Guest post: Humala is best for democracy in Peru
By Max Cameron and Michael Marx McCarthy
This Sunday, when Peruvians go to the polls to elect a new single-term president, they will be casting their ballots in an echo chamber of analogies. Peru’s election: deeply polarised
By Lucien Chauvin in Lima
Whoever wins Peru’s deadlocked presidential race on June 5 will have to move fast to keep political polarisation from derailing the country’s economic growth.
The final three opinion polls published one week before the vote found congresswoman Keiko Fujimori, 36, and retired military officer Ollanta Humala, 48, in a statistical tie. She leads among women, urbanites and young voters, while he leads among men, rural dwellers and older voters. Nearly 40 per cent of voters said they would never vote for her; the same percentage said they would never vote for him. Around 14 per cent of voters plan to spoil their ballots. Continue reading »
India retail: semblance of organisation?
Indian officials have been contemplating liberalising FDI in the country’s tightly regulated retail sector for years now, setting up high profile panels, and conducting studies to research the viability of the policy.
Kaushik Basu, India’s chief economic advisor, became the most recent supporter of the policy last week when he recommended that the government liberalised FDI in multi-brand retail in the country. But will the government finally bite the bullet? Continue reading »
Hungary: more English speakers please
Let’s overlook the uncomfortable fact that Hungary has a prime minister who is wont to impose sudden and discriminative tax burdens on foreign-owned banks, insurers, telcos and retail companies.
Let’s forget all that and concentrate on that one of the oft-mentioned barriers to attracting foreign investors to Hungary – that is, the population’s poor foreign language skills. Continue reading »
Chinese property: a bubble ready to pop?
Whether China’s real estate market is a bubble that could pop, knocking out Chinese growth and shaking the world’s economy, is a question that is now being asked by everyone from Brazilian iron ore traders to hedge fund managers in the City. In the first of a series on beyondbrics – with a separate series on FT.com – Jamil Anderlini, the FT’s Beijing bureau chief, says that whether it pops or not, the current situation is unsustainable. Continue reading »
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? The small states of the Gulf are competing to make a name for themselves internationally. Recent news from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates shows how important burnishing their image still is for all nations in the region—but also how many of their coming out plans remain very much works-in-progress. Continue reading »
El-Erian: the danger of emerging market inflation
Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of Pimco, has been in touch with his contribution to the emerging market inflation debate – and to warn of the global risk of stagflation. Here’s what he wrote to beyondbrics:
As detailed in Tuesday’s FT (“Global economy: A high price to pay”), inflation is the major challenge facing emerging economies as they seek to sustain their growth rates, alleviate poverty, and navigate a complicated global context. Continue reading »
China: coming to Russia’s rescue?
Russia may just have found the white knight it is looking for: one week after a pledge from China’s sovereign wealth fund to invest in the country’s latest round of privatization, the country’s second largest bank has thrown it’s proverbial hat into the ring.
The news will be welcome relief to Moscow’s mandarins. President Demetri Medvedev’s top economic adviser recently told the FT Russia needed to improve its investment climate amid growing capital flight. Continue reading »
Poland’s consumers drive recovery
The recovery in central Europe was driven by Germany and the powerful rebound in its exports. But now consumer demand is returning as a motor.
Poland’s first-quarter growth of 4.4 per cent year-on-year, announced on Tuesday and in line with analysts’ forecasts, included a 4.5 per cent increase in domestic demand. Private consumption was up a healthy 3.9 per cent, topping consensus analysts’ estimates in a Bloomberg poll of 3.8 per cent. Continue reading »
EMs: saving the world, paying the price
When the developed world nosedived into the Great Recession in 2007, few economists thought emerging markets would grow quickly enough to prevent a prolonged global downturn. But they did.
Now they risk paying the price in the form of inflation. As Stefan Wagstyl, emerging markets editor and editor of beyondbrics, argues on the FT’s analysis pages on Tuesday, rising food and fuel prices are having dangerous knock-on effects. Continue reading »
New York headlines
* Beijing steps up TV censorship
* Vedanta may go ahead with the acquisition of Cairn India as oil prices surge
* Russia signs Afghan arms contract with US
* Lagarde lobbies for IMF support in emerging markets
* RBS moves to tap into Chinese IPO market Continue reading »
Latin America: reasons to be cheerful
There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about Latin America. As the FT argues in a leader on Tuesday: “Despite the commodity windfall, most major economies are running budget deficits and risk overheating…. The world’s most unequal continent suffers from conspicuous corruption, rising crime and a flourishing illegal drugs trade.”
Take a longer view, however, and the picture is more promising. Continue reading »
Further reading: Goldman and Libya
Tuesday’s best picks from the beyondbrics team: measuring inequality in China, and looking at why factory workers are lonely.
Also, how Gaddafi almost became a major Goldman Sachs shareholder. Continue reading »
China energy: supply vs demand
Try as it might to outrun market forces, China’s decision to hike electricity prices from June 1 shows that even the mighty mandarins in Beijing cannot ignore basic laws of supply and demand. They finally flinched late on Monday, announcing a roughly 3 percent increase in power prices for non-residential users in a move to combat looming blackouts by stimulating more electricity production and discouraging consumption.
The immediate prompt was the threat of a nationwide 40 gigawatt power shortage this summer, China’s worst since 2004. To put this in perspective, all the power plants in Sweden could be hooked up to the Chinese grid, but there still would not be enough electricity to fill the hole. Continue reading »
London headlines
* Beijing steps up TV censorship
* Vedanta may go ahead with the acquisition of Cairn India as oil prices surge
* Russia signs Afghan arms contract with US
* Lagarde lobbies for IMF support in emerging markets
* RBS moves to tap into Chinese IPO market
* Rio Tinto boosts purchases in China Continue reading »
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