US and China to Skip Diplomatic Pomp in Summit Next Month

China President Xi JinPing and US President Barack Obama will meet in "no ties, shirt-sleeves" Presidential Summit to focus more on substantive issues.

China President Xi JinPing and US President Barack Obama will meet in “no ties, shirt-sleeves” Presidential Summit to focus more on substantive issues.

Brian Spegele from WSJ reports that a planned U.S.-China presidential summit in California next month will afford the two countries’ leaders a chance to shed their neckties and build personal rapport, just as a renewed U.S. military focus on Asia and U.S. accusations of Chinese cyberespionage have strained relations.

Two days of meetings between President Barack Obama and newly installed Chinese President Xi Jinping will be notable for the absence of the diplomatic pomp that typically accompanies a Chinese leader’s visit to the U.S.

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Rising Wages may Pose a Dilemma for China

China's rising wages may improve consumer spending but will also hurt export competitiveness and business profitability

China’s rising wages may improve consumer spending but will also hurt export competitiveness and business profitability

Tom Orlik from WSJ reports that China is showing rapid increases in wages and signs of resilience in hiring despite slowing growth, a reassuring sign for leaders seeking to put more money in the pockets of ordinary Chinese, but a trend that could prove difficult to sustain as countries nearby threaten to encroach on China’s manufacturing dominance.

Chinese private-sector wages rose 14% in 2012, data showed Friday, good news overall for Beijing’s push to make consumer spending a more important part of growth. But higher labor costs also hurt business profitability and export competitiveness—which could pose its own risks to the economic recovery.

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India, China Agree to Take Steps to Address Trade Imbalance

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang address issue of trade imbalance

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang address issue of trade imbalance (RAVEENDRAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Economic Times | New Delhi: Targeting $ 100 billion in bilateral commerce by 2015, India and China today agreed to take steps for addressing the issue of trade imbalance through greater cooperation in areas like pharmaceutical and IT.

A joint statement issued after the meeting of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said: “While striving to realise the trade turnover target of $ 100 billion by 2015, the two countries agreed to take measures to address the issue of the trade imbalance. These include cooperation on pharmaceutical supervision including registration, stronger links between Chinese enterprises and Indian IT industry, and completion of phytosanitary negotiations on agro-products.”

While India’s export to China were only $ 13.52 billion in 2012-13, its imports from that country aggregated to $ 54.3 billion, leaving a trade deficit of $ 40.78 billion.

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Is the Indian economy stronger than commonly assumed?

images (5)“When the facts change, I change my mind,” said John Maynard Keynes. Will the revised data on gross domestic product (GDP) for 2010-11 make us do likewise?

For the revised GDP estimates issued last week question popular descriptions of India’s growth slowdown, challenge estimates of a lowered potential output and possibly shed some light on the inflation-growth disconnect in 2012. The improved data has been computed from the dependable Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) rather than the notorious Index of Industrial Production (IIP); it compels us to revisit these issues and raises policy setting concerns.
The facts: India’s GDP growth for 2010-11 stands reworked to 9.3% instead of the earlier estimate of 8.4%—nearly one percentage point higher. Much of this increase comes from revised manufacturing sector growth—9.7% year-on-year, or 2.1 percentage points more. What’s more, the increase in the estimated growth for 2010-11 is itself built upon a 1.6 point increase in growth during the previous year (now 11.3% for 2009-10).
On the demand side, it was the capital stock growth that contributed 4.2 percentage points to the 10.5% real GDP growth (at market prices). Gross fixed capital formation growth is now placed at 14% year-on-year, nearly double the earlier measure of 7.5%, and a substantial jump over the 7.7% growth in 2009-10; this acceleration lifted the real gross capital formation rate to 40% in 2010-11, from 38.4% the previous year. The other demand component that has been revised is public consumption: growth in actual government expenditure was a more modest 5.9% in 2010-11 against the 8.2% recorded earlier and a big drop from the 14% growth in 2009-10.
The new facts challenge some hypotheses about the collapse of the India growth story. For one, the “policy paralysis” explanation that throttled investments and exacerbated supply constraints from 2010 weakens in the light of robust manufacturing growth and capacity creation in 2010-11. This may explain the sudden, sharp drop in growth to 6.2% in 2011-12, when scams emerged to dent business confidence, but not before.

Japan central bank moves to boost economy

r-JAPAN-STOCK-MARKET-large570According to Al Jazeera News, Japan’s central bank has taken its boldest action yet to lift the country’s struggling economy.

The Bank of Japan on Tuesday doubled its inflation target and took on an open-ended commitment to buy assets.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government has been pushing for a plan to kick-start Japan‘s economy, which is the third largest in the world.

He is hoping to spur growth in his second term in office, through heavy government spending on public works and other projects.

Jeff Kingston, the director of Asian Studies at Temple University in Tokyo, told Al Jazeera that this time around, Abe was focusing on the economy.

“Everyone is worried about his ideological objectives, but it looks like he is putting that aside and focusing on the economy,” Kingston said.

The Bank of Japan adopted the two percent inflation target demanded by the country’s new government.

“The bank sets the ‘price stability target’ at two percent in terms of the year-on-year rate of change in the consumer price index,” the bank said in a statement.

“The Bank will pursue aggressive monetary easing … through a virtually zero interest rate policy and purchases of financial assets,” it added.

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Urbanization Won’t Save The Chinese Economy

china-construction-9In nearly every public speech since the leadership handover, Li Keqiang, who will take over as premier in March, has spoke about the importance of urbanization as a new growth engine.

