Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: politics

  • Australia in the Asian Century – Chapter Two: The future of Asia

    Australia in the Asian Century – Chapter Two: The future of Asia

    This post is one of the series of articles on the Australia in the Asian Century report. An initial overview of the report is at Australian Hubris in the Asian Century.

    “Asia’s economic resurgence is set to continue” is the bold statement at the beginning of Chapter Two of the Australia in the Asian Century report and with that the chapter immediately falls back to warm motherhood statements;

    Average living standards are set to improve dramatically and transform the way people live and work. Asia’s economies are projected to expand at a strong rate. The region’s expansion and development will change the contours of Asia and the globe—opening up exciting new opportunities, while also posing some challenges.

    All of this is true, however the report struggles to identify exactly what those challenges and opportunities are as Asia develops and where Australians fit into the region’s evolving economy.

    Demographics will matter, but they are not destiny

    The constant mantra through the report is “demographics will matter, but they are not destiny.” Yet, despite the headline, Chapter Two illustrates that so far it has been destiny.

    Graph 2.6 of the report shows how Japan’s, and now South Korea’s, productivity has tailed off as the population has aged. This is to be expected when economic expansion has been based on labour intensive manufacturing, as China’s is today.

    Frustratingly, the report acknowledges this with the following paragraph;

    But the fruits of adopting new technology and adapting it will become harder to harvest. A point will come, though it’s still some way off, where the growth of labour productivity in developing Asian economies will slow—opportunities for gains from importing foreign technology and for shifting workers from agriculture to industry will diminish.

    “Some point in the future” doesn’t wash when the rest of the chapter shows off various ‘firm’ numbers estimating ‘base’, ‘low’ and ‘high’ growth rates. If you can quantify those growth assumptions, then it should be fairly trivial to estimate the turning point where aging populations start to affect China.

    Luckily others have done this work, the Australian Macrobusiness site suggests that turning point could be as early as 2015. In which case, unlike Japan and South Korea, China will have got old before it got rich.

    If this true, then IMF’s projected growth rates will miss their targets – particularly the ‘low growth’ scenario which is almost identical to their ‘base scenario’.

    Rise of the middle class

    Much of the emphasis in this view of Asia’s development is on the rise of the middle class and the report features a case study of Hitesh, a middle class stockbroker in Ahmedabad.

    While there’s no doubt Hitesh and his family’s income and standard of living are rising, the idea that several hundred million Indian and Chinese will jump to European or North American income levels before 2025 is improbable.

    Most stockbrokers in New York, London or Sydney earn between 30 and 300 times Hitesh’s $5,000 a year and in 2010, average Chinese income was a tenth of the US.

    Even if the Indian and Chinese middle classes did manage a tenfold growth in income over the next decade, the assumption they would adopt the debt driven high consumption patterns of the US or Australia isn’t a given as we see in how the Japanese middle classes haven’t aped the spending behaviour of their profligate Western friends.

    The credit and banking points in this chapter illustrate the hubris mentioned in my original overview of Australia in the Asian Century.

    And with financial systems in advanced economies unwinding the high debt levels built up before the Global Financial Crisis, financial institutions in stronger economic positions, such as those in Australia and elsewhere in the Asian region, will have opportunities to expand into new markets.

    Given the dire records of Australian banks in expanding overseas along with the “stronger economic position” being due more to government guarantees during the GFC and the desperate political desire to prop up Australia’s property market at all costs, it’s difficult to see exactly what Australian institutions have to offer Asian savers except to further underwrite the never ending down under housing bubble.

    Chapter two of the Australia in the Asian Century report finishes with an overview of the current geopolitical situation which is notable more for what has been left out. This is again probably due to Canberra public service politics and the report suffers for it.

    One major region left out is Central Asia and Russia – outstanding given the report’s view  that a resource poor Asia (that Japanese assumption again) will need Australia to fuel its energy and resources needs – which ignores the construction of pipelines and railways to China and India.

    Also missed are the projects to upgrade China’s railway and road links to Europe and Central Asia. These in themselves may trigger major geopolitical changes over the next few years, as we’re seeing today in Tibet and Xinjiang after railways were built to Kashgar to Lhasa. Yet none of this is considered.

