O ouriço e a raposa: jornal Tribuna de Macau

o ouriço e a raposa

Back to the basics

Each man has a way to betray the revolution (Leonard Cohen)

Durante os últimos cinco anos o mundo ocidental foi liderado por uma coligação estreita de duas nações que prosseguiu uma estratégia internacional dirigida a conter, num primeiro tempo, a repetição dos atentados terroristas do 11 de Setembro; num segundo tempo, a promover a conversão democrática do Médio Oriente e dos países que albergam regimes ditatoriais.

Decorrido este período de tempo é necessário reconhecer que o eixo da liberdade falhou nos seus propósitos e na sua estratégia. As razões são múltiplas e têm sido sistematicamente escalpelizadas. A cadência e o acumular de erros impõe que se altere a estratégia, se mude de executores e se redefinam objectivos melhor ajustados aos interesses das potências democráticas.

Não se trata de - de forma mesquinha - constatar que o elevado número de baixas humanas no Iraque [2900] supõe, por força da derrota republicana nas recentes eleições intercalares americanas, que se recue, deixando o pasto aos coiotes e aos abutres. Mas há que admitir que a continuidade da presença americana, britânica e dos seus aliados no terreno não serve, mais, a causa da democracia no Iraque e no conjunto do Médio Oriente. Mais do que isso é absolutamente prejudicial aos interesses do Ocidente, no médio prazo.

Francis Fukuyama disse-o, de forma ímpar, num artigo que publicou no New York Times, em Janeiro deste ano (“After Neoconservatism”, NYT, 19.01.2006): a aposta neoconservadora na conversão democrática do Afeganistão, do Iraque e dos seus vizinhos entrou em colapso porque não percebeu o contexto social, cultural e geopolítico em que actuava e porque se esqueceu que o que determina a acção dos países é um tríplice: o interesse nacional nas suas várias componentes, a necessidade de impedir que outros o ponham em risco (ou debilitem) e a projecção do poder e da sua influência, no plano internacional e regional. Porque neste domínio como no vácuo quando os grandes Estados deixam de estar presentes, o espaço vazio é ocupado pelos outros.

Como reza a canção o sonho foi bom enquanto durou. A quezilenta realidade da vida internacional impõe que se retorne ao bom senso, ao pragmatismo, ao cinismo dos sorrisos e à dislepsia (assumida) entre as boas intenções e os comportamentos.

Esta mudança de direcção impõe um conjunto de reajustamentos à actuação dos Estados Unidos, da Grã-Bretanha e do eixo democrático. Desde logo, uma reflexão séria sobre adversários e ameaças; depois, um inventário das metodologias capazes de as diluírem ou conter; terceiro, aquilo que em linguagem clausewitziana se chama a “contagem das espingardas”: apurar quem subscreve e se identifica com os nossos princípios e valores e está (ou não) disposto a correr riscos por eles.

Trata-se de um exercício exemplar - iniciado há pouco tempo pelo Conselho Geral da NATO - que mais adiante se provará útil, auspicioso e bem avisado.

O concerto das democracias1 confronta-se, a meu ver, com três ameaças que se têm organizado e agigantado, aproveitando a “distracção” do Ocidente com a guerra do Iraque. Em primeiro lugar, as forças, as redes do terrorismo internacional, incentivadas pelo exemplo e sucessos da Al Qaeda e que no Médio Oriente, na Ásia muçulmana, em África arregimentam, com enorme azáfama, seguidores, militantes e financiadores.

O terrorismo actual já não é o terrorismo de turbante e barba ridicularizado pelo cartoon de Bin Laden. É um “corporate terrorism” gerido como uma empresa, tecnologicamente bem apetrechado, sofisticado do ponto de vista organizativo, bem financiado e muito apoiado, ao nível da gestão da propaganda, por jornalistas, intelectuais e órgãos de informação sustentados pela Arábia Saudita e os principados petrolíferos do Golfo Pérsico.

Em segundo lugar, os países párias (no calão das RIs os “rogue states”), a Coreia do Norte, o Irão, a Síria e os seus aliados. Países que não formando, por enquanto, uma coligação política, partilham vários valores comuns - a teocratização do Estado, o combate ao cristianismo, a subjugação das mulheres, o silenciamento da imprensa livre, o ódio à modernidade - e se unem numa estratégia conjugada - a desestabilização do Ocidente, o isolamento dos Estados Unidos e da Grã-Bretanha, a redução da vigilância da comunidade mundial face aos atropelos aos direitos humanos, à propaganda belicista e nuclear; a fragilização das capacidades de defesa e de retaliação táctica do Ocidente e daqueles dois países, em particular.

Também aqui se vem cometendo o erro táctico de considerar estas ameaças incipientes ou destinadas ao fracasso. Preside aqui a falácia néscia que as forças da luz e da liberdade prevalecerão, em qualquer situação, sobre as da anarquia, do obscurantismo e do terror. Não se percebe é se por mão divina ou porque os “outros” são estúpidos.

Em terceiro e último lugar, as grandes nações emergentes asiáticas, a China, a Índia e a Rússia. Esta é uma ameaça de natureza diferente das outras e com finalidade distinta. Desde logo, porque não vislumbra a derrota do Ocidente, o aniquilamento dos seus valores, por outro lado, porque actua ao nível dos “soft powers” - a proeminência comercial, o assédio aos mercados energéticos, o controlo estratégico. Visa circunscrever o poderio do Ocidente e, sobretudo, dos Estados Unidos, no plano internacional, ditando ou pelo menos condicionando a “agenda”. Obrigando à concertação de estratégias, seja no plano bilateral, seja no plano das agências multilaterais.

O enleio pelas emergências benevolentes faz o trote nos media, marcando o tempo e os temas da actualidade, mas dificilmente ilude a questão essencial que o que está em causa é a (velha) rivalidade pelos recursos, pela influência e pelo poder.

Toda esta complexa malha de ameaças e interdependências sugere uma enorme capacidade de discernimento e cabeça fria aos designers da política externa do Ocidente. Não é por acaso que alguns velhos senadores da política internacional se têm dado ao trabalho de vir a terreiro2 repôr algum bom senso. Se as velhas explicações do tempo da Guerra Fria não se ajustam muito a um contexto de multipolaridade ou exogenia, o exercício de diagnóstico e a seriação de ameaças podem revelar-se de extrema utilidade como ferramentas de trabalho e previsão.

Faz todo o sentido voltarmos a soletrar conceitos-chave como appeasement, balance of power, Carter doctrine, collective security, compellence, deterrence, proliferation. Bem como a duvidar das boas intenções pespontadas pelos discursos demagógicos.

Imaginámos um tempo sem predadores, convictos que como que porque milagre mudáramos a natureza dos homens. Percebemos agora que o que mudou foi apenas a latitude, a língua em que se expressam, a religião que têm, a cor da pele. Os interesses porque se batem são os mesmos. Como dizia Benjamin Franklin “make youselves sheep and the wolves will eat you”.

1 Designo por tal a aliança formada pelos Estados Unidos, a Grã-Bretanha, alguns países europeus, o Canadá, o Japão, a Austrália e Nova Zelândia, principalmente.

2 “On negotiating with Teheran”, Henry Kissinger, Herald International Tribune, 1.12.2006.

*Especialista em Relações Internacionais. Escreve neste espaço quinzenalmente às quintas-feiras

MIFID: página 9 da edição 05.12.2006 jornal OJE

Mui excelsos leitores

Espero que tenham a oportunidade a edição de hoje do jornal OJE, mormente a página 9.

Em especial para todos de vós que estão atentos ao sector financeiro. Que atravessa uma vaga de regulação e de exigências de Compliance que está a alterar o paradigma do sector. Desta vez não se trata de mais uma obscura peça legislativa comunitária mas de uma nova Directiva sobre os Mercados e Investimentos Financeiros. Ao elevar os requisitos para operar e ao liberalizar, o Conselho Europeu e o Parlamento tentam dar profundidade ao Mercado de Capitais e à Gestão da Poupança no Espaço Europeu.