Societe Generale’s Wei Yao however writes that the impact of urbanization has been “misunderstood and overstated by the market”.

For one, Yao writes that the impact of urbanization on China‘s productivity growth is decreasing, just like the the direction of demographics on labor force growth.

“For an emerging economy to catch up, moving farmers to manufacturing plants is a key source of productivity gain in the early stage. China’s experience in the past three decades was a typical example.

The 10-year average growth rate of China‘s urban population growth was 4.8% in the 1980s, 4.2% in the 1990s and 3.8% in the 2000s. The impact of this rapid urbanization on total factor productivity (TFP) was particularly pronounced. We estimate that this source accounted for about 30% of the impressive TFP growth.

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Institute predicts 8.4% China economic growth

CWSW-Bg-Panorama-Night (1)According to ChinaDaily, BeijingChina‘s economy will expand at 8.4 percent this year, up from the 7.8-percent growth rate of 2012, a research institute under the country’s top science academy has predicted.

China, the world’s second-largest economy, will see a mild pick-up in 2013 amid sluggish external demand, according to a report released on Saturday by the Center for Forecasting Science under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Chen Xikang, deputy director of the center’s academic committee, said that difficulties still loom large over China‘s recovery process as investment and export take up too big a proportion of the economic structure and consumption still remains weak.

China‘s strict property curbs and economic restructuring will also affect the growth rebound, he added.

On a quarterly basis, the growth rate is expected to accelerate in the first and second quarter of 2013, and gradually draw back in the middle of the year before picking up again in the fourth quarter, the report said.

China‘s economy recorded 7.8 percent year-on-year growth last year, marking the first time that the annual increase dropped to less than 8 percent since 1999, according to data released on January 18 by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

“The growth rate did slow last year but still remains at normal levels, which will not change the basic development pattern of China‘s economy in the medium-to-long term,” said Zhu Baoliang, a researcher with the State Information Center, a government think-tank.

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Indian banks can be trusted: Survey

images (3)“What have you done to me lately?”

For banks around the world, the answer to that question seems to be the determining factor in whether banks are largely trusted. In countries whose financial systems did not blow up during the worldwide recession, trust has remained high. But in some European countries where the banks were generally viewed as having caused the crisis, trust plunged and has not recovered.

Online surveys of “informed publics” in 26 countries were conducted by people hired by Edelman, a public relations firm. Respondents were asked how much they trusted banks “to do the right thing,” on a scale of one – “do not trust them at all” – to nine – “trust them a great deal.” In the 2013 survey, conducted in October and November and released this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, more than two-thirds of the respondents in seven areas – all but one of them in Asia – thought the banks were worthy of trust. They were Indonesia, India, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico.

At the other end of the spectrum, fewer than a third of the respondents in six countries – all in Europe – thought bankers could be trusted. They were Ireland, Spain, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Italy.

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Indonesia: IPOs ride economic growth

20120207171513093A flurry of initial public offerings (IPOs) planned for December and early 2013 highlight how firms in Indonesia are trying to harness bullish domestic and global confidence to fund plans for expansion.

Currently leading the pack is Indonesia AirAsia, whose planned IPO hopes to raise some Rp1.7trn ($175.78m) in early 2013. The aviation firm is closely followed by state-owned plantation firm Perkebunan Nusantara’s Rp1.5trn ($155.1m) listing, also scheduled for 2013, and state-run construction company Waskita Karya’s Rp1.2trn ($124.08m) December IPO.

The Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) saw two IPOs in December, bringing the total number of listings for 2012 to 23. This is down on the 24 IPOs seen in 2011, but continues to underline international sentiment over the vast archipelago’s private equity prospects.

A survey conducted by private equity firm Coller Capital saw nascent Asian economies, such as Indonesia and Vietnam, favoured by one-fifth of investors over the more mature markets found in other Asian countries, including China and India.

Northstar Pacific Partners, a local partner of global investor TPG Capital, for example, raised $800m in 2011 to invest in Indonesian companies. Other large firms, such as Starwood Capital Group, are circling in search of deals, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal.

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Japan Economy Minister Urges Yen Caution

topics_yen_395According to The Wall Street Journal’s Mari Iwata, Tokyo—A top Japanese economic policy maker warned that a further sharp drop in the yen could harm the country’s economy, tempering the full-throated yen-weakening rhetoric of the new government that has successfully pushed the Japanese currency down more than 10% against the dollar in less than two months.

“The yen has come to a good level,” Economy Minister Akira Amari said in an interview Monday on Japan‘s TBS television station, the latest in a series of comments from cabinet members suggesting that officials are happy with an exchange rate of about ¥90 to the dollar—but not much weaker.

“If it falls further to the three-digit level, it would boost import prices, weighing on the everyday life of the nation,” Mr. Amari said, implying that officials may try to step on the brakes if markets seem to be pushing the dollar to the ¥100 level—a mark unseen since 2009.

The dollar traded in the 89-yen range in Asia markets Monday, flirting with the 90-yen level for the first time since June 2010. That is considerably stronger for the dollar—and weaker for the yen—than the 79-yen range it hit in mid-November.

The yen started weakening two months ago when general elections were called and polls forecast a victory for then-opposition leader Shinzo Abe. He based his campaign on calls for aggressive economic stimulus, and a weakening of the yen. Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party won a landslide victory in the mid-December ballot, and he and his aides have since pushed aggressively for policies seen as weakening the yen, from bigger government spending to more monetary easing from the Bank of Japan.

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