%, see chart) together represents less than 2% (1.9%) of personal consumption expenditures (or $194.65 billion out of $10,245 billion).
2. The SF Fed concludes that because the “share of consumer spending attributable to imports from China is less than 2%, it is unlikely that recent increases in labor costs and inflation in China will generate broad-based inflationary pressures in the United States.”
Continuando nossa discussão iniciada no post anterior de que a China talvez não seja um centro de inovação, eis aqui mais uma evidência de que a China oferece mais mitos do que realidade.
Desta feita apresentamos um artigo muito interessante do National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies do Japão, escrito por Yuqing Xing .
O paper pode ser baixado aqui e o abstract segue abaixo!
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Abstract
China’s leading position in high-tech exports is a myth created by outdated trade statistics, which are inconsistent with the trade based on global supply chains. Assembled high-tech products, made with imported key parts and components, accounted for 82% of China’s high-tech exports. Current trade statistics mistakenly credit entire values of these assembled products to China, thus greatly inflate the export value. For instance, in 2009 China’s export in the iPhone amounted US$4.6 billion, of which only 3.6% was the value added by Chinese workers; its annual export in laptop PC valued at US$52 billion, but assembly accounted for only 3% of the gross value. In addition, 83% of China’s high-tech exports was attributed to foreign invested firms, in particular Taiwanese owned companies. Taiwan-IT companies have relocated 95% of their production/assembly capacity into and transferred mainland China to a top assembler of information and communication technology, such as laptop PCs, digital cameras and all i-products.
Excelente artigo que saiu hoje em The Wall Street Journal sobre a China!
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JULY 28, 2011
China as an Innovation Center? Not So Fast
An impressive volume of patent filings conceals serious challenges to Beijing’s R&D aspirations.
Hardly a week goes by without a headline pronouncing that China is about to overtake the U.S. and other advanced economies in the innovation game. Patent filings are up, China is exporting high-tech goods, the West is doomed. Or so goes the story line.
The reality is very different. China is indeed mounting considerable efforts on the innovation front. However, many of the pundits seem to confuse inputs with outputs.
The “inputs” for innovation are impressive. China’s R&D expenditure increased to 1.5% of GDP in 2010 from 1.1% in 2002, and should reach 2.5% by 2020. Its share of the world’s total R&D expenditure grew to 12.3% in 2010 from 5.0% in 2002, placing it second only to the U.S., whose share remained steady at 34-35%. According to UNESCO, China now employs more people in science and technology research than any other country.
At first blush, data on “outputs” also look impressive. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, Chinese inventors filed 203,481 patent applications in 2008. That would make China the third most innovative country after Japan (502,054 filings) and the U.S. (400,769).
Yet there’s less here than meets the eye. Over 95% of the Chinese applications were filed domestically with the State Intellectual Property Office. The vast majority cover Chinese “innovations” that make only tiny changes on existing designs. In many other cases, a Chinese filer “patents” a foreign invention in China with the goal of suing the foreign inventor for “infringement” in a Chinese legal system that doesn’t recognize foreign patents.
A better measure is to look at those innovations that are recognized outside China—at patent filings or grants to China-origin inventions by the world’s leading patent offices, the U.S., the EU and Japan. On this score, China is way behind the others.
Getty Images/Huntstock
Starkly put, in 2010, China accounted for 20% of the world’s population, 9% of the world’s GDP, 12% of the world’s R&D expenditure, but only 1% of the patent filings with or patents granted by any of the leading patent offices outside China. Further, half of the China-origin patents were granted to subsidiaries of foreign multinationals.
Why is there such a big gap between innovation inputs and outputs? Partly it may simply be a matter of time. Innovation requires not just new efforts but also a rich stock of prior knowledge. As new players on the technology frontier, Chinese organizations will need several years to build the requisite stock of knowledge.