Encontram uma breve digressão minha sobre o tema em:

http://www.oje.pt/download.php/f/108/oje-108-completo.pdf

www.oje.pt (edição completa)

Mifid: artigo no jornal OJE

Caros leitores

Sugiro que possam ler o jornal OJE de amanhã.

O diário OJE (www.oje.pt) é já o líder nos jornais económicos e financeiros, tendo superado o Diário Económico.

O seu ritmo de crescimento permite augurar que a sua circulação possa ser, em Dezembro de 2006, superior aos dos dois rivais diários combinados.

O Director do OJE é um nome tradicional no jornalismo económico.

Amanhã o jornal publicará um artigo de 5.000 caracteres sobre a Mifid.

Uma versão ligeiramente retocada sairá num grande jornal semanário brevemente.

A tradição ainda é o que era

O Benfica ganhou em Alvalade. Afinal o resultado mais tradicional deste derby no estádio do clube verde e branco.

Foi lindo de morrer e ainda ficarem mais alguns por marcar... Nuno Gomes continuou a falhar de forma despudorada... Micolli a acertar na barra...

Novas de outros blogues

Se atentarem nos links que recomendamos, deixo-os com algumas recensões sobre o que lá se escreve:

- Rua 7: ácido, corrosivo, um estilo incisivo, político.
- Exílio de Andarilho: Relações Internacionais, vistas a partir do Oriente. Entrou em período de reflexão... Não queremos que acabe... Deixem mensagens de incentivo...
- MarketingMania: o congresso dos profissionais do Marketing, no início de Novembro, ocupa o destaque. Reflexões ponderadas pela pena do presidente da APPM.
- Marketing Faculty: cada vez melhor e uma referência na área do Marketing em Portugal.
- Pateira: goza, descaradamente, com o "caso" dos cartões de representação dos administradores não executivos da Metro do Porto.
- AbsolutMartunis: fala de um novo espectáculo de dança com açucar.

Marketing Inovador

O livro "Marketing Inovador" está pronto e foi entregue na Universidade Católica Editora.
Lá para meados de Fevereiro de 2007, um pouco antes do dia dos namorados, estará numa banca perto do leitor.

Agora estamos em pleno processo de convite e recolha de prefácios de ilustres profissionais do mundo empresarial e académico.

Iremos dando notícias por aqui...

Robert Barro sobre Milton Friedman

Palestra de Robert Barro, da Universidade de Harvard, no Cato Institute, sobre Milton Friedman.
12 fabulosas páginas em formato pdf para download fácil.

http://www.cato.org/events/monconf2006/barro.pdf

Minton Friedman: obituário da Reuters

Milton Friedman Dead at 94

A sad day.

"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Milton Friedman, the free market economist and winner of a 1976 Nobel Prize, has died, a spokeswoman for his family said on Thursday.

Friedman, who preached free enterprise in the face of government regulation and advocated a monetary policy that called for steady growth in money supplies, was 94."

Be sure to check out these two recent interviews w/ Milton Friedman, by Dr. Russ Roberts.

EconTalk, Friedman on Capitalism and Freedom: "Russ Roberts talks to Milton Friedman about the radical ideas he put forward almost 50 years ago in Capitalism and Freedom. Listen to the most influential economist of the past 50 years discuss the principles of liberty, social responsibility of business, the inertia behind bad legislation and his career as economist and public intellectual."

EconTalk, Milton Friedman on Money: "Russ Roberts talks with Milton Friedman about his research and views on inflation, the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, and what the future holds."

Retirado de http://amateureconomist.blogspot.com

Frases célebres de Milton Friedman: cortesia do The amateur economist blogue

"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programmes by their intentions rather than their results."
-- Milton Friedman


"There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40% of our national income."
-- Milton Friedman


"If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can only gain at the expense of another."
-- Milton Friedman


"I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. The reason I am is because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. The question is, "How do you hold down government spending?" Government spending now amounts to close to 40% of national income not counting indirect spending through regulation and the like. If you include that, you get up to roughly half. The real danger we face is that number will creep up and up and up. The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes."
-- Milton Friedman


Retirado de http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/

Frases célebres de Milton Friedman

"There's no such thing as a free lunch"
and
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"

Minton Friedman - parte 4- notícia da Associated Press

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 17, 2006

Filed at 12:54 a.m. ET

Milton Friedman

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who championed individual freedom, influenced the economic policies of three presidents and befriended world leaders, died Thursday, a spokesman for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Center in Indianapolis said. He was 94.

In numerous books, a Newsweek magazine column and a PBS show, Friedman championed individual freedom in economics and politics. The longtime University of Chicago professor pioneered a school of thought that became known as the Chicago school of economics. His work is still widely influential in the business world, academia and politics.

Friedman's theory of monetarism was adopted in part by the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. It opposed the traditional Keynesian economics that had dominated U.S. policy since the New Deal. He was a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board.

His work in consumption analysis, monetary history and stabilization policy earned him the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.

Friedman favored a policy of steady, moderate growth in the money supply, opposed wage and price controls and criticized the Federal Reserve when it tried to fine-tune the economy.

He argued that government should allow the free market to operate to solve inflation and other economic problems. But he also urged adoption of a ''negative income tax'' in which people who earn less than a certain amount would get money back from national coffers.

Minton Friedman - parte 3 - notícia do Guardian

Mark Tran
Thursday November 16, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist and Margaret Thatcher's monetarist guru, died today at the age of 94.

Mr Friedman died of heart failure after being taken to hospital near his home in San Francisco, his daughter, Janet Martell, said today.

His wife, Rose Friedman, who co-wrote many of his books, survives him.

A great believer in unfettered markets, Mr Friedman was the leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics. The central tenet of the school was that the money supply determined inflation.

As the flipside to his belief in the central role of markets, Mr Friedman, who won the Nobel prize in 1976, thought the role of government should be as limited as possible.

That view made him highly popular with free market devotees such as Margaret Thatcher and Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who relied on his advice as they put his ideas into practice.

Mr Friedman, however, later distanced himself from Mrs Thatcher's policy of cutting public-sector borrowing at a time of recession.

In 2003, he publicly declared in the Financial Times that monetarist policy had failed. "The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success ... I'm not sure I would as of today push it as hard as I once did," he said.

Mr Friedman took his free market approach to its logical conclusion on various social issues, advocating the decriminalisation of drugs and prostitution.

An active Republican, Mr Friedman served as an informal economic adviser to Senator Barry Goldwater in his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964, to Richard Nixon in his successful 1968 campaign and to Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign.

His books included A Theory of the Consumption Function, The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays, and (with A J Schwartz) A Monetary History of the United States, Monetary Statistics of the United States, and Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom. He was also a columnist for Newsweek magazine.

Minton Friedman - notícia do óbito na Business Week

The death of Milton Friedman at age 94 ends, after more than 60 years, the greatest rivalry in modern economics—the one between the conservative great Friedman and the liberal great Paul Samuelson. Samuelson lives on, at age 91, and remembers his intellectual foe with respect.

"Milton Friedman was a giant," Samuelson said in a Nov. 16 interview from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "No 20th-century economist had his importance in moving the American economic profession rightward from 1940 to the present."

More than anyone else, Milton Friedman was responsible for challenging the worldview of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who believed in the power of government to guide and stimulate economic growth. As an alternative to Keynesianism, he put forth a more laissez-faire philosophy known as monetarism—the doctrine that the best thing the government can do is supply the economy with the money it needs and stand aside.

Friedman blamed inflation on tinkering by governments and central banks. Along with Edmund Phelps of Columbia University, who won the 2006 Nobel prize, Friedman showed that central banks can't buy permanently lower unemployment with slightly higher inflation. Wrote Friedman: "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output."

Promoting Monetarism

Friedman won the Nobel prize in economics in 1976. Among his achievements, the Nobel committee cited the monumental book he wrote with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, which explained how missteps by the Federal Reserve deepened and prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s.

While Friedman taught and researched at the University of Chicago, making it into a bastion of conservative, monetarist thinking, fellow Nobelist Samuelson held forth in the more liberal environs of MIT, where Keynesianism continued to have a foothold. Friedman's students helped spread free-market thinking around the world, including to Chile; Samuelson wrote the best-selling economics textbook, Economics, published by The McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP) (publisher of BusinessWeek), which influenced generations of undergraduates.

