Monday, June 25, 2018

Economic Facts of Week: Brexit videos and Ireland's low science base

FT Whitehall editor James Blitz looks at the mounting frustration of leading UK companies  Siemens and John Lewis  over the Brexit process and the UK's future trading relationship with the EU.

A softer Brexit is a better Brexit | The Economist — The Brexit vote took place two years ago. But when Britons voted to leave the EU they had no say in what sort of Brexit they wanted. It has become clear that a softer Brexit is better, and Britain need only look to Norway to see why.

Airbus SE has threatened to pull its investments in the U.K. if the nation exits the European Union without a deal. Bloomberg's Benedikt Kammel reports on "Bloomberg Surveillance."

The Irish border issue is one of the most contentious aspects of the Brexit negotiations. The FT's Alex Barker explains everything you need to know about the proposed options for a regulatory boundary and how it can be solved.

Ireland has a low science base and in the 2017 ranking by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, of the top 2,500 global firms by business spending on R&D, there are 23 Irish firms — 18 are fake Irish (mainly American), 2 are banks; Kerry Group is at 439, Glanbia at 2,306 & Kingspan at 2,485.

The Economist reports in this week’s issue: "CHINA’S urbanisation is a marvel. The population of its cities has quintupled over the past 40 years, reaching 813m. By 2030 roughly one in five of the world’s city-dwellers will be Chinese. But this mushrooming is not without its flaws. Rules restricting migrants’ access to public services mean that some 250m people living in cities are second-class citizens, who could in theory be sent back to their home districts. That, in turn, has crimped the growth of China’s cities, which would otherwise be even bigger...The plan calls for 19 clusters in all, which would account for nine-tenths of economic activity (see map). China would, in effect, condense into a country of super-regions. Three are already well on track: the Pearl River Delta, next to Hong Kong; the Yangtze River Delta, which surrounds Shanghai; and Jingjinji, centred on Beijing."

The IMF says in a report that "Latin America may be the most unequal region in the world, but it is the only region to significantly lower inequality over the past two decades, and the boom in commodity prices helped make it happen. With the boom over, poverty rates are edging up in some Latin American countries, and job creation has slowed. The region needs to find new ways to raise its currently low revenue collection and allow for further spending on key social areas, such as education and healthcare. This will help sustain growth and fight inequality and poverty.

Benefits of a boom, especially for South America

In our latest Regional Economic Outlook for Latin America, we show that poverty has decreased from about 27 to 12 percent, and inequality has decreased almost 11 percent across Latin America from 2000 to 2014. This period, commonly referred to as the commodity boom, saw the prices of commodities like oil, and metals, steadily increase thanks to growing demand from emerging market economies like China and India."

The IMF also reports “As Japan’s population ages and the birth rate is too low to sustain growth, the country is no stranger to coping with a limited number of working age people. 

As shown in the latest issue of Finance and Development, Japan is still a leader in robot production and industrial use. The country exported some $1.6 billion worth of industrial robots in 2016—more than the next five biggest exporters (Germany, France, Italy, United States, South Korea) combined. Japan is also one of the most robot-integrated economies in the world in terms of 'robot density' — measured as the number of robots relative to humans in manufacturing and industry. Japan led the world in this measure until 2009, when Korea’s use of industrial robots surged and Japan’s industrial production increasingly moved abroad.”