Mr Tang, a wine connoisseur who as finance secretary famously removed duty on wine, had been evasive about the illegal construction
Written by China News Headlines: Finance, Business & Politics - FT.com on February 17th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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The country’s rush to buy the precious metal is a sober reminder that locals are looking to a traditional haven for their savings, writes John Lee
Written by China News Headlines: Finance, Business & Politics - FT.com on February 16th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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UK Only Article:
standard article
Issue:
A way out of the woods
Fly Title:
Consumption economics
Rubric:
At least one of China’s economic imbalances is narrowing
Location:
HONG KONG
A LETTER arrived at the White House a day or two ahead of China’s president-in-waiting this week. The letter condemned China for its big trade surplus, which it blamed on the country’s cheap currency, among other economic sins. It was written by Sherrod Brown, a senator from Ohio, who sponsored a bill passed by the Senate in October that would impose tariffs on countries that undervalue their currency.
But is China’s currency still undervalued by the Senate’s own definition? The bill relies on the IMF’s methods (it has three) to identify offending exchange rates. In his letter, Mr Brown referred to one IMF calculation showing that the yuan was undervalued by 23%. That estimate, made in September, was based on the exchange rate required to bring the country’s notorious current-account surplus into line with the “norm” for a ...
Written by Chinese Economy on February 16th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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IN 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev took over as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, India published its seventh economic plan. Its preface said planning was a “precious gift” from Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, who had been an admirer of Soviet economics. Inevitably, the goals of the document, which included ending poverty by 2000, were missed by a country mile as India slipped towards a crisis that prompted it to open up its economy in 1991.Yet some things about the report have the capacity to surprise today. The preface’s author, Manmohan Singh, went on to lead the 1991 reforms and is now prime minister. The body behind it, the Planning Commission, is still alive and will soon launch its 12th plan for the five years beginning in April. It is the most powerful organ in India that would not be invented if it did not already exist. It is run by a bureaucratic rock star and, weirdly, is a bastion of liberal views in a government that has fallen out of love with reform.By rights, India’s Planning Commission should be toast. Since 1991 the private sector has boomed, taking more...
Written by The Economist: Asia on February 16th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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Thick-skinned, buoyant and quick?
Correction to this articleIN THEIR presentations to foreign investors, Indonesian officials often like to begin with a montage of images from their fascinating country: the elegant mast of Jakarta’s Wisma 46 skyscraper, for example, and the vast ninth-century Borobudur monument. One presentation last year even featured a Komodo dragon peering out of the frame.
As a symbol of Indonesia’s economic virtues, these enormous and venomous lizards, native to a couple of islands, are not obviously appealing. But they are apt. The Komodo is thick-skinned, with scales resembling chain-mail, and surprisingly quick. That is a fair description of Indonesia’s resilient, resurgent economy. It grew by 6.5% in 2011, according to figures released this month, its...
Written by The Economist: Asia on February 16th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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INDIA’S foreign minister, S.M. Krishna, gushes about the close “civilisational, cultural” ties his country shares with Sri Lanka. He notes how India is the biggest trading partner and source of tourists for the island nation, plus one of the largest investors. It dishes out pots of aid, including roughly $300m for 50,000 Tamils, displaced in a brutal civil war that ended in 2009, to build houses near Kilinochchi and Jaffna in Sri Lanka’s north. And India is building a power station, and renovating railways and a port.Memories in Sri Lanka of India’s troubled role in the long and bitter civil war appear to be fading. Meanwhile, India, officially, does not worry about signs of its neighbour’s dalliance with China. That is despite the news last month that Chinese investors took 85% control of the project extending Colombo’s main commercial port, which handles goods traded almost entirely with India. “Sri Lanka is sensitive to the security concerns of India,” says the foreign minister, reassured.But regardless, Mr Krishna says, India does not (any longer) meddle in the affairs of its neighbours. “We will not...
Written by The Economist: Asia on February 16th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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GIVING on to one of the Cambodian capital’s grand, crumbling boulevards is an unusually modern, unfeasibly clean building: the home of the South Korean embassy’s commercial section. It is also noticeably big, indicative of South Korea’s growing economic ties with one of the poorest countries in the region. Officials point out that two of South Korea’s biggest banks opened here in 2009, and South Korean engineers are building Phnom Penh’s highest building. South Korean investments, though impressive, lag behind the Chinese and Japanese ones, but relative to South Korea’s size, the embassy’s staff like to think that they are not doing badly.Besides the usual commercial ties, however, South Korea has been cultivating another, equally significant, link with Cambodia. Impressed by the economic success of South Korea over the past decades, Cambodian officials and businessmen are now flocking to Seoul, South Korea’s capital, to find out how the country has done it. And the South Koreans, proud of their achievements and eager to tell the world, are doing everything they can to oblige. It is an effective exercise of “soft...
Written by The Economist: Asia on February 16th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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Beijing seeks to challenge a tradition that the bank’s chief be a US citizen after it said that the next president should be selected in an open competition
Written by China News Headlines: Finance, Business & Politics - FT.com on February 16th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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The world’s second-largest economy struggles to deal with the immense environmental degradation that has accompanied economic growth
Written by China News Headlines: Finance, Business & Politics - FT.com on February 16th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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Without the iPhone and iPad, it would be a struggling computer maker trying to fill the gap left by shrinking iPod sales
Written by China News Headlines: Finance, Business & Politics - FT.com on February 15th, 2012 with comments disabled.
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