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Bret Stephens of the WSJ puts the -question what is Pakistan? And looks at possible answers. Starting with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who he says had aquite different idea from that of the Taliban. He quotes Jinnah 'you will find that in the course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus, and Muslims cease to be Muslims , not in the religious sense, because this is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State." His idea was of religion as apolitical identification of the state as opposed to asecular idea like that of India, not of a religious state in a religious sense.This Bret Stephens says is why a majority of Pakistanis have rejected religious parties at the polls but still find the idea of political religion identification appealing. He sees these aims as immodest or overreaching in the modern world of technology, mass communications and economic deveopment. Only by remaining backward can such aspirations be supported because economic development, technology and mass communications can only supplant such religious politcal identification with aspirations for higher standards of living. Witness the current general elections in India with 730 million people voters. The common driving force for all parties is how they can deliver on the economic aspirations of people for better living standards, better infrastructure, and better services such as health care and education. And communal parties like the BJP also have to shift their focus to delivering on these aspirations to get support. So Bret Sephens makes the point quite effectively when he says that the threat to Pakistan is existential, so he would like to put the point existentially - just accept simple countryhood, or face nothingness. ...

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The loss of some 4 million jobs is expected by experts in 2009, and Obama economic advisor Christina Romer has presented information at a meeting that shows the current downturn will be more severe than anything we experienced in the last 50 years. At that meeting on December 16, 2008, Obama met with Romer and other economic and policy advisors for 4 hours. It was decided that the target for jobs should be 3 million jobs created in 2009 and 2010. This still means a lot of the 4 million job loss will still occur in 2009, even if the infrastructure jobs estimated at $136 billion by the nation's governors get off to a fast start as they are supposedly ready to go. Money to states and local governments will reduce job losses and loss of services, and money in the form of lower payroll taxes would probably be saved to reduce debt by the public. Money to the poor to support medicaid and health care services and expanding healthcare coverage for those who lose coverage will be safety net reinforcement and support. So finding places to spend where jobs can be created quickly will be a challenge going forward and some of the $1 trillion stimulus will not go directly to job creation but as support. For the December 16 meeting Romer consulted with Martin Feldstein the senior Republican economist who said that " without action the economy will continue to decline rapidly." For a long time Martin Feldstein has been advocating strong action especially to reduce foreclosures and help stabilize housing prices. As the economy has weakened he has revised upwards what needs to be done, and his estimates are close to the lower end of the $800 billion to 1.3 trillion that is being estimated for 2 years. Lawrence Lindsay and other economists are supporting upto $1 trillion stimulus. ...

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The Economist looks at the 3 options facing Britain and America to tackle the financial crisis, and evaluates each option for its merits. It says nationalization is an option, and adds that it supported the nationalization of Northern Rock in the UK early on. Where nationalization is the best option considering the scale of the problem, as in the case of RBS in the UK, this should be followed without exacerbating the problem by pretending that it can be avoided. With its huge losses and large committments by the government of Britain, the state ends up with majority ownership. So for individual banks this policy would be a good one. With the government on both sides of the table, this avoids the major problem of how to value the assets, and of the bank's shareholders plotting to grab taxpayer's money. Expect to hear more about nationalization as a best option under the circumstances, says the Economist. This may also be because the situation is likely to get much worse in 2010. The single most important criteria should be it says returning the individual bank to good health. The other option is to collect toxic assets in a bad bank, with the clean bank rid of these assets not having to set aside reserves for losses of an unknown magnitude. This helps get lending and credit starting to flow again if banks are more willing to lend. The third option is guarantees by the government regarding the bad assets and insurance. The Economist does not think the insurance and gurarantees offered by the British government recently will work by itself, and feels it should have been combined with the separation of toxic assets of banks in a bad bank. The Economist also feels scale will be needed considering the magnitude of the problem and its continual escalation....

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Smaller biotech firms typically have products in the development stage and are not making money. Now they are facing increasing financial hardship. Even in good times except for a few names like Genentech and Amgen, the others are struggling. They have a hard time raising money, and its coming at a higher price, 90% of equity instead of 50% like before for 5 or 10 or 20 million dollars. Older shareholders are diluted with new capital raised. And some are selling out. Others are going into bankruptcy liquidation, after wrenching periods of firing most of the staff. Even blue chip firms like Helicos of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which went public in 2007, and has backing of advisors like Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize laureate, are in trouble; with its DNA reader designed to produce custom tailored cancer treatments at $1 million a piece. It has not booked a sale, faces competition from a reader developed by two companies, Roche and Illumina of San Diego. It almost ran out of cash last year. Helicos shares $18 last year, are at 54 cents. According to Burrill and Company, a venture capital concern, 100 of the publicly traded biotechs this year may be lost as companies fail or get taken over. 120 of the 360 publicly traded biotechs have less than 6 months cash left, compared with 12 a year ago, says Burrill. Already 10 have declared bankruptcy according to Biotechnology Industry Organization. BIO is asking Congress to step in and for the government through the National Institutes of Health to provide matches for private investment in small startups with promising treatments. All this is happening as companies are spending large sums for mergers like the Pfizer Wyeth merger. ...