    Not the ‘Stans should feel aggrieved, like the rest of the report the emphasis is on China and India with scant mention of other Asian countries.

    For Australia, much of the hope in the report seems to be in providing raw materials for Asia’s industrialising and urbanising societies along with being a holiday destination and education provider. This is all lazy 1980s thinking which projects Australia’s Japanese experience of thirty years ago onto China and India today.

    The predictions of Asia’s future in the Australia in the Asian Century report are largely are a continuation of the status quo. If this report had been written in 1960, it may have picked the rise of Japan over the following twenty years but the main focus would have been on Burma as Asia’s richest independent country.

    Exacerbating the report’s weakness are the assumptions that development paths will follow the same course as Japan, Taiwan or South Korea in the late 20th Century.

    Development wasn’t a smooth path in all three of those countries and each had their own unique political and economic upheavals in that time, the failure to recognise that similar disruptions will happen in Asia’s emerging economies as they develop is probably the greatest weakness in the entire report.

    It’s very easy to draw straight lines on graphs based on ‘best case’ IMF projections but history is rarely linear. This is probably the greatest intellectual failing of the white paper.

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  • Australia in the Asian Century – Chapter One: The rise of Asia

    Australia in the Asian Century – Chapter One: The rise of Asia

    This post is one of the series of articles on the Australia in the Asian Century report. An initial overview of the report is at Australian Hubris in the Asian Century.

    “Just over two decades ago, the Australian Government commissioned a study of Australia and the Northeast Asian ascendancy” starts the opening of the Australia in the Asian Century report. That sentence describes how this paper is the latest of Australia’s earnest efforts to understand the region.

    The opening chapter of the report follows the sensible principle that to plan for the future we have to first understand the present so this section seeks to explain the development of various Asian economies and put those changes into an Australian perspective.

    Notable in the narrative is the North East Asian focus, while India gets a brief mention most of the story revolves around the development of China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. Chart 1.2, “Asia’s economic dividend” gives the game away when all but one ‘Asian’ country listed is East Asian.

    Russia, along with most of South and Central Asia – not to mention other Asia countries like Iran, Turkey and the former Soviet Republics – rate no mention all.

    The narratives around the countries which are covered is also deficient – for instance the discussion on Japan’s, South Korea’s and Vietnam’s developments totally ignore post-war reconstruction efforts and their relations with the United States.

    China does get a more detailed examination rightly noting it was the country’s admission to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 that really set the economy’s export sector moving, however it skates over the massive dislocations and market reforms introduced in the 1980s which laid the foundations for China’s successful bid to join the WTO.

    More notably, the analysis overlooks – probably to avoid upsetting PRC diplomats and making life difficult in Canberra – the role of Taiwanese investment in China and Taiwan’s development itself.

    In a similar vein the scant discussion of India misses the role of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) in the country’s economic development along with the concentration of power in the various industrial conglomerates like the Tata Group.

    Again, the same omission is made when discussing the South Korean Chaebols and Japanese Keiretsu. Given the investments made in Australia by all of these industrial conglomerates it’s curious they barely rate a mention in discussing Asia’s industrialisation process.

    The discussion on innovation in Chapter 1.3 is useful however it lacks substance in identifying exactly which sectors various Asian economies are specialising in and which industries are in decline as various countries move up the value chain.

    Singapore’s success in becoming East Asia’s hub for banking and corporate regional headquarters is a notable omission and again one has a suspicion this is because of ongoing Australian governments’ doomed ambitions to establish Sydney as a regional financial and business centre.

    Probably the most glaring omission in Chapter One though is the role of the United States. In tracking the rise of the Indian service sector or Chinese, Japanese and South Korean manufacturing the trade policies of the US cannot be ignored. And yet they largely are.

    That failure to acknowledge the US role means report overlooks the Clinton and Bush I Administrations’ forced opening East Asia’s largely closed economies which radically changed South Korea, Taiwan and Japan in the late 1980s and early 90s. Not to mention the critical role the US had during that period in allowing China and Vietnam to join the global trade networks.

    Chapter One of Australia in the Asian Century is an unsatisfactory introduction to the complexities of the Asian economies and one suspects is because of the compromises made to assuage the egos and groupthink of Canberra’s mandarins and politicians.