At times, the rivalry was right out in the open. From 1966 to the 1980s, Samuelson and Friedman had alternating columns in Newsweek magazine. But their competition was always collegial.

Says Samuelson: "I've known Milton and Rose Friedman for 65 years [Rose Director Friedman, his wife and co-author, survives her husband]. We have had considerable differences on policy. We have had considerable agreement on analytical matters. Knowing that differences on policy and ideology often poison and taint personal relations, I think we should both be admired for the friendship and civility we maintained over all these years."

Friedman was more the traditional economist, harking back to the wisdom of Alfred Marshall, while Samuelson was the innovator. But Friedman's views hold up remarkably well from today's vantage point.

Economists now generally reject heavy-handed Keynesian intervention and agree with Friedman that inflation is a monetary phenomenon. Friedman backed away from the crudest version of monetarism, which said that central banks should do little but set a target for the growth rate of the money supply. For example, he had high praise for former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, even though Greenspan paid little attention to the size of the money supply when setting short-term interest rates.

Theory of Consumption

According to his autobiography for the Nobel prize, Friedman was born on July 31, 1912, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in Rahway, N.J. He wrote: "Financial crisis was a constant companion. Yet there was always enough to eat, and the family atmosphere was warm and supportive."

He received his bachelor's degree from Rutgers University, studied economics at the University of Chicago, and got his PhD from Columbia University. During the Depression, Friedman worked in Washington on a large consumer-budget study that later led to one of his best-known achievements, the so-called "theory of the consumption function," which says that people's spending is determined by their expectations of future or "permanent" income, not just their current income.

Friedman spent most of his academic career in Chicago, then became a senior research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In the 1970s he and his wife created a PBS documentary series called Free to Choose, which later became a book.

He was a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board and received from Reagan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his final years, he and his wife established the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation, devoted to promoting parental choice in schooling through vouchers.

Coy is BusinessWeek's Economics Editor.

Morreu Milton Friedman - parte 1

David Olive on The Star
Um artigo crítico sobre a vida do homem mais influente da segunda metade do século XX

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Milton Friedman, guiding spirit of economic conservatives worldwide in the post-World War II era, died yesterday of heart failure at a hospital near his San Francisco home. He was 94. A relentless champion of unfettered free markets and minimalist government, Friedman died just six months after the death of his chief intellectual antagonist, the Canadian-born U.S. economist John Kenneth Galbraith, an unapologetic liberal to the end who promoted an activist role for government in assisting the disadvantaged. Friedman and his wife, Rose, a noted economist in her own right, have for more than a quarter century been chief mascots of the modern conservative movement that has dominated public policy making in the West since the 1980s. The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, an influential libertarian think tank, was perhaps unrivalled in the zeal with which it adopted the Friedmans as ideological patrons almost since the institute's inception in 1974. Friedman was an adviser to U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He took criticism from human-rights advocates for counselling Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and from anti-communists on the right for his lectures on free-market principles to government officials and students in the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam. Recalling the protestors who accosted him in Santiago, Friedman said he was resigned to being followed about the globe by demonstrators who made "a concerted effort to tar and feather me." In contrast to Galbraith, whose undiluted liberalism has been out of style since the early 1980s, Friedman went out on a high, his dismissal of government as an effective agent of social progress having ruled as the dominant economic theology for the past quarter-century. That makes the Friedman legacy something of an oddity. For his maxims, so revered in conservative salons in London, Washington and elsewhere, are contradicted by the facts on the ground, and his life story is at odds with some of his most fundamental beliefs. This leading exponent of the private sector's superior acumen over government did not ever toil in the private sector, but for taxpayer-financed government agencies and universities. Criticizing the Depression-era New Deal would consume much of Friedman's thinking and lectures in the 1960s. But unable to find work during the Depression, he regarded the job he secured with one of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal agencies "a lifesaver." Later, on encountering anti-Semitism during a brief teaching stint at the University of Wisconsin, Friedman returned to government work in the federal Treasury department, where, of all things, he played the lead role in devising the current withholding system of collecting income-tax revenue. Friedman railed against corporate philanthropy, insisting that the exclusive role of business is to generate wealth, not engage in social engineering. Yet Friedman's own academic home of longest duration, the University of Chicago, was willed into existence by Standard Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller. Friedman's influence derived from his prophetic 1960s warning that runaway government spending and spiralling wage costs would someday culminate in a toxic co-existence of moribund economic growth, double-digit inflation and soaring unemployment — a phenomenon dubbed "stagflation" by fellow economist Paul Samuelson, a centrist, when it manifested itself in the 1970s. Friedman's was hardly the only voice raising the alarm, only the most persistent and well-credentialed. During his long tenure as an economics professor at the University of Chicago, Friedman's tutelage of like-minded young economists, some half-dozen of whom went on to become Nobel laureates, earned Friedman the distinction of having appeared to create a movement, namely the "Chicago School," for which there is no liberal counterpart. Friedman himself won Nobel honours in 1976.Friedman earned a reputation as a contrarian for rebelling against government pump-priming in tough economic times, which was advocated by John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the 20th century. But the stagflation that earned Friedman celebrity status, a PBS television series and a Newsweek column, was not caused by those practices. The economic malaise of the 1970s was caused by reckless U.S. spending on Vietnam, two oil shocks in the space of a decade (a barrel of oil cost less than $2 U.S. before the first shock in 1973), and a managerial class in both the public and private sectors content to pass wage increases on to customers rather than stand up to union leaders. All of that was abhorrent to Keynes, who preached fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets in good times in order to bulk up government treasuries for the inevitable bad times. The influence of Friedman and his acolytes is exaggerated, although this is rarely acknowledged by either adherents or opponents of "Friedmanism." It's seldom remarked upon, for instance, that both Reagan and Thatcher used traditional Keynsian methods of increased government spending, along with tax cuts about which Keynes would have been less enthusiastic, to spur the economic boom of the 1980s. Current U.S. President George W. Bush followed an identical strategy in response to the U.S. recession of 2001-02. The era of big government continues apace, with the massive Medicare and other entitlement programs of Lester Pearson and Lyndon Johnson still in place, embellished recently by the creation of the U.S. homeland security department — the biggest expansion in the U.S. bureaucracy since the creation of the Pentagon shortly after World War II. Corporate philanthropy is arcing toward a new zenith, surpassing the largesse of the Rockefeller clan and Andrew Carnegie. "These days, billionaires try to outdo each other not just in how much they give away, but in how effective they can be in tackling problems," writes Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, whose online magazine now sponsors an annual conclave of the world's big business donors. Attending this year's donorfest were Bill Gates, whose foundation has $30 billion (U.S.) to dispense, and, of perhaps more interest, Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page. As an ideology, Friedmanism is widely subscribed to; in practice, it is stillborn. Viable leadership today comes with promises of frugality and doing more with less. But then, inevitably, come the hiring and acquisition binges, the corporate-welfare handouts and renewed farm subsidies, the extravagant public expenditure. Galbraith sought attention while Friedman affected to shun it. "I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person," Friedman insisted. He might have meant it, too. But his legacy would not be well served by a careful examination of either the efficacy of the ideas he fought for, or a true measure of how widely they have been genuinely implemented.

Zune versus Ipod

Chegou o Zune. Mais feio, com menos atributos, mais barato que o Ipod.

Mas tal como o Windows 3 destronou o MAC também não devemos negligenciar o potencial dano que o Zune, com prováveis versões melhoradas no futuro, venha a ser um rival à altura...

Lusofonia e os jogos lusos

Mais um artigo muito interessante do professor arnaldo gonçalves, desde Macau. Saído na edição online do jornal de negócios.

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O reduzido eco dos primeiros Jogos da Lusofonia, que tiveram lugar em Macau entre 7 e 15 de Outubro, na imprensa portuguesa é sintoma claro do divórcio entre as boas intenções na política externa e o afunilamento da agenda na política doméstica. Significa, também, que os responsáveis políticos não conseguem estruturar as prioridades da acção externa de Portugal consentindo em ir a reboque das estratégias dos outros.