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As president Jinping begins a second five year term his focus is on the small communities like Chashan, only a 6 hour drive from Beijing, that were neglected in the rush to industrialization. He has vowed to get rid of poverty in China by 2020. About 43 million people live in rural communities that have mostly older people and live on 95 cents a day. There is another challenge say experts which is the much larger popuation that lives in rural and urban areas- including urban migrants without property and residence rights- who live on less than $5.50 per day, $165 a month, according to the World Bank. This is about 1070 yuan per month, or in Indian rupees for a comparison with India- which was at a similar stage of development in 1990- of Rs 10,000 per month. About 40% of China's population or 560 million people are in this group. With a rapidly aging society as a result of the earlier one child policy, China faces the risk of not advancing from the level of a middle income country, in the way that South Korea and Japan have moved to levels similar to Western Europe and the U.S. As China's growth level slows and with an aging society this remains a major challenge. As this report shows there is great pressure on local officials to eliminate the poverty level of people living below $30 or about 200 yuan a month, as targets are set at local levels and corruption weakens the effort. There is concern at the lack of an effort to improve the living conditions of the 200 million rural migrants living in cities, who under China's "hukou" system are not considered residents and are not getting education and health benefits. ...

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This essay in WSJ is from Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida, and now Secretary of State in the second term DJT administration. Here Rubio points to his first visit as a return to focus on the American continent, on Central America and South America, which was neglected since the Kennedy administration in 1961 when JFK launched the Alliance for Progress (Allianza para Progreso). Like JFK Rubio visited Central American countries the source in the last decade in addition to Venezuela of much of the illegal migration north to the US. After support for failed dictatorships under the Eisenhower administration, JFK made Latin America a priority. This can be seen in the JFK Nixon debates. 64 Years after the conference in Uruguay's Punta del Este in 1961, America is back to square one with the failed Central American countries from gangs plus crime and from Venezuela's economy collapsing from inflation plus mismanagement with a socialist experiment. Kennedy said-"To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge – to convert our good words into good deeds – in a new alliance for progress – to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty." -- John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961 Kennedy said of the Alliance for Progress "a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose to satisfy the basic needs of the [Latin] American people for homes, work and land, health and schools – techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela." Speaking in the White House on March 13, 1961, JFK said to more than two hundred Latin American diplomats,  "Let me be the first to admit that we North Americans have not always grasped the significance of this common mission." Yet at the same time, "many in your own countries have not fully understood the urgency of the need to lift people from poverty and ignorance and despair." ...

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Pakistan's economic delegation meets Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, at the IMF and World Bank Annual meeting in Bali, Indonesia. Lagarde calls for transparency in accounting and complete understanding of Pakistan's debt. IMF delegation will visit Islamabad to discuss terms for a loan. The previous government of Mr. Sharif came under criticism for not providing transparency on Pakistan's total debt. There is concern about debt trap diplomacy in loans from China, as loans may exceed the country's ability to repay and the interest rate terms are not seen as favorable to Pakistan. The Sharif government is criticized for not negotiating better terms for loans from China. Pakistan faces $8 billion debt load in 2018, with first payments to China under Belt and Road Initiative of $1 billion due in 2019. Pakistan's total foreign exchange reserves fell to a low of $8.4 billion, according to the central bank. Pakistan is seeking $12 billion in IMF assistance, but experts say more will be needed to bridge the financial gap. The Pakistan rupee dropped by 10% during this week in October 2018, down to 137 rupees for a U.S. dollar. The new government of prime minister Imran Khan took office in August 2018 after election promises to bring transparency to Pakistan's debt situation. Promises were also made to improve low income housing and meet needs of poor and low income public. Imran Khan opened a public housing project to build 5 million new homes. IMF terms could restrict the money available for badly needed housing and other social projects.  Pakistan's small tax base with a small percentage of the population paying taxes, also restricts the ability of the government to fund social welfare projects and infrastructure. It makes the country more dependent on outside assistance and loans. India has moved to expand its tax base, and is implementing GST tax reforms to increase the tax revenues available to fund infrastructure, health, education and housing. The war in Yemen has complicated other sources of funding traditionally accessed by Pakistan from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The financing gap is estimated by experts to be $20 billion, with the IMF assistance sought of $12 billion falling short of the financial needs. ...