But other factors are also at work. For instance, processes for allocating government funds for R&D projects remain highly politicized and inefficient. Policy makers have a strong penchant for megaprojects backed by individual ministries and give R&D grants based largely on political clout and connections rather than scientific peer review.
As Yigong Shi and Yi Rao, deans of Life Sciences at Tsinghua and Peking Universities respectively, observed in a recent editorial in Science magazine, for grants ranging from tens to hundreds of millions of yuan, “it is an open secret that doing good research is not as important as schmoozing with powerful bureaucrats and their favorite experts.. . . . China’s current research culture . . . wastes resources, corrupts the spirit, and stymies innovation.”
China’s research culture also suffers heavily from a focus on quantity over quality and the use of local rather than international standards to assess and reward research productivity. The result is a pandemic of not just incrementalism but also academic dishonesty. A 2009 survey by the China Association for Science and Technology reported that half of the 30,078 respondents knew at least one colleague who had committed academic fraud. Such a culture inhibits serious inquiry and wastes resources.
China’s educational system is another serious challenge because it emphasizes rote learning rather than creative problem solving. When Microsoft opened its second-largest research lab (after Redmond, Wash.) in Beijing, it realized that while the graduates it hired were brilliant, they were too passive when it came to research inquiry. The research directors attacked this problem by effectively requiring each new hire to come up with a project he or she wanted to work on. Microsoft’s approach is more the exception than the rule among R&D labs in China, which tend to be more top-down.
Yes, China is making rapid strides in some areas such as telecommunications technology. However, on an across-the-board basis, it still has quite some distance to cover before becoming a global innovation power.
Mr. Gupta is the Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Smith School of Business, The University of Maryland and a Visiting Professor in Strategy at INSEAD. Ms. Wang is managing partner of the China India Institute. They are the co-authors of “Getting China and India Right”(Wiley, 2009).
O Prof. Danny Quah, do Economics Department da London School of Economics and Political Science and LSE Governance, está com um novo paper na praça. Ele se intitula “The Global Economy´s Shifting Centre of Gravity”.
Como mostra o Prof. Quah, o centro econômico de gravidade do planeta está se deslocando, e, pelas suas projeções estará entre a India e a China lá pelos anos 2050! Quem viver verá!
Eis o resumo do paper, que você pode baixar aqui!
Abstract
This article describes the dynamics of the global economy’s centre of gravity, the average location of economic
activity across geographies on Earth. The calculations here take into account all the GDP produced on this planet. The article finds that in 1980 the global economy’s centre of gravity was mid-Atlantic. By 2008, from the continuing rise of China and the rest of East Asia, that centre of gravity had drifted to a location east of Helsinki and Bucharest.
Extrapolating growth in almost 700 locations across Earth, this article projects the world’s economic centre of gravity to locate by 2050 literally between India and China. Observed from Earth’s surface, that economic centre of gravity will shift from its 1980 location 9,300 km or 1.5 times the radius of the planet.
Matéria de capa da nova revista The Economist!
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China’s economy
China’s success owes more to its entrepreneurs than its bureaucrats. Time to bring them out of the shadows
Mar 10th 2011 | from the print edition
FEW would deny that China has been the economic superstar of recent years. Thanks to its relentless double-digit annual growth, it has become the world’s second-largest economy and in many ways the most dynamic. Less obvious is quite what the secret of this success has been. It is often vaguely attributed to “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”–typically taken to mean that bureaucrats with heavy, visible hands have worked much of the magic. That, naturally, is a view that China’s government is happy to encourage.
But is it true? Of course, the state’s activity has been vast and important. It has been effective in eradicating physical and technological obstacles: physical, through the construction of roads, power plants and bridges; technical, by facilitating (through means fair and foul) the transfer of foreign intellectual property. Yet China’s vigour owes much to what has been happening from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Just as Germany has its mighty Mittelstand, the backbone of its economy, so China has a multitude of vigorous, (very) private entrepreneurs: a fast-growing thicket of bamboo capitalism.
