Climate Change: Indonesia and burning carbon-rich peatlands

Heavy smoke hangs over the Indonesian islands of Bangka and Belitung as well as Kalimantan (73% of the island of Borneo, excluding East Malaysia and Brunei). This thick smoke comes from the peat fires that have engulfed these peatlands. On September 11, 2019, NASA/NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite using the VIIRS instrument (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) captured this dramatic photo of the smoke rising from these islands in Indonesia.

In August 1883 the eruption of the Krakatoa (Indonesian Krakatau) volcano on Rakata Island between Java and Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), was one of the most powerful in recorded history. Explosions were heard 2,200 miles (3,500 km) away in Australia as ash and rock was blasted to a height of 50 miles (80 km) in the atmosphere.

War and Peace: Tolstoy's rejection of 'Great Man' leadership myth

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), left, and Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) in Gaspra, Crimea, May 1901. At a previous meeting, Tolstoy commented, “You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.'"

Leo Tolstoy (Lev Nikoláyevich Graf (Count) Tolstóy, in Russian,) one of the world’s greatest novelists, is the author of the novel 'War and Peace,' which was written in 1865–1869. It is set in the period from 1805 to 1820 and describes the war between Russia and France through 1812. The book also contains an analysis of leadership that has resonance today, and Tolstoy rejects the notion that great men were instrumental in achieving success or being solely responsible for failure in history.

Crazy economics have fuelled Hong Kong's protests

Last year a couple sold a parking space in Kowloon (in North Hong Kong on a mainland peninsula across from Hong Kong island's Victoria Harbour) for HK$6m (US$765,000). In 2017 the Straits Times of Singapore reported that a 4,242 sqft (394 sqm²) apartment had sold for HK$560m (US$71m).

This year, Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, ranked 32nd out of 35 global cities with an average property price of RM494,266 (US$119,738), according to Global Living report by US real estate firm CBRE.

The popes of French wine

Grape cultivation or viticulture is almost as old as civilisation and the Phoenicians of the East Mediterranean carried the grape into France about 600 BCE. This year an archaeologist at the University Of York, UK, disclosed in a paper where he is the lead author, that grapes from the Jura region in Eastern France, near the border with Switzerland, which are used to produce Savagnin blanc (a white wine not to be confused with Sauvignon blanc), are the exact same grape, down to the genetic level, which have been grown there for at least 900 years.

Ireland's transactional membership of the European Union

The Treaty of Accession 1972 was the international agreement which provided for the entry of Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the United Kingdom to the European Communities. Norway did not ratify the treaty after it was rejected in a referendum held in September 1972.

Here Jack Lynch, taoiseach/ prime minister, signs for Ireland. Ireland was the poorest country in Western Europe in 1972 with a GDP per capita at 50% of new EEC member Denmark, which was the richest. The 3 new members formally joined on January 1, 1973.

When Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973, the Iron Curtain hemmed in millions in the vast prison that was the Soviet Union and its satellite states while military juntas ruled Spain, Portugal and Greece. By any measure, the enlargement to 28 countries and the development of the European Union from the wasteland in the aftermath of World War II, has been a remarkable success of gigantic proportions. Ireland has benefited enormously and compromise is the essence of such a huge project.

Since the UK Brexit vote in June 2016 support in Ireland for European Union membership as reflected in opinion polls has risen to highs of over 90%. However, there has always been a significant transactional aspect to membership including the cute hoorism that has been a perennial factor in domestic politics.

Irish prices 27% above EU average, adjusted disposable income below

In 2018 Ireland had the second-highest prices of consumer goods and services in the European Union. Denmark was on top at 38% above the average. It appears Luxembourg was level with Ireland but about 40% of the duchy's workforce live beyond its borders. Germany was just 4% ahead while Britain was at 17%. The Irish difference with Spain was 34%.

Ireland was the only EU member country to have experienced a fall in consumer prices in 2008-2012 and it's level was 18% above the EU average in 2013.