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On the first day of the new vaccine policy on June 21, 2021, India has vaccinated 6.9 million people. India has now vaccinated 287 million people out of a population of 1.2 billion. This is a race against time as new variants caused the second wave of coronavirus in April and May of 2021 with cases peaking at over 300,000 a day.  The shortcoming of the old vaccine policy are being corrected. The entire vaccine supply process and the vaccination drive is now being handled by the federal government. Earlier during the second wave vaccine supply and the vaccination drives were under an arrangement with no clear overall responsibility. States shared responsibility with the federal government and target vaccination goals were missed, vaccine supplies were inadequate.  A similar arrangement in Germany failed and Germany's vaccination supplies were inadequate and vaccination drive stalled. This caused immense frustration in Germany in April-May 2021. Germany's troubled history before World War II led to a reliance on decentralized actions, and state governments imposed different rules in a relatively small country compared to India. This was corrected with the federal government taking on the entire responsibility for the vaccine supply and vaccination drive leading to good results today in vaccines. With India's huge population and political process of different state governments, some lacking experience in administration for a complex process, and others failing to coordinate well with the federal government, the lack of overall responsibility at the federal government posed serious risks of missing targets for vaccines and letting the coronavirus wreck the economy and public confidence. Complex negotiations with other governments in Europe and the US for vaccine manufacture in India could only be handled at the federal level. The resources and planning at the federal level were already in place in India for infrastructure and other projects, experience and setting targets in that area at the federal level could now be transferred to this task in vaccines. Somewhere in the range of 8 million vaccines a day need to be reached and sustained from August to December 2021 for India to reach the goal of vaccinated all 1.2 billion people ahead of any further attack from a third or fourth wave, say experts. This is not a choice for the federal government, it is simply something India has got to accomplish to be a healthy nation that can grow with neighbors in Europe, the US, Australia and Japan and build confidence in its Asia-Pacific region. The entire Asia-Pacific region has a lot resting on how well India achieve this goal and moves on to the next phase of assisting its neighbors in the region.  ...

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What is the difference between South Korea and the U.S., Europe in the handling of coronavirus? It is tracking and testing.  President Trump and health adviser Dr. Fauci, see South Korea as the successful model to be followed in controlling the coronavirus. What has happened till now it is accepted with shortage of basic medical supplies and equipment, stress on hospital systems, are merely mitigation actions. South Korea was prepared for the coronavirus crisis because of the MERS and other epidemics, and failures resulting in corrective actions. Labs were centralized and better equipped for testing and tracking the infected. One of the key tools is testing. President Trump says the goal is for the U.S. to exceed and far surpass tests per capita in South Korea. Five million tests are planned by the end of April in the U.S. Where the U.S. falls short is in use of multipronged digital tracking using data from people's use of mobile phones, credit card usage, and use of apps designed to separate infected people from others. South Korea is a democracy with a population of 52 million people, about the size of France. People who were student activists in the democratization era in South Korea say the use of digital technology is a need today. We have to adapt in emergency situation they say. Ki Mo-ran, epidemiologist, and adviser to South Korean government says this is a key part lacking in the European and U.S. efforts to control coronavirus. She says in South Korea we know the patient's contacts, where he goes and stays, so we don't have to lock down everybody. Without digital tracking one cannot know which place is contaminated, which place is clean, so that there can be a lockdown of just that area and not the whole country, says Ki Mo-ran. She asks the question- is one person's privacy more important than the lives of a family or other people who are affected. Is it OK to lockdown every child in the country in a home as in Spain for over a month so that particular people's privacy is respected? These are serious questions for western society, are they exceptions or is democracy not just a western idea but equally cherished in Asian societies, people talk about Confucianism in China and the Asian culture forgetting that the biggest democracies are quite large and functioning well in India in addition to South Korea, Taiwan Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Japan, far larger in area and population than China. The French government has chosen the app TraceTogether as the least intrusive one adaptable to France for use there. The U.S. is having Google and Apple develop one of its own. India will be developing one of its own. The NYT raises the question will it be watered down so much in France or in the U.S. and UK to be less effective than the  dire need for an alternative to lockdowns? ...