Os primeiros Jogos da Lusofonia juntaram 700 atletas oriundos de onze países, de quatro continentes e representando oito modalidades desportivas. Os jogos tiveram lugar por iniciativa da Região Administrativa Especial de Macau contando com o apoio institucional do governo chinês. Os Jogos visaram, segundo os promotores, celebrar o espaço da lusofonia como comunidade de afinidades construídas em redor de uma mesma língua, o português. Os Jogos custaram 160 milhões de patacas (cerca de dezasseis milhões de euros) o que corresponde a 0,55 por cento das receitas brutas totais dos casinos de Macau, registadas nos primeiros sete meses do ano.

Estes números dão bem sinal da pujança do crescimento económico do pequeno enclave, administrado até 1999 por Portugal, mas os Jogos têm uma outra leitura: a utilização pela China do conceito da lusofonia, para propósitos de política externa.

Porquê este súbito interesse da China em potenciar a ideia da lusofonia, da presença portuguesa no Oriente, quando seria natural que tudo fizesse para fazer esquecer a presença portuguesa de 440 anos?

Trata-se de um exemplo de pragmatismo chinês, resultante das reformas económicas lançadas por Deng Xiao Ping na década de 80 explicável por duas razões principais. Em primeiro lugar, a emergência da China como grande potência mundial impondo à China que se afirme como potência pacífica, cosmopolita, aberta ao mundo e apoiante da multiculturalidade. Em segundo lugar, porque as enormes carências energéticas do seu modelo de desenvolvimento, da sua rede de infraestruturas, lhe recomenda que olhe para África, dada a sua riqueza em recursos naturais, como fornecedor alternativo de crude.

De uma forma muito chinesa os responsáveis políticos de Pequim preferem não pôr "os ovos no mesmo cesto", isto é, ficar dependentes de um único parceiro comercial e estratégico, seja a Rússia, a União Europeia ou os países do Médio Oriente. Isso poderia sair muito caro na eventualidade de uma crise internacional como a que se alimenta com a deriva nuclear do Irão.

Este reavivado interesse pelos países que foram parte do império português no continente africano prossegue, também, dois desígnios adicionais: conseguir o reforço da balança comercial com os países africanos e com o Brasil e a tomada de posições em empresas africanas a quem cabe a exploração de recursos naturais estratégicos. Sendo o país com maiores reservas cambiais no mundo a China é o país que qualquer fornecedor de matérias-primas gostaria de ter como parceiro.

Um outro aspecto merece referência. Em reunião do recente fórum para a cooperação económica e comercial entre a China e os Países de Língua Portuguesa que teve lugar, em Setembro passado, em Macau, foi estabelecido que o comércio entre a China e os sete países que constituem aquele possa atingir, em 2009, os 45 a 50 mil milhões de dólares americanos. O que a acontecer corresponderá ao dobro do valor actual do comércio entre a China e aqueles países.

Portugal tem, neste particular, uma posição pouco mais que modesta. Em 2005, as trocas comerciais entre a China e Portugal cifraram-se em mil milhões de dólares norte-americanos, com um défice para Portugal de 300 milhões de dólares. O valor global do comércio China-Países de Língua Portuguesa (I&E) é de 32 mil milhões de dólares a valores de 2005.

A confirmarem-se tais previsões económicas e as intenções chinesas quanto aos mercados africanos, Portugal pode ver reduzido, ainda mais, a sua influência em África.

Resta perceber até que ponto a nomeação do secretário-geral do MNE, embaixador Rui Quartin Santos como próximo embaixador em Pequim pode ajudar a inverter uma tendência de divórcio continuado de Portugal das oportunidades colocadas pelo mercado chinês.

A minha irmã tem trissomia 21 e não foi "abortada"

Não resisto a publicar um texto que o Jaime, meu ex-aluno, publicou nos jornais.

---------------

Os olhos azuis da minha irmã

No último Prós e Contras, a eurodeputada Edite Estrela considerou que o aborto poderia ser legítimo, caso a mãe descobrisse que a criança era portadora de trissomia 21.

Eu tenho uma irmã com olhos azuis. Chama-se Mónica, tem 22 anos e tirou o curso profissional de Serviços Básicos de Hospitalidade.

Trabalha hoje numa pastelaria de Lisboa. Os olhos dela são lindos e ela é educada, feminina, anda sempre perfumada...

A Mónica é a minha irmã e irmã de mais três. Gostamos muito dela e ela é muito feliz. Dá unidade à família, está atenta sempre a todos e a cada um.

A sra. eurodeputada não tem os olhos azuis mas tem uns olhos tão bonitos como os da Mónica. Tem os talentos e as virtudes de avó e de mãe. E tem dificuldades; certamente também chora e se alegra, é mais uma das pessoas deste nosso planeta que acorda todas as manhãs e lava os dentes.

De certeza que já viu um pobre na rua e lhe estendeu a mão direita (a esquerda) ou as duas, ou olhou para uma prostituta e sentiu pena. De certeza que já ajudou alguém em apuros.

Gostávamos que viesse a nossa casa, provasse os muffins que a Mónica faz e visse o gosto com que ela põe a mesa. E descobrisse que esta menina de olhos azuis tem... trissomia 21.

E ficaria bem contente por ela ter nascido. Tal como nós. Tal como qualquer pessoa.

Jaime Bilbao
Destak - 03/11/2006

Twin deficits, twenty years laters

Location: New York
Author: Linda Ricci
Date: Friday, October 27, 2006

The latest edition of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Twin Deficits, Twenty Years Later, is available.

Authors Leonardo Bartolini and Amartya Lahiri analyze the relationship between the increase in the size of fiscal deficits in a large number of industrialized and developing nations and the current account deficits of those countries. They do not find sufficient evidence to support the argument that cutting a nation’s fiscal deficit would significantly reduce its current account deficit.

The authors cite international data that every dollar of increase in fiscal deficit, accounted for primarily by tax cuts, goes in large measure to consumer savings rather than consumption. As a result, some of a nation’s need to borrow from abroad to finance its fiscal deficit is mitigated and its current account deficit is left relatively untouched.

According to the authors, when applied to the United States, this analysis suggests that even if the fiscal deficit—now about 2 percent of GDP—were fully erased, the nation’s current account deficit would improve by only a fraction of its current 7 percent of GDP.

Internacionalização do sector financeiro português: 8 ideias

Internacionalização do Sector Financeiro Português e impacto sobre o tecido produtivo português: 8 ideias

1. Os Relatórios e Contas, relativas aos anos de 2005 e primeiro semestre de 2006, permitem concluir que, nos principais bancos operantes no mercado português, o contributo dos negócios internacionais para a formação do resultado bruto do exercício correspondeu a uma percentagem entre 20 e 35%. E numa tendência que indicia ser crescente.

2. Para melhor se perceber este fenómeno talvez seja conveniente recordar as principais tendências do Meio Envolvente Contextual com que se deparam as instituições financeiras portuguesas:

i. Intensificação e harmonização regulamentar, o que vem aumentar os custos de actuação no mercado (compliance costs) e suscitar um acréscimo concorrencial. Salientem-se alguns: acordo de Basileia 2, DMIF/MiFID, mercados grossistas, SEPA, Prospectos de emissão,

ii. Integração económica e financeira dos mercados,

iii. Convergência do padrão de aquisição de produtos e serviços financeiros por parte dos cidadãos da União. O que tenderá a levar ao aumento das aquisições transfronteiriças.

3. Adicionalmente as instituições portuguesas defrontam-se com as limitações próprias de mercados domésticos, de dimensão reduzida e periféricos. Não sendo exaustivo, podem-se realçar:

a. Reduzidas oportunidades de manutenção do movimento de concentração doméstico. Independentemente do desfecho da OPA do BCP sobre o BPI.

b. Desvantagem de custos:

i. Menores economias de escala;

ii. Inferiores sinergias operativas (falta de escala, menores oportunidades de economias de gama);

iii. Menor acesso a capital para expansão e maior custo do mesmo.

c. Reduzida dimensão e eventual dispersão do capital pode tornar os bancos portugueses mais vulneráveis a processos de aquisição ou de reestruturação empresarial.

