Don’t like the currency? Create your own

[C]onsumers in the region southeast of Munich use (the chiemgauer) to buy products as diverse as pizza, haircuts and rugs. Aimed at fostering the production and consumption of local products and services, the chiemgauer challenges the central banking orthodoxy that pumping more cash into an economy accelerates inflation and eventually harms growth.

“When people use the chiemgauer, the apple juice producer sells more bottles and the cheese maker sells more cheese,” Mr. Gelleri said. “In theory, this is not supposed to happen, but the fact is it does.”

While more than 300 million people in Europe use the euro to buy life’s essentials, a small but growing number concentrated in the German-speaking world use a proliferation of currencies with names like chiemgauer, urstromtaler, landmark, kirschblüte and kann was.

Issued by private organizations, these currencies are probably better understood as vouchers — pieces of paper that can be redeemed for goods and services at regional businesses that have agreed to accept them. (…)

Regiogeld, a German association for alternative currencies, tracks 21 such types of money in circulation in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with an additional 31 in preparation. Gerhard Rösl, an economist with the University of Applied Sciences in Regensburg, Germany, has also
located similar experiments in Denmark, Italy, Scotland, Spain and Italy. (New York Times)

Microcredit

As founder of the Grameen Bank receives Nobel Peace Prize, the profile of microcredit lending grows

Bangladeshi Economist Claims Nobel Peace Prize [Real Player] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6605060

Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony 2006 [Windows Media Player]
http://nobelprize.org/award_ceremonies/ceremony_oslo/video/2006/index.html

Grameen [pdf, Windows Media Player
http://www.grameen-info.org/

The Microcredit Summit Campaign [pdf]
http://www.microcreditsummit.org/

Kiva.org: Loans that change lives
http://kiva.org/

(thanks)

Greater threat than violence: Water

My students will recognize an issue that I have been discussing for years now.

Beyond the household, competition for water as a productive resource is intensifying. Symptoms of that competition include the collapse of water-based ecological systems, declining river flows and large-scale groundwater depletion. Conflicts over water are intensifying within countries, with the rural poor losing out. The potential for tensions between countries is also growing, though there are large potential human development gains from increased cooperation.

See the UN’s 2006 Human Development Report.

NationMaster

http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php

With endorsements from such respectable institutions as the New York Times and the BBC, NationMaster presents a formidable amount of data for the general public in a way that is both accessible and at times, downright addictive. The website brings together data from such sources as the CIA World Factbook, the United Nations, as well as other such organizations.

On the left-hand side of the page, visitors can peruse areas such as “Top Stats”, “What’s New” and “Stats in the News”. The “Top Stats” presents information on the countries with the greatest life expectancy, the highest median income, and so on. Journalists may find the “Stats in the News” area particularly helpful as it presents data on topical areas of interest such as statistics on bird flu infection rates and oil consumption. Additionally, users can offer comments on some of the data sets, and at any given time, there tends to be a great deal of commentary on almost all of the items featured on the site. (thanks)

One of the best aggregation of information on matters international!

Duopolies

Coke and Pepsi, McDonald’s and Burger King, Boeing and Airbus—this is an economy full of duopolies. One of those pairs, UPS and FedEx, is proving to be a fascinating Rorschach test about the state of the economy.

UPS and FedEx both make excellent bellwethers for the stock market as well as the economy at large. They have their fingers on the pulse of trade and services. When the economy is humming, these firms process ever-larger quantities of parcels, envelopes, and boxes. FedEx and UPS are also heavily exposed to price changes in key inputs—particularly transportation and fuel. So, their results can tell us quite a lot about how rising costs affect corporate profits, and thus stock prices.

Same but different:

FedEx gets most of its revenues from express delivery and has a small retail copying unit (Kinko’s); UPS has a larger presence in the global freight market. (via)

Controlling corruption: legal or cultural?

A recent article [pdf] with an astute metric:

Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is poorly understood. To disentangle these two factors, we exploit a natural experiment, the stationing of thousands of diplomats from around the world in New York City.

Diplomatic immunity means there was essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations, allowing us to examine the role of cultural norms alone. This generates a revealed preference measure of corruption based on real-world behavior for government officials all acting in the same setting. We find tremendous persistence in corruption norms: diplomats from high corruption countries (based on existing survey-based indices) have significantly more parking violations.

Coming soon to a planet near you: war over water

By 2025, more than two billion people are expected to live in countries that find it difficult or impossible to mobilize the water resources needed to meet the needs of agriculture, industry and households. Population growth, urbanization and the rapid development of manufacturing industries are relentlessly increasing demand for finite water resources.

Symptoms of the resulting water stress are increasingly visible. In northern China, rivers now run dry in their lower reaches for much of the year. In parts of India, groundwater levels are falling so rapidly that from 10 percent to 20 percent of agricultural production is under threat.

From the Aral Sea in Central Asia to Lake Chad in sub-Saharan Africa, lakes are shrinking at an unprecedented rate. In effect, a large section of humanity is now living in regions where the limits of sustainable water use have been breached – and where water-based ecological systems are collapsing.

The disputes erupting within countries are one consequence of increasing scarcity. But water is the ultimate fugitive resource. Two in every five people in the world live in river and lake basins that span one or more international borders. And it is this hydrological interdependence that has the potential to transmit heightened competition for water across frontiers. (via)

Cost of doing business internationally

Several years ago, the World Bank became concerned about the business climate and environment in different countries around the world. After a time, they decided to embark on the creation of a database that would provide indicators of the cost of doing business in various countries. With a keen eye towards looking at existing laws and regulations in each country, their team of researchers looked at such topics as starting a business, protecting investors, paying taxes, getting credit, among others.

Visitors with an interest in such matters can download their annual reports, view country specific reports (such as “Doing Business in Brazil”), and also take advantage of 155 printable country data profiles. Additionally, visitors can view the study’s complete methodology and also compare economies on various metrics. (via)

Globalization – numbers

Researchers attempting to wade through the murky and volatile waters of globalization can sometimes find the going rough. For the general public, even grasping the mere tenets of what globalization entails can be equally confounding. The Center for Global, International and Regional Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz has stepped in to help with their UC Atlas of Global Inequality.

Drawing on a wide range of data sets, their online Atlas “explores the interaction between global integration (globalization) and inequality.” Some of the themes visitors can explore include economic globalization, health, and income inequality. Along with these interactive features, visitors also have access to time series maps of the world that show patterns of inequality and a database that allows tables and graphs to be generated and downloaded for selected data and countries. (via)