    Most importantly, it fails to put the last thirty years’ developments in Asia into an Australian context or perspective. In this respect, it’s a fitting start to a largely inadequate report.

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  • Guarding your words

    Guarding your words

    US presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Australian radio commentator Alan Jones have in one thing in common – not understanding that almost every person they know is carrying a listening device.

    The smartphone is a powerful tool and one of its great features is how it makes a great dictation device, you can use the built in recording applications to jot down ideas or make a record of important conversations.

    Political events are a great opportunity to record the candidates’ or speakers’ talks and this is what has caught both Jones and Romney.

    The 47% dependent on welfare slur has probably sunk Romney’s presidential campaign. At the very least it’s exposed the contradictions at the heart of the Republican agenda as they try to demonise those receiving government entitlements while trying to win the votes of older Americans who rely on state subsidies to survive.

    In many ways the US Republicans are facing the problem of electorates that believe their entitlements are sacred that all Western politicians will be grappling with over the next quarter century.

    This contradiction isn’t something either the media or the Western political classes have the intellectual capacity to deal with, so there is little chance of a rational debate on the economic sustainability of the entitlement culture.

    For Romney, this contradiction now threatens to sink his campaign.

    The Jones problem is somewhat different, this nasty little man was speaking to the next generation of Australian Liberal Party apparatchiks and the controversy about his tasteless comments will probably improve his standing in the sewer in which he floats. In the wider community outside Jones’ increasingly narrow circle of influence his comments only confirm the low opinion decent people have of this man.

    Jones though is not naive when using the media, the real naivety is among his guests. It’s been reported that before the event the audience were asked “if there were any journalists present”.

    That question being asked betrays any claim that the organisers didn’t know Jones’ comments would be offensive. It also shows how the modern political fixer misunderstands the nature of today’s media. It’s likely a recording of proceedings would have leaked out through an enthusiastic supporter showing off.

    What’s really instructive is how the kindergarten apparatchiks of the Young Liberals believe that shutting down recording devices will remove the risk of being held accountable. That mentality is pervasive through government and politics – shut down discussion and lie about what happened.

    All of these politicians have to understand something Alan Jones has known all along; that a microphone should be treated like a loaded weapon and never assumed to be turned off and safe.

    The days of what was said to the Poughkeepsie Chamber of Commerce or the Cootamundra Country Womens Association not being reported outside the local community are long gone. If you don’t want something broadcast nationally, then don’t say it.

    On balance, this is good for democracy and leadership as it makes all politicians – and business leaders – far more accountable and transparent.

    Accountability and transparency are anathema to the apparatchiks who run the political parties of the Western world. These people, despite their access to power, are ultimately going to be found wanting in a world where there is a recording device in almost every person’s pocket.

    There are genuine privacy concerns with smartphones but for business and political leaders the days of “speaking with a forked tongue” are over. This is not a bad thing.

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  • Risk free fallacies

    Risk free fallacies

    One of the conceits of the late Twentieth Century was that we can engineer risk out of our lives.

    Derivatives like Collateral Debt Obligations were thought to overcome financial risks, think contracts would eliminate business risks and wise central banks would massage the economic cycle to banish the risks of economic crises.

    In schoolyards, the kids are banned from doing cartwheels and playing ball games – in response to a recent edict prohibiting physical activity at a local school an education department spokesman said the ban was to prevent, and not in response to, playground injuries.

    So nothing’s happened to provoke a ban, just someone decided there was risk and the first reaction is to eliminate it rather than manage it.

    In a litigious society where a culture of blame has developed this reaction is understandable. If a kid gets hurt in the playground then the parents might blame the teacher and one should be under no illusion that in the NSW state education system, the industrial concerns of teachers will always trump the welfare of students.

    So the cartwheels must stop.

    The strange thing with our culture of blame is that when something goes seriously wrong, such as the implosion of the banking system due to greed and misunderstanding of risk, no-one is held responsible.

    For lawyers, this culture is understandable. After all, their job is to warn clients of legal risks and it’s true that every time we walk down the street or jump in our car we might make a mistake that could see us in court.

    But we learn to manage that risk and we accept the odds every time we choose to drive down to the supermarket.