4. O desafio passa pela capacidade de continuar a terem autonomia estratégica, para o que é essencial a manutenção de adequados níveis de rendibilidade (dada a situação periférica portuguesa, isto implica um prémio face a outros mercados mais centrais da Europa).

5. A internacionalização pode ser uma forma de elevar a rendibilidade das instituições financeiras portuguesas.

6. Os mercados de retalho financeiro têm permanecido predominantemente locais, pelo que vários especialistas apontam-nos com tendo o maior potencial de desenvolvimento e de aquisição transnacional. As instituições portuguesas têm estado atentas e entre as suas opções de expansão contam-se aquisições de bancos locais ou a criação de bancos desde a raiz.

7. Por fim, deve-se atentar que a capacidade de uma Economia ser capaz de ter uma forte presença internacional em bens e serviços transaccionáveis constitui um forte estímulo ao desenvolvimento dos países. Não decerto por acaso fortuito, tem sido esta a via recomendada para Portugal. Um verdadeiro DESAFIO ESTRATÉGICO.

8. Aqui os Bancos portugueses têm um papel importante, pois é conhecido desde há muito, o papel de estímulo que a expansão internacional das maiores empresas de uma dada Economia exercem sobre as empresas situadas em sectores relacionados ou de suporte. Veja-se o caso das PME espanholas, em verdadeira fúria de internacionalização, à boleia da Telefónica, Ibéria, Iberdrola, BBVA, Santander, ....

17 de Outubro de 2006

www.antonuco.blogspot.com

www.ointerior.pt

Internacionalização do sector financeiro português

Meu pequeno artigo sobre o tema, com amplas repercussões sobre a internacionalização das PMEs.

http://www.ointerior.pt/home/artigo.asp?id=101

Discurso de Trichet: o que precisa de fazer a Europa para crescer mais

Location: Berlin
Author: Jean-Claude Trichet
Date: Friday, October 20, 2006

The following is a speech by Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, at the Ludwig Erhard Lecture.

---

First of all, Dr Hans Tietmeyer is a pioneer of Economic and Monetary Union and the euro, and so, for obvious reasons, I feel close to him and responsible for ensuring that his work on the European project is continued. I particularly share his views on how to conduct monetary policy. Allow me to quote him to illustrate my point, “In the longer run, monetary stability has proved to be unequivocally beneficial for growth and employment. Moreover, it is the most social of all conceivable economic strategies”

Second, and on a more personal basis, I pride myself on being among his friends for more than 20 years.

Thanks to leaders like Hans, who shared the same vision for the future of Europe, in 1999, 11 European countries introduced the single currency, followed later by Greece. Slovenia will join the euro area next year. The introduction of the euro has been a remarkable success, acknowledged not only in Europe but in the whole world. However, to continue fully exploiting the benefits of the euro, Europe has to face important challenges that require major policy measures. Indeed, when comparing the euro area’s economic performance to that of the US in terms of growth, there is clear evidence of the fact that we have still a lot of progress to make. Since 1996, the annual growth rate in the euro area has averaged 2.1% per yearcompared with 3.4% in the US, reflecting a particularly mediocre euro area’s growth potential. As a result, while in 1996, the GDP per capita level in PPP in the euro area represented 84% of the US level, it represented only 76% in 2005.

Increasing potential output growth in Europe is today a priority for the euro area, as potential output growth is one of the major catalysts for improvement in living standards. It is also an important issue for the central bank, as potential output can be thought of as the maximum output an economy can sustain in the medium and long term without a rise in inflation.

I will first review the past economic growth performance of the euro area, focusing on some of the underlying factors of potential output growth, namely labour resource utilisation (or labour supply) and hourly labour productivity growth, in particular in comparison with the US and other advanced industrialized economies. Then I will elaborate on the kind of reforms which I consider essential to increase the potential growth rate and the prosperity of Europe in the future.

The economic performance of the euro area since the mid-1990s

Let me start with an assessment of the euro area’s economic performance by:

• first recalling a few general facts,
• then, analysing the euro area labour market and labour productivity performance in more detail.

As I already mentioned, over the period from 1996 to 2005, euro area output grew on average by about 1.3 percentage points less than in the US, and the gap appears to be persistent.

The main factor which explains these developments is the diverging trend in hourly labour productivity growth. Labour productivity growth is indeed typically the most important determinant of long-term potential output growth. During the 1980’s and the first half of the 1990s, hourly labour productivity in the euro area grew on average by 2.4%, decelerating to on average 1.3% between 1996 and 2005. By contrast, US hourly labour productivity growth rose from 1.3% to 2.2% over the same period.

At the same time, the euro area witnessed a slight improvement in the utilisation of labour, which increased on average by 0.3% between 1996 and 2005 compared with 0.1% in the US] when defined as the total annual hours worked divided by the total population. Labour utilisation reflects the extent to which the potential labour resources in an economy are actually utilised and therefore has a direct influence on output growth. The slight improvement in labour utilisation mainly reflects the significant rise in the euro area employment rate from 58% in 1996 to 63.5% in 2005, accompanied by a decline in the aggregate unemployment rate from 10.7% to 8.6%. However, the increase in employment has been partly dampened by a fall in the average annual hours worked per person of 0.4% per annum over the same period [compared with a fall of 0.2% in the US].

Let me now describe in more detail four features of the European labour market and labour productivity performance that will provide some useful insight on progress achieved by the euro area economy and its weaknesses.

First of all, despite the progress recorded on the labour market side, the overall employment rate in the euro area remains low by international standards [63.5% in the euro area compared with 71.5% in the US in 2005] and the unemployment rate is clearly too high [8.6% compared with 5.1% in the US in 2005. Moreover, in 2005 the number of annual hours worked in the euro area was 1603 compared to 1804 in the US. All in all, this clearly suggests that there is still considerable room for improvement as regards increasing the level of labour resource utilisation in Europe.

Second, while the prime-age male employment rate in the euro area is comparable to that observed in the United States, when we look at the youth, female and older worker employment rates, the disparities are considerable. The female employment rate was 55% in the euro area and 66% in the US, the older workers employment rate was 40% in the euro area and 60% in the US, the youth employment rate was 37% in the euro area and 54% in the US. These figures appear to be consistent with an “insider-outsider” characterisation of the European labour market, where structural impediments prevent those groups “at the margin” of the labour market from entering and participating in the labour market.

The rise in the overall employment rate in the euro area over the last ten years has been mainly driven by an increase in the female and older workers employment rates, partly reflecting the progress made by structural reforms and wage moderation policy in some European countries. Nevertheless, and turning to my third point which relates more specifically to hourly labour productivity growth performance, specific policies aiming at increasing employment particularly in the unskilled segment of the labour market have certainly contributed to the observed slowdown in labour productivity growth. However, this apparent trade-off between labour utilisation and productivity is likely to be a temporary phenomenon that should fade when the economy reaches a higher “equilibrium” labour/output ratio.

However, it is worth mentioning that the US managed at the same time to increase both labour input and labour productivity. This leads to my final point. There is indeed another factor that explains the difference in the rate of labour productivity growth in Europe compared with the US, which in my view is a major policy concern, namely the fact that Europe is lagging behind in terms of innovation and more specifically the diffusion of information and communication technology (ICT). Several authors have already highlighted the major role of ICT in the revival of labour productivity growth in the US.

While the ICT sector is the single most important source of productivity growth, it represented only 40% of EU productivity growth compared with 60% in the US. In 2004, total R&D investment in the euro area accounted for 1.9% of GDP and the ICT sector represented as much as 20% of this amount, while in the US, 2.8% of GDP was spent on R&D and the ICT sector represented as much as 30% of this total. Even more important is the effect ICT diffusion has had on productivity in the US economy, particularly in the services sector, with a substantial impact on retail and wholesale business and on the financial services sector. ICT investment, which is a good indicator of ICT diffusion, represented 4% of GDP in the US over the period from 1996 to 2004 compared with only 2% in the euro area. The structural characteristics of the US economy – a more flexible labour market, a higher degree of competition in product markets and lower barriers to entry for new firms – were apparently more conducive to exploiting the opportunities provided by new technologies. By contrast, the productivity growth performance in Europe was characterised by a lack of technology diffusion across sectors, particularly in the services sector.

