Oil and natural gas travelling from the Middle East to China may begin to bypass the traditional Strait of Malacca shipping route as soon as the end of May, reported state-owned Xinhua News Agency on Tuesday, following the projected completion of a 1,100km Sino-Myanmar pipeline that will transport energy imports to China’s Yunnan province via Myanmar’s Indian Ocean coast.
Financial repression results from policies that allow governments to fund their borrowing through imposing costs on others – increasingly seen across global financial markets from Japan’s asset purchase programme to the European Central Bank’s outright market transactions. By artificially lowering the cost of debt below what would prevail in a free market, quantitative easing has been called a “stealthy default” by PIMCO, one of the largest bond investors in the world.
A series of important meetings to take note of this week: The African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Arab League economic summit in Riyadh, World Economic Forum in Davos as well as the EU-Brazil summit on Friday. More importantly, after months of speculation, British Prime Minister David Cameron is expected to announce on Wednesday that Britain will drift out of the EU and the European project will fail unless the bloc tackles three major problems: the eurozone debt crisis, faltering competitiveness as well as declining public support.
Monday, January 21
China will spend nearly $250 billion a year on educating tens of millions of youth moving from rural to urban areas, claimed a report by the New York Times on Wednesday, underlying the nation’s need to develop a multifaceted labour force in order to support further economic growth.
A government-funded study in Italy has revealed that the country’s infamous organised crime networks take in just 10.5 billion ($14 billion) a year, a fraction of previous estimates of their turnover.
The study, Gli Investimenti delle Mafie, by the Catholic University of Sacred Heart found that mafia revenues amounted to just 0.7 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product – much lower than a study by Milan’s Bocconi University last year that said criminal activity was responsible for about 10.9 percent of Italy’s income.
The pace of land grabbing in the developing world is accelerating fast. Foreign governments, financial institutions and corporate giants have combined to create a neo-colonial expansion, which has disastrous consequences for the local populations, as well as the environment.
The European Union’s ambassador to China has rejected reports of a trade war between the two economic heavyweights – which together make up the world’s largest trade relationship – and instead pointed out that the proportion of trade disputes between the EU and China is “actually very small”.
Besides its economic and social implications, the persistent decline of the American middle-class also poses a significant geopolitical threat: Can the U.S. really maintain its status as a global superpower when half of the country is either stagnant or already losing ground to the rest of the world?
The World Bank has reduced its global growth forecast from 3 percent to 2.4 percent in 2013, projecting that the downturn in Europe and fiscal problems in the United States will continue to weigh on investment and spending.
Andrew Burns, lead author of the World Bank’s twice-yearly Global Economic Prospects report, said that a recovery the bank had previously anticipated will be delayed, beginning “closer to the end of the first quarter and into the second quarter of 2013, rather than beginning a little earlier.”
China’s food safety watchdog, the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), has offered cash rewards of up to 300,000 yuan ($48,200) to any individual willing to report on health safety violations, reported Xinhua News on Tuesday, following the revelation of yet another food-related scandal last month – adding to the nation’s already abysmal food safety record.
