Peter Gallagher

Temperatures for June in Victoria

2009-07-14T05:38:18-07:00

June 2009 was not as warm as June 2008, but still 0.8° C above the average for 1961-1990, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. There have been ten hotter Junes since 1950.

Remove the buy-local tax on books

2009-07-14T02:50:41-07:00

Yes! The right recommendation for a more competitive and better-informed (or, at least, better-read) Australia.

"The Government should repeal Australia’s Parallel Import Restrictions (PIRs) for books. The repeal should take effect three years after the date that it is announced." Extract from Research report - Productivity Commission

This discretionary quota on books maintains local margins for the global book publishers and printers at the cost of readers and competitive Australian publishing. Now maybe—at last—we will see a more aggressive release of electronic titles ('Kindle books') in Australia. Welcome to the 21^st century.

Market and PPP measures of GDP

2009-07-13T18:25:44-07:00

In comments on the previous post, Ian Castles AO, the former Australian Statistician, notes that the World Bank and IMF create confusion in their reports by mixed use of market-exchange-rate (MER) and purchasing-power-parity (PPP) bases for estimating output and growth. Simply, using market exchange rates to compare the value of output among countries over-estimates the size of developed economies and under-estimates the size of developing economies. This confusion affects their analyses of, among other things, trade data.

The charts (click the thumbnails), taken from the two sets of data prepared by the IMF, show the dramatic difference between MER and PPP bases for comparing output and growth. Using the PPP basis for comparison, developing countries' economies are much larger in relation to developed economies and projected to 'close the gap' sometime after 2015 (take the IMF projections with a grain of salt: they're just 'straight line' extensions of current patterns of growth). The only difference between the two charts is the identification of China. Note that using a PPP basis for comparison, China appears less dominant in the developing country group.

Caloric restriction diet doesn’t work

2009-07-13T04:02:24-07:00

Reports this week that a "nutritious but reduced-calorie diet blunts aging and significantly delays the onset of such age-related disorders as cancer…" are a perverse account of a study that showed no statistically significant effect of calorie restriction.

Sandy Szwarc shows that the supposed benefits appear only if the results are cooked by 'cherry picking' the trial's mortality records. She also summarizes the weight of evidence that calorie restriction 'life extension' is vodoo (or possibly a commercial venture in this case)

Carbon tariffs, permits and subsidies

2009-07-09T20:47:51-07:00

Gary Horlick, Washington trade attorney, former senior official of the Commerce Department and a very fine analyst of WTO law, sets out some of the impossibly tricky technical questions in plain langugage

"Perhaps the biggest international trade challenge -- and one on which a lot more work needs to be done -- is how the mechanics of international trade will work if each of the hundred and ninety countries (or even 10-15 regional groupings) has its own individual climate change implementation. What if some of them have border taxes, some require permits for imports, and others instead offset the costs for their domestic industry. Or each country has a cap- and-trade system with different limitations on the permits?" Extract from testimony to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee

A short paper that asks the right questions (to which there are few, if any, satisfactory answers). Thanks to Simon Lester for finding this.

The life of Robert McNamara

2009-07-06T17:56:10-07:00

Dead at 93 years of age. The last survivor (? I'm pretty sure) of Kennedy's clever, risk-taking, technocracy of the early 1960s.

A man who, like Lyndon Johnson, struggled with the terrible consequences of the wrong choices he helped to make in Vietnam, but unlike Johnson survived them. His unlikely translation to the World Bank from the U.S. Defense Department was (in contrast to the recent Wolfowitz debacle) a remarkable success, expanding the role and scope and intelligence of the Bank during the classic era of 'industrializing' development while pushing it strongly toward preferential support for the poor.

Modeling a Doha agreement on agriculture

2009-07-06T15:48:24-07:00

To conclude my series of posts on modeling a critical mass agreement on agriculture, I would like to show you how I set up UNCTAD's Agricultural Trade Policy Simulation Model (ATPSM) to project the economic impacts of an agreement to liberalize agricultural trade based on WTO's December, 2008, draft 'modalities'. In my previous post, I compared the results of this simulation with the results of a simulated critical mass agreement, also modeled in ATPSM.

In this video (click the thumbnail image: 17.5 minutes, about 25mb.), I walk through the setup of the simulation. Because the ATPSM program uses a graphic interface to the modeling tools, a video seems to be the best way to give you a feeling for what's going on and, perhaps, prompt you to think of ways to use the program yourself.

How bad is global deforestation?

2009-07-04T23:31:22-07:00

The short answer: if the data is reliable (it may not be) annual forest 'loss'—mostly conversion of land to agriculture—is small: a fifth of one percent and slowing. Does this small loss of forest add to net CO₂ emissions, or reduce them, or make no difference? It's not clear.

In this post I take a look at the FAO data on global deforestation rates, just to get a feeling for the size of the problem from a climate-change perspective (there are other perspectives, of course, including land-care). The data on the loss rate seems is questionable because of the difficulty of collecting it. Given the uncertainty about the net-emissions of forests—see over the fold—the reported rate of forest loss looks to be insignificant for climate change (only).

Another small step

2009-07-04T23:54:04-07:00

But it's impossible to ignore the significance of this continuing internationalization of the remminbi.