The need for further structural reforms in Europe

Overall, this brief assessment of the underlying causes of Europe’s disappointing longer-term growth performance provides a mixed picture of the European economy. Of course, I focused on a specific set of supply-side determinants of economic growth. Economic growth is also influenced by other factors, including the macroeconomic policy framework. I will deal with some of these aspects, including the contribution of monetary policy to sustainable output growth, later on in my speech.

The lack of sufficient structural reform in Europe is, in my view, a major cause of the difference in the rate of economic growth in Europe compared with the US and with some other advanced industrialized economies, and of the fall in potential output growth in Europe. All in all, it appears that the overriding policy concern for Europe is how to simultaneously achieve solid employment and productivity growth. I will therefore now turn to those structural reforms that have the potential to increase both euro area labour productivity growth and labour utilisation, and therefore long-term growth potential. It is clear that embarking on the path of such major structural reforms is easier said than done, especially in the current environment, where the European economy is facing a number of important challenges, including rapid technological change, ageing populations as well as accelerating globalisation. For instance, ageing will not only put pressure on public finances by driving up ageing-related expenditure, but will most certainly also bring down the potential growth rate of Europe if no reforms take place. According to the European Commission’s projections, the impact of ageing populations alone could reduce potential output growth in Europe by nearly half by 2040, from the present rate of 2%-2.25% to around 1.25% if structural reforms are not carried out.

All in all, these challenges will require major efforts to increase the output growth and adjustment capacity of the euro area in general and the flexibility of workers in particular. European governments should take advantage of the recent favourable growth developments to push ahead with structural reform.

Without aiming to be exhaustive, I should like to highlight some of the key priorities for reform in four main areas, namely:

• Getting more people into work,
• Increasing competition,
• Unlocking business potential,
• And finally, supporting an innovative environment.

First of all, well-functioning labour markets are extremely important in fostering higher economic growth. The differences in labour market developments, especially with regard to the level of labour utilisation, between the US and Europe has prompted some economists to suggest the existence of a “European model” and a “US model”, related to the trade-off between labour and leisure. One view is that the lower levels of GDP per capita in Europe reflect a European preference for more leisure time. However, we should bear in mind that lower participation rates are not necessarily associated solely with personal preferences, but are also triggered by the legal and regulatory environment, tax systems and social institutions. Benefit systems that are too generous discourage job searching, early retirement schemes encourage early withdrawal from the labour market - employment rates for older workers aged from 55 to 64 stood at just 40% in the euro area in 2005 and at around 60% in the US - and marginal tax rates that are too high discourage labour market entry and have a downward effect on average hours worked. Necessary measures to increase labour utilisation or labour supply include the reform of tax and benefit systems to address these problems and increase incentives to work. Measures aimed at reconciling motherhood with professional life, such as the provision of childcare, should also raise participation rates. Furthermore, the use of flexible forms of work such as part-time and temporary work may also provide further working incentives.

High unemployment rates in the euro area and in particular high youth unemployment rates, amounting to 17.8% in 2005 compared with 11.3% in the US, clearly suggest the need to spur not only labour supply but also labour demand. In this context, there is a need to promote wage flexibility and to address labour market rigidities. Adjustments should be made to employment legislation where it impedes the hiring of younger and older workers in particular.

And reform does pay off. Indeed, the European countries that did engage on the path of such reforms in particular Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands have achieved success in reducing unemployment and stimulating job creation, despite significantly different economic conditions. In 2005 the unemployment rate in these countries stood below 5.0%, while their overall employment rate was above or close to the US level. To achieve such remarkable success, these countries reformed their tax and benefit systems by reducing for example tax wedges on labour income and by carrying out a stricter enforcement of job search rules and a better surveillance of eligibility. They also increased, when needed, the flexibility of their labour market by easing employment protection legislation (EPL), in particular as regards temporary workers.

What all these countries also have in common is a significant reduction of product market regulation (PMR). This leads to the second prerequisite for higher medium to long-term growth: increasing competition towards establishing efficient and well-functioning product markets.

Most studies point to the potential competitive pressure has to increase employment, at least in the long run, and to boost productivity trends by improving production efficiency and by enhancing the incentive to invest and innovate. The links between competition and productivity growth are now both theoretically and empirically well-established. The ECB and the Eurosystem as well as the Commission have been working in this domain of research.

In the EU, some progress has been made in this regard. For example, several network industries, like telecommunications, are now fully or largely open to competition. A lot remains to be done: the extension and deepening of the EU internal market remains a priority. With service-related activities representing around 70% of value added and employment in the euro area, more competition in the EU service markets is absolutely of the essence.

In this context, the adoption of the Services Directive by the European Parliament in February 2006 constitutes a step forward in the right direction even if it has been somewhat watered down which I regretted. Let us also stress that the mere adoption of Internal Market directives does not automatically produce benefits. Once adopted, directives must be transposed into national law and enforced in order to produce benefits and Member States have the primary responsibility for these tasks.

The third prerequisite for higher growth in the euro area is the unlocking of business potential by creating an entrepreneurial-friendly economic environment. Europe needs more new and thriving firms willing to reap the benefits of opening markets and to embark on creative or innovative ventures for commercial exploitation on a larger scale. It is increasingly new and smaller firms, rather than large ones, that are the major providers of new jobs. The contribution from firm dynamic processes to aggregate labour productivity growth and innovation also plays a major role, in particular in high-tech industries. All in all, an entrepreneurial-friendly economic environment would imply less red tape for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to help them develop at home and across borders, as well as positive action to ease access to the finance they need. As regards risk capital markets, venture capital (VC) financing is also crucial. Without these funds, many new and innovative companies will simply not emerge. And Europe is significantly lagging behind in this field, as VC financing in Europe remains only a fraction of what it is in the US relative to the size of their economies. The immense importance of having an entrepreneurial-friendly economic environment is however increasingly appreciated by European governments, and several initiatives at national or EU level have started to implement actions for “better regulation”. For example, in March 2006, the European Council called for the establishment of “one-stop-shop” arrangements in each Member State by the end of 2007, which would enable a company to be set up in one week. Today, the number of days needed to set up a new business in the euro area ranges from eight days in France and Portugal to 47 and 38 days in Spain and Greece respectively, compared to only five days in the US.

Fourth, to fully exploit productivity potential, the labour and product market reforms I just mentioned need to be accompanied by policies that help to diffuse innovation and technological change. This includes, inter alia, measures to support innovation through higher investment in research and development (R&D). The immense importance of this issue, and the great opportunities provided by investment in research, are also increasingly appreciated by European governments and firms. Europe has set itself the target of achieving a share of 3% of GDP by 2010 and some progress seems to have been made in this regard. According to a recent EU pilot survey on R&D investment, European companies expect their global investment in research and development to grow by about 5% per year over the next three years, which represents a considerable improvement over recent years. At that growth rate, provided it would effectively materialize, European companies would be doing as well as their US counterparts in terms of R&D investment for the first time since a large number of years. The survey also found that European companies continue to prefer to locate R&D activities in their home country, with Germany, the United Kingdom and France topping their lists of favoured destinations.

To make these measures most effective, they need to be accompanied by efforts to improve the labour force’s level of education and expertise.

The impact of education on growth may be related to innovation, as well as the adoption of new technologies. Policies aimed at improving human capital are usually considered to be of the utmost importance in this field. One possible explanation, commonly mentioned in literature, is that the diffusion of innovation and new technology is associated with a rapid decrease in learning costs over time triggered by the increasing number of users. More widespread knowledge about how to exploit new technology would obviously speed up the rate of diffusion and foster non linear effects as regards the benefits associated with it.

Better education and training also helps to reduce mismatches in the labour market and allows for a smoother reallocation of workers between sectors and firms.

All in all, meeting the challenges of technological progress and ensuring the labour force’s employability and flexibility, requires that human capital is continuously adjusted to labour market needs through improved education and training, as well as lifelong learning.