    The danger in believing we can eliminate risk is that removing one element of risk often results in unexpected consequences – they are even more unexpected when you don’t understand the risks in the first place. CDOs and the shadow banking system are a good example of this.

    Government seek to pass laws eliminating risks and in doing so create new risks, particularly when the Acts they pass are poorly written and badly thought out.

    There is always the question of what risk we are addressing – in the modern corporatist political system, the PR risk to a government always takes priority over a real risk to citizens. Passing a law to protect the minister’s backside might make life more risky for others.

    As helicopter parents, always hovering over our children and blaming teachers, schools, neighbours and other parents when something goes wrong, we’re creating a whole set of risks we don’t understand.

    For politicians, managers and leaders their main responsibility is to manage risk, not pretend it’s been eliminated by the latest memo, law or silly schoolyard ban.

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  • Is Australia’s blue sky future making way for a red sunset?

    Is Australia’s blue sky future making way for a red sunset?

    Australia’s political and business leaders are convinced the nation will ride on the back of a fast growing China for the foreseeable future.

    Having climbed off the sheep’s back during the 1980s and moved from being an economy dependent on agricultural exports to a ‘clever country’ exporting high value services and products, in the late 1990s Australia turned its back on building a modern economy and decided to stake the future on a never ending coal and iron ore boom driven by Chinese industrialisation.

    Smarter than Bill Gates

    Australia’s success in riding China’s coattails allowed the Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens in 2010 to boast how he and the nation’s politicians were smarter than Bill Gates who nine years earlier warned Australia about being over reliant on commodities.

    Despite the hubris, there are real risks in the Chinese economy that the blue sky mining school of Australian economic management needs to plan for.

    China warnings

    The warning to US Presidential candidates on trade with China by Professor Patrick Chovanec of Beijing’s Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management is a good starting point.

    In his warning Professor Chovanec points out that Chinese growth in recent years has been driven by the construction sector, even if building activity were to stay constant this would shave off half of China’s growth rate. The options for stimulating the economy in manner similar to 2008 have narrowed.

    China’s economy is not just slowing, it is entering a serious correction.  The investment bubble that has been driving Chinese growth has popped, and there are no quick “stimulus” fixes left.  There is the very real possibility of some form of financial crisis in China before year’s end.

    China’s stimulus package was the world’s biggest response to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, followed by the South Koreans (another Australian commodities customers) and Australia itself.

    While the Chinese commodities boom drove most of Australia’s trade, it was domestic spending driven by the Rudd government’s stimulus package that saved Australia from entering recession.

    Squandering a century’s boom

    One of the notable things about Australia’s commodity success in the 2000s is just how little a dent the booming coal and iron ore exports put in the trade deficit. Despite record terms of trade, Australians still manage to spend as much on imports as they make on exported goods.

    Not that this worries Australia’s leaders who seem to spend all of their time worrying about pandering to a tiny number of marginal seat voters who listen to fear mongering talkback radio hosts which is what has driven the last two weeks’ obsession with a few hundred asylum seekers.

    Professor Chovanec points out the Chinese leadership is distracted as well with their struggles over a messy change of Politburo leadership, risking that the policy makers might miss any opportunity they have to engineer a ‘soft’ landing for their economy.

    The biggest risk is that of a crisis engineered to distract a discontented population warns Chovanec;

    in a worst case scenario, China may be tempted to provoke a conflict in the South China Sea to redirect popular discontent onto an external enemy.

    Already such things are happening, as anti-Japanese demonstrations step up around China over an island dispute.

    There are no shortage of island disputes in the South China Sea and almost all scenarios involve allies of the United States – the only one feasible dispute that doesn’t is Vietnam and China’s leadership has had their nose blooded in such disputes with their southern neighbour before.

    Even if we don’t see military tensions between the US and China, we certainly are going to see trade and political disputes in the next few years as both countries adapt to their places in a changed world.

    For Australia’s business and political leaders, it means being prepared for a world more complex than one where a country can get by just lazily skimming a few dollars of easy iron ore exports to China.

    We have to hope Australia’s leaders are capable of dealing with the challenges of a much more dynamic and difficult world where huge growth of one friendly trading partner is not assured. The stakes are too high to be distracted by suburban apparatchiks scoring meaningless political points off each other.

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