"Although it has no short-term implications for the full convertibility of the renminbi, the announcement provides ballast to the volley of political signals Beijing has been sending in recent months over its dissatisfaction with the US dollar." Extract from Financial Times

Ex-PMs attack Defense White Paper

2009-07-02T22:39:36-07:00

Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating, who would have believed it? Both criticize the obscurely Sino-phobic tone of the White Paper and advocate—in place of a more belligerent regionalism, or reliance on the US alliance (for something it is not designed to deliver)—a more effective regional engagement.

Doesn't convince the Colonel Blimps, of course, who imagine that with sufficient expensive and obsolescing weaponry, Australia could run a "totally independent foreign policy" (independent of those pesky foreigners, presumably).

Global Trade Alert

2009-07-02T22:13:07-07:00

Just before the London G-20 Meeting in April, Andy Stoler and I wrote a paper for a booklet published by the Center for Economic Policy Research in which we suggested that the best way to make G-20 governments live up to their promises was to expose their misdeeds on trade policy—including those that nominally complied with their WTO obligation—using a public website.

Specifically, we recommended that the site should not be run by one of the global institutions (WTO, World Bank) that are owned by governments, but should be a private venture open to contributions from individuals around the world. Why? Well, as the FT notes, in an editorial today, sovereigns are not likely to put much pressure on themselves:

"The problem with naming and shaming wrongdoers is that, all too often, they turn out to be shameless." Extract from Financial Times

I am delighted to learn that the co-editor of the booklet (Simon Evenett) and the publishers (CEPR) have created just such a website: Global Trade Alert. It has been launched in the past couple of weeks with the backing of institutional sponsors (government funds, mostly) and an advisory board of distinguished analysts. GTA already lists a couple of dozen measures with useful details including the trading partners and tariff lines affected (for goods measures).

A nicely implemented and potentially intriguing experiment in global transparency. Please visit and contribute.

Critical mass agreement vs the Doha Round

2009-07-02T15:39:54-07:00

We'll cut to the chase, shall we, in this fourth of my posts on modeling the impact of a 'critical mass' agreement in agriculture? Click on the tags at the left-side or at the bottom of this article to find the earlier posts.

A 'critical mass' agreement among 38 countries that account for 80 percent of world trade in the 30 top-traded agricultural products (all of them food) to eliminate import duties on those products would achieve about two thirds of the projected value of the global Doha agreement on agriculture. If the members of the CM eliminated production and export subsidies, too (turns out, they won't have much choice) the global gains would be a third as much again as those projected for the Doha agreement.

Click the thumbnail to see the results in a table. A brief explanation of the table: the CM-35 scenario assumes that 3 of the potential members of the critical mass agreement decide not to join. They are China, India and Indonesia. As you can see the projected 'static' global welfare impact is actually slightly larger if they stand-back because China and India (especially) would benefit from the opportunity to 'free ride' on the open markets of the other 35 countries.

Is the U.S.A. really warming?

2009-06-28T15:49:12-07:00

An examination of the evidence using the U.S. government's own records. The Australian BOM 'adjustments' are similarly large.

"The corrected data from NOAA has been used as evidence of anthropogenic global warming yet it would appear that the rising trend over the 20th century is largely if not entirely an artefact arising from the 'corrections' applied to the experimental data, at least in the US, and is not visible in the uncorrected experimental data record." Extract from Jennifer Marohasy

Let’s hope this means more clarity

2009-06-25T16:51:20-07:00

Trade ministers in Paris for the June OECD meetings are looking for Lamy's 'second track' to a Doha deal.

"U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk called for a new approach to the Doha talks, involving direct negotiations with key trading partners as the traditional multilateral format was not working…'We think getting more clarity around that ['exactly what the U.S. would gain'] may be the key to helping us find a solution to a way forward,' Kirk said after a meeting of ministers at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)." Extract from Reuters via Portfolio.com

Lamy did not mean—as this news report suggests—that the 'second track' would be series of bilateral deals. That's a long-standing U.S. fallback position (from the days of GATT), but I doubt Kirk had that in mind either. Here's the official account of what he said.

By the way, isn't it great to see that USTR has finally dumped that crappy old web-site and has adopted the much more accessible Obama-Whitehouse (or, maybe, Vivek Kundra) style?

Manufacturing copyright ‘consensus’

2009-06-25T15:42:23-07:00

A fascinating analysis of a 'coalition of interest' at work—strategies often alleged but rarely detailed with such clarity.

Geist shows how three Canadian entertainment industry organizations have manufactured the appearance of widening concern over copyright piracy and growing evidence of its impact.

"It is not just that these reports all receive financial support from the same organizations and say largely the same thing. It is also that the reports each build on one another, creating the false impression of growing momentum and consensus on the state of Canadian law and the need for specific reforms" Extract from Michael Geist

Geist notes that experienced politicians seem to understand what's going on here. That's to be expected: this is nothing more than an elaborate, effective and, in the scheme of things, acceptable lobbying strategy.

But that knowledge doesn't shield polticians—or the public debate—from the misrepresentation of either the data or the 'consensus' unless the insight is widely shared. Few make the effort that Geist has made to evaluate either.

How to prepare for FTA negotiations (Part III)

2009-04-17T18:28:59-07:00

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How to prepare for FTA negotiations (Part II)

2009-04-17T18:29:35-07:00

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How to prepare for FTA negotiations (Part 1)

2009-04-17T18:29:21-07:00

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