These entrepreneurs often operate outside not only the powerful state-controlled companies, but outside the country’s laws. As a result, their significance cannot be well tracked by the state-generated statistics that serve as a flawed window into China’s economy. But as our briefing shows, they are an astonishing force.
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First, there is the scale of their activities. Three decades ago, pretty much all business in China was controlled by one level of the state or another. Now one estimate—and it can only be a stab—puts the share of GDP produced by enterprises that are not majority-owned by the state at 70%. Zheng Yumin, the Communist Party secretary for the commerce department of Zhejiang province, told a conference last year that more than 90% of China’s 43m companies were private. The heartland for entrepreneurial clusters is in regions, like Zhejiang, that have been relatively ignored by Beijing’s bureaucrats, but such businesses have now spread far and wide across the country.
Second, there is their dynamism. Qiao Liu and Alan Siu of the University of Hong Kong calculate that the average return on equity of unlisted private firms is fully ten percentage points higher than the modest 4% achieved by wholly or partly state-owned enterprises. The number of registered private businesses grew at an average of 30% a year in 2000-09. Factories that spring up alongside new roads and railways operate round-the-clock to make whatever nuts and bolts are needed anywhere in the world. The people behind these businesses endlessly adjust what and how they produce in response to extraordinary (often local) competition and fluctuations in demand. Provincial politicians, whose career prospects are tied to growth, often let these outfits operate free not only of direct state management but also from many of the laws tied to land ownership, labour relations, taxation and licensing. Bamboo capitalism lives in a laissez-faire bubble.
But this points to a third, more worrying, characteristic of such businesses: their vulnerability. Chinese regulation of its private sector is often referred to as “one eye open, one eye shut”. It is a wonderfully flexible system, but without a consistent rule of law, companies are prey to the predilections of bureaucrats. A crackdown could come at any time. It is also hard for them to mature into more permanent structures.
All this has big implications for China itself and for the wider world. The legal limbo creates ample scope for abuse: limited regard for labour laws, for example, encourages exploitation of workers. Rampant free enterprise also lives uncomfortably alongside the country’s official ideology. So far, China has managed this rather well. But over time, the contradictions between anarchic opportunism and state direction, both vital to China’s rise, will surely result in greater friction. Party conservatives will be tempted to hack away at bamboo capitalism.
It would be much better if they tried instead to provide the entrepreneurs with a proper legal framework. Many entrepreneurs understandably fear such scrutiny: they hate standing out, lest their operations become the focus of an investigation. But without a solid legal basis (including intellectual-property laws), it is very hard to create great enterprises and brands.
The legal uncertainty pushes capital-raising into the shadows, too. The result is a fantastically supple system of financing, but a very costly one. Collateral is suspect and the state-controlled financial system does not reward loan officers for assuming the risks that come with non-state-controlled companies. Instead, money often comes from unofficial sources, at great cost. The so-called Wenzhou rate (after the most famous city for this sort of finance) is said to begin at 18% and can even exceed 200%. A loan rarely extends beyond two years. Outsiders often marvel at the long-term planning tied to China’s economy, but many of its most dynamic manufacturers are limited to sowing and reaping within an agricultural season.
So bamboo capitalism will have to change. But it is changing China. Competition from private companies has driven up wages and benefits more than any new law—helping to create the consumers China (and its firms) need. And behind numerous new businesses created on a shoestring are former factory employees who have seen the rewards that come from running an assembly line rather than merely working on one. In all these respects the private sector plays a vital role in raising living standards—and moving the Chinese economy towards consumption at home rather than just exports abroad.
The West should be grateful for that. And it should also celebrate bamboo capitalism more broadly. Too many people—not just third-world dictators but Western business tycoons—have fallen for the Beijing consensus, the idea that state-directed capitalism and tight political control are the elixir of growth. In fact China has surged forward mainly where the state has stood back. “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” works because of the capitalism, not the characteristics.