Irish and Euro Area debt as recession fears rise

Debt data above are in respect of 2017 and 2007 for the European Union's 27 member countries (ex-UK) taken from the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Global Debt Database as both public and private debt data are available.

Low interest rates, globalization, technological change and ageing

“May you live in interesting times," is claimed* by non-Chinese to be a Chinese blessing or curse and we are today living through not only interesting times in economics and finance but unique ones in the history of commerce.

Ireland's missing exporters

Naïve commentary on exporting and opening new overseas markets is not uncommon. International expansion often ends in failure — research published in 2017 by Banco de España (Bank of Spain) on service firm exporters in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain found that French export starters had the lowest survival rate with 31% of firms staying in the market after the first year. Spain was at 36% and 57% of new exporters had survived in Germany.

Industrial Revolution in Ireland: Fortune and Misfortune

The ruins of a large 5-storey factory building in open countryside in the townland of Knocknagarrane 4 kilometres south-west of the West Cork town of Bandon (visible from the road linking the villages of Old Chapel and Timoleague), is a symbol of the heroic failure to bring the British Industrial Revolution to the area. However, the entrepreneuring family that built the factory would still have a local economic impact for 100 years more.

A 'winter of discontent' and Brexit

The ship of fools (from a 1549 German woodcut) is an allegory, originating from Book VI of Plato's Republic — written in 360 BCE (Before Common Era) — about a ship with a dysfunctional crew (Wikipedia): "Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarreling with one another about the steering––every one is of the opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces any one who says the contrary."

Brexiters dismiss warnings that a 'No Deal' departure from the European Union on October 31, 2019, will trigger chaos at ports with risks of food and medicine shortages coupled with massive disruptions to international supply chains.

Fintan O'Toole Brexit and Irish direct democracy

Fintan O’Toole, the chief political and arts commentator of the Irish Times newspaper, has made a stunning leap from November 2010 when he called the economic bailout of Ireland by the European Union-International Monetary Fund, “the longest ransom note in history,” to a torrent of scathing commentaries since mid-2016 on the Brexit decision by Britain to leave the EU.

Brexit & Global Britain: UK's top global trade surplus in 2018 with Ireland?

In 2018 46% of UK goods and services exports went to the EU while 2% went to Africa. According to the Financial Times in 2018, Chinese goods exports to Africa were eight times larger than those of the UK and even bigger than the top three exporters — Germany, France and the US — combined.

Brexiters with an ambition to make Britain an exporting superpower may be surprised that the UK’s official second biggest global trade surplus in 2018 was with Ireland. The United States was in first place but it’s possible that Ireland should have the top rank as the US claims 2018 goods and services surpluses with the UK!

European Central Bank: German word ‘schuld' can mean either 'debt' or 'guilt'

Emmanuel Macron, French president, with Mario Draghi, ECB president
Brussels, June 21, 2019

The German word ‘schuld' can mean either 'debt' or 'guilt' and Germans have a history of aversion to debt and fiat money (government-issued currency that is not backed by a metal such as gold or silver). The genesis of this obsession pre-dates the hyperinflation in the aftermath of the First World War.

2021 Post: Irish standard of living at 13th in EU27 and 19th among rich OECD countries

This map has the 2020 data

Among the 31 advanced (defined by the International Monetary Fund: IMF1) / rich countries of the 38 member Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Ireland had the 19th ranking for Household net adjusted disposable income per capita. The poor occupational pension coverage in the Irish private-sector workforce is also relevant to the standard of living.

2021 Post: Irish standard of living at 13th in EU27 and 19th among rich OECD countries

While Ireland had a GDP (gross domestic product) per capita at 87% above the EU28 average in 2018, a proxy for material standard of living per capita was again below the EU28 average and that of Italy despite the latter's long period of economic stagnation.