The last decades have already brought about an enormous increase in the level of educational attainment, the so-called “catch-up effect in education”. In the euro area, according to OECD data for 2003, an average of 73% of those aged from 25 to 34 had attained at least upper secondary education, compared to only 46% of persons aged from 55 to 64.

However, so far investment in human capital in Europe is still clearly inadequate for a “knowledge-intensive” economy. In 2005, the US annual expenditure on higher education institutions per student was 17,890 EUR, while in the euro area only about 7,402 EUR was spent. Furthermore, we need more high quality scientists and researchers. In the EU we have about 5.3 scientists and researchers per thousand workers, compared with the US’s nine per thousand.

The state of structural reform

If euro area countries now summon up their strength and ambitiously push forward with structural reform, this will support and broaden the improvement in economic activity in the euro area. This is why the ECB has always encouraged the implementation of structural reform within the so-called Lisbon Strategy, which was put in place during a meeting of the European Council of Heads of State and Government in Lisbon in 2000. Over these first few years, progress has been made in some areas, as is also indicated by an increase in the euro area employment rate. Still, the reforms have not been far-reaching enough and their implementation, in particular, has been too slow, particularly as regards the urgency of these reforms and the opportunity costs associated with this slow motion.

Against this background, the mid-term review of the Lisbon Strategy in 2005 led to a re-launch of the process by shifting the strategy’s focus to growth and employment. Also, a number of changes were made to the governance framework of the Lisbon Strategy in order to improve the implementation rate of structural reforms. One outcome of this process was that all EU countries had to prepare National Reform Programmes (NRPs) outlining steps for structural reform for the period from 2005 to 2008. Overall, the NRPs appear to reflect a stronger political commitment to the reform process in the context of the Lisbon Strategy, and all euro area governments acknowledge the need for further reforms and the benefits arising from implementing such reforms. It has also been acknowledged that a well-functioning and competitive Internal Market is particularly important for the euro area inasmuch as it will enhance its capacity to adjust smoothly to asymmetric shocks. This will help to more fully reap the substantial benefits of the single currency.

In this context, the NRPs appear to be an important step forward and these efforts are welcomed by the ECB. Indeed, the potential gains are very significant. A recent study finds that if Europe reaches the objectives set down in the Lisbon Strategy (in particular, full implementation of the internal market for services, a reduction of administrative burdens, improvements in human capital as well as the R&D and employment targets), EU GDP could be 12 to 23% higher than otherwise and employment increased by about 11% by 2025. These figures might look impressive. But these orders of magnitude are not out of reach. Fancy that if only we could go back to our labour productivity yearly progress level of the 80’s, namely 2.5 %, we would gain each year around 1.2 % of growth knowing that our present average yearly level is 1.3 %...

Macroeconomic stability to support higher and sustainable growth

As mentioned earlier, the supply-side determinants of long-term growth that I have emphasised should not be understood as an exhaustive explanation for the growth performance of the European economy. We should also look beyond the microeconomics of the supply-side and ensure an appropriate macroeconomic framework in Europe. I am referring now to the national fiscal policies and the single monetary policy.

First of all, sound fiscal policies in Europe are of the essence because they ultimately are supporting growth and stability. Through various channels, including favourable “ricardian” confidence effects, prudent fiscal policies contribute to lower risk premia on long-term interest rates and thus to more favourable financing conditions. This, in turn, promotes investment and long-term growth. It is, amongst others, for these reasons – to have a stable and sustainable fiscal framework for economic growth as well as to support a stability-oriented monetary policy – that the EU has adopted the Stability and Growth Pact.

Beyond that, the “quality” of public finances matters also enormously for growth. The level and composition of government taxes and expenditure has an impact on the way markets function, and they can hinder – or promote – growth. Reducing public spending inefficiency, would pave the way to financing tax cuts. And public expenditure directed towards productivity-enhancing physical and human capital accumulation rather than towards propping up failing enterprises or “sunset industries” is, of course, growth-promoting.

I do not need now to explain in detail why we at the ECB insist that the best contribution monetary policy can make to growth is to maintain price stability. I am in the presence of Hans about whom Time magazine wrote in 1997 “If the Romans had a god of central banking, he might look like Hans Tietmeyer”. Let me make a brief comment about the role of monetary policy in fostering sustainable economic growth in Europe.

What a central bank must do and can do is to avoid, to the extent possible, the negative effects on long-term growth of the uncertainty caused by high, variable and unanticipated inflation. The variability of inflation increases uncertainty and exerts a major negative influence on investment and thus on potential output as well as on other components of aggregate demand. The environment of price stability in line with our definition, the credibility of the ECB in delivering price stability over time and therefore the solid anchoring of inflation expectations, are paving the way for the favourable levels of medium and long term market rates, lending support to sustainable economic activity.

Orhan Pamuk, nobel da literatura

Orhan Pamuk tornou-se ontem o primeiro escritor turco a ganhar o prémio Nobel da Literatura.

Deixo-vos com um pequeno comentário do The Guardian.

Nicholas Birch
Friday October 13, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Twenty-four hours after Orhan Pamuk became the first ever Turkish writer to win the Nobel prize, reactions in Turkey are strangely mixed.

His fellow artists have been overwhelmingly positive. Yasar Kemal, doyen of Turkish novelists and often tipped for the Nobel himself, emailed Pamuk to congratulate him for an award that he "thoroughly deserved", while the winner of the 2003 Grand Jury prize at Cannes, Nuri Bilge Ceylan declared he was as happy as if he'd won it himself.

Others picked up on Pamuk's suggestion that his award was above all a victory for all Turkish writers. "It's a great opportunity for Turkey and Turkish literature to be better known by the world," said the bestselling crime writer Ahmet Umit.

Generosity has been in much shorter supply in Turkey's mainstream media. "Should we be pleased or sad?" asked Fatih Altayli, editor of the mass circulation daily Sabah, in his Friday column.

Unlike the fork-tongued contributions of other equally prominent journalists, what he wrote next at least had the merit of being straightforward.

The best reaction to Pamuk's victory was pride, he opined. And yet "we can't quite see Pamuk as 'one of us'... We see him as someone who 'sells us out' and ... can't even stand behind what he says."

Turkey's most influential paper, Hurriyet, also felt the same impulse to question Pamuk's Turkishness.

Editor Ertugrul Ozkok wrote at length in his column about the difficulty of choosing the seemingly banal headline "Nobel to a Turk," declaring "we all know this headline will probably satisfy nobody's 'Turkish side'."

While some have seen Pamuk as something of an outsider since the publication in 2002 of Snow - his most overtly political novel - such ill-disguised bile has surrounded him ever since he told a Swiss newspaper last year that nobody but him dared to say that Turkey had killed 30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians. Within hours, he became Turkey's enemy number one.

Lawyers hauled him into court on charges of "insulting Turkishness" - charges dropped amid ugly scenes earlier this year after international pressure - and one provincial official issued orders for copies of his books to be collected and burnt. Not one was found.

Pamuk's sin wasn't just to break a taboo. By talking about such delicate topics with foreigners, he opened himself to accusations of treason and political opportunism. Many Turks remain convinced his remarks were a calculated attempt to win the status of political dissident.

The cartoon on the front of today's Sabah shows the novelist in front of shelves emblazoned "works that won Orhan Pamuk the Nobel".

On the upper shelf, his seven novels. On the lower, a grey tome with "Turkish Penal Code Article 301" - the article used to bring him to trial last December - inscribed on its spine.

Some see the criticisms as simple jealousy on the part of a parochial-minded intelligentsia. Others present them as just the latest evidence of how much damage the authoritarian coup of 1980 did to Turkish society.

But the debate is also typical of the country's elite: determined to be taken seriously on the international stage, but only on its own terms.

"It's tragic really", said Elif Shafak, another novelist brought to book under Article 301 last month. "This is a huge honour both for Pamuk and the country, and yet so many people are so politicised they forget about literature entirely."

Why It's So Hard to Value Social Networking Sites

Less than three years after emerging from nowhere, the hot social networking website MySpace is on pace to be worth a whopping $15 billion in just three more years. Or is it?