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Arvind Panagriya, Prof. of Economics at Columbia University, points out the key initiatives of the Modi government in its first four years which will show results in future years for development of the country.  He mentions the Swachh Bharat Mission and cites results that show rural households with toilets are now 84% up from 38%.  By 2019 the whole country will be defecation zone free on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. The Dhan Jan Yojana DJY accounts opened for rural households are up to 316 million. Aadhar cards for identification are up from 650 million to 1.2 billion. The Aadhar and DJY work together to enable direct transfer of benefits to poor households, eliminating the leaks in benefits transfer and ghost accounts of the period since independence in 1947. Not mentioned by Panagriya is the Health Insurance scheme for lower income households that enable families to survive a sudden medical expense that could put them in dire straits.  These efforts work in a way to change India from the ground up from its villages and rural areas as envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi in the struggle for independence. The land acquisition law amendments were put on hold till farmers concerns could be better accomodated, an area of concern for industrial development cited in an editorial in the Hindu newspaper. Fiscal consolidation and inflation targeting have resulted in an average inflation rate of 4.3% for the 4 years of the Modi government. Inflation was over 9% in the last 2 years of the previous Congress UPA government with GDP growth dropping to 5.9% for the last two years. Average GDP growth for four years for the Modi government is 7.3%, even after the changes to implement GST taxation for one national tax eliminating state barriers in interstate commerce and demonetization to fight corruption and black money. Rate of GDP growth should be higher after the gains from the initiatives and the new GST integration of the country are felt, with increase in investment and FDI, after infrastructure improvements and land acquisition arrangements are made. Transportation infrastructure modernization initiative pushes ahead with the first bullet train in the pilot project for Ahmedabad- Mumbai set to start in 2022. This is a $17 billion project financed for $13 billion by the Japanese government at 0.1% loan for 50 years, moratorium on repayments for 20 years, using E5 Shinkansen series technology. Implementation of this project on a sound financial basis should lead to transformation of the Indian rail network, raising the level of technology implementation across the entire Indian rail system. Such an achievement would rival the first introduction of railways into India in the nineteenth century under the British. A new bankruptcy law is intended to free up capital for investment by putting behind the large number of non performing loans in the Indian banking system. Changes made by the central bank RBI are designed to speed up this process so that loss making enterprises are absorbed, consolidated or shut down, a legacy from the earlier period.     ...

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The lack of economic opportunities for an increasingly urbanized African younger generation is a major challenge. The median age of 19 makes Africa the world's youngest continent. Megacities are growing up in places such as Lagos and Kinshasha as millions leave subsistence farming to go to cities. Unlike Asia and Latin American countries men and women are coming to shantytowns in cities at a time when Africa is much poorer for a similar level of urbanization that Asian and Latin American nations reached decades earlier. In 1993 this WSJ analysis and graphs show the Asian emerging economies and sub Saharan Africa had similar GDP per capita of $2415, by 2019 this was $4000 for Africa and $12,000 for Asian emerging economies. Latin America was at $10,000 in 1993 and in 2019 was at about $15,000. The gap widened considerably between Asia and African countries. Asian emerging economies increased GDP to 5 time from the same starting point as Africa in 1993, Africa doubled GDP over the period of 25 years to 2019. Latin America started from a much higher point and increased GDP by only 50% over 25 years. Asian economies that performed better over this period did better because of stable even entrenched governments such as in Singapore with Le Kuan Yew and in China with stable successive governments under CPC leadership of prime minister Deng. The difference in Asia was a commitment across all classes and groups to development, a sense of development as a way to make up for the years lost under colonialism of foreign powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A sense of correcting historical injustice and wrongs. This is a missing ingredient in the processes unfolding in Latin America and Africa in the last 25 years. ...

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Kevin Roose explains the unique structure of Open AI which has 4 board members and is structured as a nonprofit with the overriding goal of safety and making AI beneficial to humanity. Ilya Sutskeyer is chief scientist and member of the board. He says Altman's ouster was necessary to protect OpenAI's mission of making Artificial Intelligence beneficial to humanity. Mr. Altman was asked to join a video meeting of the board on Friday 17th November and was immediately fired. Open AI started in 2015 as a nonprofit and in 2019 setup a capped profit subsidiary in which investors returns are capped in relation to the investment. It keeps the nonprofit in charge and able to fire the CEO of the profit subsidiary and keeps the mission as overarching for both subsidiaries. There are three other members who hold no shares in the company and who are bound to a fiduciary duty to "create safe AI that is broadly beneficial to humanity." Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner are the two other members who are members of the Effective Altruism movement who have raised concerns that AI could lead to the extinction of humanity. Adfam D'Angelo is the other member, he is CEO of Quora a question and answer site. ...