The poor state of entrepreneurship in Ireland

“Ireland is ranked among the most entrepreneurial countries in the world with increasing opportunities for budding MBA entrepreneurs,” according to a 2018 article sponsored by the UCD Michael Smurfit Business School. A year before Enterprise Ireland, the public enterprise agency, stated, “In Ireland, there was (sic) an estimated 35,000 new business owners in 2016. 1 in every 23 people in Ireland (aged 18 to 64 years) is a new business owner. This is similar to the US (1 in every 25 people), and high compared to many other European countries, where the average is 1 in every 29 people.”

Is Irish public spending out of control?

From economic heyday of British Empire to EU and Brexit

Boris Johnson, a possible prime minister of the United Kingdom, wrote in a column in the Daily Telegraph in May 2016:

Germany's 2018 global goods trade with 237 countries/ territories

Germany had merchandise goods trade with 237 countries and territories in 2018 encompassing every region of the world — with partners that were large, small and tiny. There were trade surpluses with 167 and deficits with 70 partners.

Minimum corporate tax rate to imperil Ireland's FDI model

For decades Ireland felt assured that it would maintain the tax advantage that was first provided in 1956 to lure mainly American foreign direct investment (FDI) to Ireland. On Friday (May 31) in Paris 129 member countries of the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) adopted a Programme of Work laying out a process for reaching a new global agreement for taxing multinational enterprises.

Ireland in top 10 for competitiveness in world in 2019 - Fact or Fiction?

IMD, the Swiss business school, released its World Competitiveness Rankings for 2019 this week with Singapore at the top of ratings of 63 countries. Ireland returned to a 7th ranking it had achieved in 2016 based on data for 2015 — the year of Leprechaun Economics when moves by Apple and other multinationals to reallocate via accounting entries (not relocate) assets such as intellectual property (IP) to Ireland, had resulted in GDP (gross domestic product) rocketing over 26%.

Ireland wants ‘modest’ global corporate tax reform

OECD data published earlier this year showed show that corporate income tax remains a significant source of tax revenues for governments across the globe. In 2016, corporate tax revenues accounted for 13.3% of total tax revenues on average across the 88 jurisdictions for which data are available. This figure has increased from 12% in 2000. Corporate taxation is even more important in developing countries, comprising on average 15.3% of all tax revenues in Africa and 15.4% in Latin America & the Caribbean, compared to 9% in the OECD.

The Irish Government had hoped that global corporate tax reform was on a “slow boat to China” but the winds of change are accelerating and on Thursday this week, Pascal Donohoe, finance minister, told a conference in Dublin that he wished for “modest” reform.

New Cold War: Containing China is a dumb policy

At current prices combined US-China GDPs of $21.3trn & $14.2trn is 41% of global GDP of $87trn in 2018. Using Purchasing Power Parities the International Monetary Fund estimates China's value at 19trn & US at 15trn. China had been the world’s biggest economy for about 2 millennia & in the 1890s was overtaken by the United States.

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, this week quoted lines from a poem by Robert Frost (1874-1963), an American poet, “Some say the world will end in fire/ Some say in ice.” Wolf said these lines "capture the world’s possible economic prospects. Some warn that the world of high debt and low-interest rates will end in the fire of inflation. Others prophesy that it will end in the ice of deflation." The more present economic danger this week is addressed in a special report in The Economist and David Rennie, the Beijing bureau chief and author of the Chaguan column on China, writes, "If a vengeful America wants to hurt China, there are few incentives for Chinese officials to propose imaginative concessions or urge reforms that might repair ties with America. In geopolitics as in marriage, contempt is an emotion that leads to bad outcomes."

Trade dispute

The fiction in Irish Times Top 1000 2019 leading companies

This week the Irish Times announced the publication of its ‘Irish Times Top 1000 2019, the definitive guide to Ireland’s leading companies’ with a headline ‘Apple is still on top but Google is surging ahead in business league table.’

Idiots reject compelling science of climate change

I was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on a day in July 1995 when the noontime temperature rose to almost 50 degrees Celsius. Saudi Arabia had its record hottest temperature on June 22, 2010 at 52.0°C (125.6°F) in Jeddah. The record heat was accompanied by a sandstorm, which resulted in 8 electric power plants to fail.