Is the much smaller Facebook, run by a 22-year-old, really worth the $900 million or more Yahoo is reported to have offered for it? Maybe. Or maybe this is Dot-Com Bubble, Part II, with MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and the other new Internet phenoms destined for oblivion when the fad fades.

"What makes this hard is that these companies seem to be so many years away from the kind of earnings that the valuation numbers are forecasting for them," says Andrew Metrick, finance professor at Wharton. The $15 billion MySpace figure "would imply that a lot more people will be on MySpace than are currently on it."

While the social networking sites vary considerably, each relies heavily on content provided by users who can post personal profiles and build networks among friends and others with shared interests. For the most part, these users have free access and the sites are funded with advertising revenue. To lure advertisers, young sites typically offer deep discounts that make profitability elusive, and it is unclear when they will be able to push ad rates higher, if ever.

The problem, as Wharton accounting professor Robert W. Holthausen sees it, is a dearth of information to plug into the standard valuation models. "You have little data on what kind of revenues they can generate and what their cost structure is."

Valuing advertising-driven sites is particularly hard because the same numbers -- such as the number of users or page views -- can mean different things depending on how the advertisers are billed, Holthausen adds. "How often do they get paid for that advertising? Is it just when the advertisement appears? Or does there have to be a click through?" Similarly, not every user has the same value. That depends on how much the typical user is likely to spend and what he or she is likely to buy. Finally, Holthausen notes, a site will be more valuable if it uses a proprietary technology than if it simply offers services competitors can easily duplicate.

The $15 billion MySpace prediction was issued late in September by RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan, fresh from a meeting with Fox Interactive, the News Corp. unit that acquired MySpace's parent company, Intermix Media, about a year ago for a then-astounding $580 million. Rohan cited MySpace's phenomenal growth. It now has more than 90 million active users, twice as many as a year earlier, making it a magnet for advertisers. It recently signed a deal with Google to display search results and sponsored advertising links in exchange for $900 million over three years. In setting the $15 billion forecast, Rohan pointed to Google, which also relies on ad revenue, and which has a market capitalization of $120 billion.

But is Google a good benchmark? Google is without question the premier Internet search service, while MySpace is one of a number of competitors scrambling for market share in a new industry. Google has a proven track record of profitability, while MySpace does not.

Moreover, even Google's $120 billion market cap may reflect some irrational exuberance, making it a misleading model. Its shares sell for about 55 times annual earnings, roughly triple the price-to-earnings ratio of the average Standard & Poor's 500 company. Using the same 55-times-earnings figure, MySpace would need about $270 million in annual profit to justify a $15 billion value. Can it do that in three years, given it is expected to generate only about $200 million in revenue this year? It looks like a reach.

Consider some of the figures bandied about for Facebook. Last January, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, now 22, reportedly turned down a $750 million offer from Viacom, holding out for $2 billion, according to news accounts. This fall he is said to be mulling over a $900 million offer from Yahoo. Those are big numbers considering that the business, started early in 2004, has a modest nine million users and is believed to have annual revenue of around $50 million, though some experts expect that to double soon. If Facebook were valued at 55 times earnings, it would need a $16 million profit to justify a $900 million price.

"Discounted Cash Flow"

Still, there are sure to be some winners in social networking, and sites that are already pulling in significant revenue must certainly have an edge over the dozens of lesser-known competitors. "That's a lot of revenue," Metrick says, noting that this distinguishes Facebook from the dot-com bubble firms. "There were a lot of Internet companies in 1999 that had no revenue.... That kind of [$900 million valuation] doesn't seem so crazy if you believe there is a lot of growth built in." But, he adds, "There are a whole lot of examples of firms like Netscape which grew -- and then eventually lost."

The market-capitalization method of valuation is typically used with a public company -- a free standing entity that sells stock to the public. And it's best for stating a current value rather than a future one. Analysts also like to factor in a company's future prospects, using any number of calculations to derive a figure for "discounted cash flow." Essentially, they look at expected revenues over a given number of years and subtract expenses to arrive at a figure for "free cash flow." Then, using various assumptions about interest rates, they determine what money received in the future is worth in today's terms.

Analysts can never be sure about any company's future revenues and expenses, but the problem is even worse when dealing with a young company in a fledgling industry. The assumptions used in any valuation model are ideally based on experience of at least six or seven competitors, Metrick says. But there is no good peer data in the new social networking business.

With older industries, analysts often value a company on some ratio, such as a multiple of revenues. "But the problem is you are assuming the valuations put on these are rational," says Holthausen, arguing that expectations for new industries are often not rational. During the dot-com bubble, some companies that did have substantial revenues were valued far beyond what any standard analysis would say they were worth, he adds. "You totally had to suspend belief."

After the bubble burst, valuing the survivors did become more sensible, and some are assessed fairly easily with standard approaches, according to Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader. That's especially true of publicly traded companies involved in ordinary commerce, such as bookseller Amazon.com and auction site eBay. Their stocks trade at 45 and 39 times earnings, respectively.

"You're not going to see an Amazon being overvalued like [Internet stocks] used to be," he says, "but these social network sites are the Wild West. This is an area where it has been notoriously fickle. It's not like search engines, where you can really compare them on objective criteria," he suggests, referring to established players like Google and Yahoo.

Among the unknowns: How well can social networking sites hold on to their users? One player, Friendster, burst onto the scene a few years ago, then largely deflated. On the other hand, users go to considerable trouble to upload information and images to these sites, and to establish elaborate networks of friends for electronic sharing. They are not likely to abandon all that effort as casually as they would switch from one online bookseller to another. "It does seem to me there is some stickiness to the model," Holthausen says.

Networks Based around Products

Metrick believes social networking sites will not be a passing fad. But there's no guarantee that MySpace, Facebook or any of the other current players will be the big winners in the end. Fader, too, believes social networking is here to stay, but he thinks it may work best not as a freestanding function but as an additional feature on sites that draw users for other reasons. Hence, the winners may turn out to be other sites that adopt social networking features. Or they may be new players, or current networking sites that broaden their offerings.

Many sites may ultimately be acquired in the way MySpace was bought by publicly traded News Corp., the enormous multi-national media company run by Rupert Murdoch. Part of the News Corp. strategy is to let advertisers link users into networks based around products, such as movies or music groups. More than a million bands have profiles on MySpace, for example.

If MySpace becomes the model, social networking sites will be quite different from the classic dot-com bubble companies which tried to cash in big by going public while staying independent. The risks are not the same when an iffy venture is part of something bigger, says John R. Percival, adjunct professor of finance at Wharton. "This is kind of like the oil and gas business. The risk might not be as great as you think, and a high valuation might be justified."

A small, independent oil driller faces a huge risk in drilling a new hole, which may be dry, he says. Compared to that, risks from changing oil prices and demand are relatively small. But the situation is reversed when the driller is part of a bigger enterprise that drills many wells. A dry hole here and there doesn't matter, but changes in oil prices and demand do.

Social networking sites may be risky for their founders and the venture capital firms that fund them in the early years, but they don't appear to be pumping huge amounts of risk to the marketplace the way tech firms did in the late 1990s. "If you have a little bit of money invested in this and you're already invested in other things," says Percival, "frankly the risk is not as big as you think."

Recalling the first dot-com bubble six years ago, Fader notes, "We all look back and laugh and say we will not go through that exercise again, but this could easily be a case of history repeating itself."

Location: Phildadelphia
Author: Knowledge@Wharton
Date: Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Actual Editora

Estou a ler o livro do Buzz Marketing, do qual oportunamente farei uma pequena nota de síntese para os leitores deste blogue.

Mas entrementes queria deixar-vos com uma pequena descoberta: a Actual Editora (www.actualeditora.pt). Com quem tomei contacto aquando do lançamento do último livro de Charles Handy.

A editora destingue-se das outras, e bem, por uma série de factores:

- especialização em temas económicos, gestão, marketing, liderança e desenvolvimento pessoal;
- livros de sucesso nos mercados anglo-saxónicos;
- capas cuidadas e muito atractivas;
- traduções esmeradas;
- composição do texto indutora de leitura não cansativa.

Um regalo.
Parabéns!