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Short time work programs, paid leave, aid to small business for employee retention with the government paying a big percentage of wages, and unemployment benefits till companies rehire employees with government paying for this, are all different ways in which the U.S. and Europe are coping with the coronavirus crisis.  In the U.S. 22 million have applied for unemployment benefits with the U.S. government picking up a substantial part of the wages till companies rehire these employees. In the UK the government has launched a program that gives 2500 pounds or $3100 to each worker each month upto 80% of the worker's pay. The money is sent to businesses for retaining employees. This could cover estimated 8.3 million workers in the UK at a cost of $52 billion. The U.S. has a similar program with the first phase $377 billion already distributed to small businesses which requires retention of employees for government forgiveness of these loans. The basic idea is retain employees who could stay at home or be in short work programs or work from home. The French government is paying the wages of 9.6 million workers, almost half of workers in the private sector by sending the money to 785,000 small businesses. In Germany the Kurzarbeit program covers 725,000 companies which supports the wages of employees in a downturn and is financed from a special fund. The cost for Germany, France and Spain is about $147 billion or 135 billion euros for such programs. The European Union will step in with a 100 billion euros loan package. ...

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Biden is a US president in a hurry, says this analysis in The Times. And it says this is for a good reason. Biden as vice president in the Obama administration has watched as time slipped by and much of the hopes remained unfulfilled for infrastructure and other plans including climate change. Biden also has long experience in Congress and long experience working with Congressional rules. He also understands that the Democratic majority may not last beyond 2 years, better to go all out now and lose no time. This is the thinking behind his plan for $2 trillion in infrastructure spending in the first 100 days of his administration, and the idea that he does not need to win Republican support by watering down his plan.

The American people now support this kind of bold vision and bold plan after the pandemic showed the weak nature of presidential plans and aspirations till now for three decades.

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Plastic water bottle use surged with a shift to single bottle use of bottled water as a preferred option to using sugar drinks and sodas. In the U.S. this use has surged 284% since 1994, with 67% of the bottled water sold not in jugs but in single use convenience type plastic water bottles.  Manufacturers of plastic water bottles have failed to come up with a technology that makes the kind of plastic that can be easily recycled. Danone's bottled water company Evian brand makes about 30% of its plastic water bottles from recycled plastic and no aims at shifting entirely to recycled plastic by 2025.  Images of bottles filling landfills and hurting sealife have led to consumer opposition to their prolific use. Ocean Conservancy says plastic water bottles are behind cigarette butts and food wrappers the thrid most item washing up on shorelines.  Curbs- Cities in Massachusetts along the coastline are banning their use. New York City is banning the sale in parks, beaches, of these bottles. And the European parliament  is backing laws for member states to collect 90% of these bottles for recycling by 2025. Mumbai has banned this year eater being sold in small bottles. The importance of this is now sinking in. ...

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Ford making plans to put 2 plants one in Nanjing, China, and one in Thailand with about $1 billion investment combined suggests Ford is looking at GM's strategy and planning for a new era in automobile production, one that makes more cars in high growth regions of Asia. The demand is expected to grow largest in India, China and the rest of Asia. And these cars will have to cost a lot less than they are today for the lower purchasing power of Asia's new middle clases and lower middle classes which are growing in numbers. Meantime the costs in the US are still high even after reducing the health care burden through the health care trust that GM negotiated with the UAW. The UAW agreement with GM reduces labor costs for new workers but existing workers costs continue to be at the levels from before. And non assembly new workers not all new workers get paid at lower rates than the existing rates. So the progress in labor costs is still short of where GM or Ford needs to see it to compete effectively worldwide. Meantime the automobile markets continue to change and grow worldwide. The American car companies cannnot wait, they have to make decisions based on the labor situation in the US and their response is to build new capacity in the Asian markets, even while maintaining labor peace at home so as not to have upheavals in the domestic markets in the USA. New product and designs can still be handled in the USA so GM could agree to make commitments for manufacturing new product at plants in the USA, while at a minimum getting the UAW to agree to take over health care responsibility and agree on the playing field in labor costs for the future, which would have to take into account global competition and not just a labor social contract from another era. Ford's 2 investments are in alliance with Mazda, of which it owns 33%, and which generated $168 million in profits in 2006. Of the product in Thailand 80% will be exported to the rest of Asia excluding China and India, and also to S. Africa and Australlia and New Zealand. It will make about 100,000 cars. Currently Thgailand exports about 650,000 vehicles out of production of 1.25 million vehicles. About 70% of exports are pickup trucks....