Brookings comes to India
How do you get Reliance’s Mukesh Ambani, Rahul Bajaj of Bajaj Auto (both pictured left) and Infosys’ Kris Gopalakrishnan on the same team?
The answer, it seems, is to bring a little Washington to Delhi. The Brookings Institution, a highly-regarded think-tank, is opening an Indian affiliate, and many of India’s big names have signed up. Continue reading »
China’s only children: risk-avoiding, untrustworthy pessimists?
China’s “little Emperors” have got a lot of bad press in the 30-odd years since Mao Zedong created a generation of pampered and pilloried only children with the “one child policy”. It did not help that KFC, the Western fast food behemoth, opened its first restaurant in China soon afterwards, helping plump up the little darlings to the point where obesity is a problem for children whose parents and grandparents lived through famine.
But now an Australian study has even less nice to say about the generation that dominates China’s labour force. It says the one-child policy has created a generation of risk avoiders. Hardly good news for Beijing’s plan to create an innovation nation by producing millions of Chinese replicas of Steve Jobs. Continue reading »
China: yellow light u-turn but red lights still apply elsewhere
A bit of a climbdown by the Chinese government on its yellow traffic light rule, which made running a yellow light as bad as running a red one.
Beijing, it seems, is increasingly ready to give ground on some issues prompting popular protest – unless the issues are really big ones. Continue reading »
Stop! China redefines yellow
China was already notorious for traffic jams but driving on its roads has just got that much more frustrating. A new rule forbids cars from “running” yellow lights and advises drivers to slow down on approaching intersections even when the light is green.
The intention behind the rule is a good one: to make roads safer. But on suffering mild whiplash today when the light turned yellow and my taxi driver slammed the brakes a few feet short of the intersection, it occurred to me that the authorities had not fully grasped the consequences of overturning a century-old worldwide traffic convention. Continue reading »
Guido Mantega’s positive picture
But the smiles were gone when Mantega, visiting the FT on Thursday, turned to the question of QE3: “The US pursues protectionist policies. Any country that manipulates its currency is practicing protectionism. We don’t do that.” Continue reading »
| About this blog | Headlines email | Blog guide |
| Regulars | Series | Archive |
Stefan Wagstyl
Rob Minto
Pan Kwan Yuk
Jonathan Wheatley
Heba Saleh