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Mostrando postagens com marcador China. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador China. Mostrar todas as postagens

02 dezembro 2014

Maconha na China

A China tem uma das mais eficientes censuras do mundo. Mas isto não impede a criatividade da população. O site Quartz mostra que o culto ao dirigente máximo, Xi Jinping, também tem estendido para sua mulher, Peng Liyuan, uma ex-cantora. Xi tenta propagar a ideia paternalista do dirigente, designando de “papai” Xi e “mamãe” Peng.

Acontece que a pronuncia de “papai” em conjunto com “mamãe” resulta na palavra “maconha”. O jogo de palavra foi aproveitado – e depois proibido – para falar da nova era da China.

25 dezembro 2013

Comércio com a China

O mapa mostra como a China está dominando o comércio mundial. De vermelho os países onde a China é o principal parceiro comercial. Isto inclui boa parte dos países da Ásia, assim como o Brasil e o Chile, que são exportadores de commodities. De laranja, os países onde a China é o segundo parceiro comercial. E amarelo os países que a China não é o principal ou segundo parceiro. Boa parte da Europa, América Central e alguns países da África e América do Sul.

06 novembro 2013

Diplomacia Panda

Qual o valor de um urso panda? Para a China, o simpático bichinho possui um grande valor. Um estudo mostrou que existe uma relação entre o fato da China presentear um país com o panda e os benefícios de acordos comerciais.

A China é o único país do mundo onde existem pandas em ambientes naturais. E o panda é o desejo maior de qualquer zoológico. (Certa vez visitei uma zoológico somente para ver um panda!). A China empresta pandas para países que fizeram acordos comerciais. Aconteceu com o Canadá e a França, que ganharam pandas depois de acordos para exportação de urânio para China. E com o Japão e Austrália. E a Escócia, que garantiu um contrato de fornecimento de salmão, entre outros produtos. E a China também pune: o encontro entre Obama de o Dalai Lama, em 2010, contrariou o governo Chinês que considera o monge do Tibete um inimigo; como represália, forçou o retorno de dois pandas.

31 julho 2013

The Economist traz Bric afundando na lama

A capa da "The Economist" traz uma avaliação negativa sobre a economia Bric (Brasil, Rússia, Índia e China). A revista tem uma ilustração que mostra os quatro países como atletas afundando na lama, com o título "A grande desaceleração". O Brasil é o mais afundado.
Em 2009, a mesma revista havia feito uma capa em que mostrava o Cristo Redentor como um foguete decolando, simbolizando a boa fase do país então. O título da capa era "Brasil decola".

Segundo a revista, após uma década de forte crescimento, durante a qual os países emergentes ajudaram a impulsionar a economia mundial e segurar os efeitos da crise econômica, os países dão os primeiros sinais de que a recuperação pode estar perdendo fôlego. A revista afirma ainda que a China terá sorte se conseguir atingir a meta oficial de crescimento de 7,5% da economia neste ano. As metas da Índia (5%), do Brasil e da Rússia (2,5%) se reduziram à metade do que os países conseguiram alcançar no período de crescimento coletivo.

O crescimento mais fraco da China ajuda a afundar as outras economias emergentes, bastante dependentes de exportações para o país asiático. O crescimento econômico recente do Brasil foi ajudado pela forte alta no preço das commodities vendidas à China. Agora, a combinação de inflação com baixas taxas de crescimento do PIB faz com que a economia caminhe a passos muito mais lentos do que o esperado.


Fonte: Uol, São Paulo

17 julho 2013

Madoff chinês

O empresário chinês Zeng Chengjie
Zeng teria fraudado mais de 57.000 investidores em cerca de 460 milhões de dólares (Reprodução/Weibo)
O empresário Zeng Chengjie, que saiu da pobreza da província chinesa de Hunan para se tornar um grande homem de negócios, foi executado pelo governo chinês na última sexta-feira, acusado de praticar fraude e captação ilegal de recursos, por meio de um esquema de pirâmide financeira.
A execução do empresário por meio de injeção letal foi feita sem que a família estivesse ciente ou presente. A pena contraria as leis chinesas que permitem que os executados tenham chance de ver suas famílias antes da morte. Contudo, segundo a justiça chinesa, Zeng não quis que a família presenciasse sua execução.
A filha do empresário, Zeng Shen, usou a rede social Weibo para protestar. Segundo ela, os membros dos partidos locais removeram seus investimentos dos projetos de Zeng em 2009, causando pânico entre os outros investidores. Tal debandada fez com que o esquema de pirâmide se desmontasse. De acordo com o site chinês Tea Leaf Nation, Zeng teria fraudado mais de 57 000 investidores em cerca de 460 milhões de dólares.
A fraude fez com que o empresário ficasse conhecido como 'Madoff chinês' - em menção a Bernard Madoff, fundador de uma das maiores firmas de investimento de Wall Street, e também autor de uma das maiores fraudes ocasionadas por uma pirâmide financeira. Madoff drenou mais de 50 bilhões de dólares por meio do esquema e foi condenado 150 anos de prisão.
A execução de criminosos de colarinho branco na China tem se tornado cada vez mais controversa, já que o próprio governo tem uma grande participação nos assuntos econômicos. Segundo a filha do empresário executado, o governo atuou em parceria com Zeng na captação de recursos, mas os membros do Partido Comunista se apressaram em retirar os recursos dos fundos em 2009, antes de mudanças regulatórias que seriam aprovadas pelo governo e prejudicariam milhares de pequenos investidores. Ainda segundo a filha do empresário, a mídia estatal chinesa sempre se referiu a Zeng como um investidor sábio, precavido e consciente
Fonte: aqui

08 junho 2013

Xi e o Sexo

Um texto interessante do Quartz mostra que a recente viagem do poderoso chefão chinês Xi Jinping esteve associada a "sexo". Primeiro, a fotografia abaixo, em que Xi olha, com ternura, para o presidente do México:


Depois a capa da revista The Economist, fazendo uma comparação com o filme Brokeback Mountain:

Naturalmente que tudo isto foi censurado na China

30 maio 2013

Entrevista com Barry Eichengreen

Excelente entrevista retirada do site do Fed de Cleveland com o professor Barry Eichengreen.

To some, the term “economic historian” conjures up images of an academic whose only interests lie deep in the past; an armchair scholar who holds forth on days long ago but has no insights about the present. Barry Eichengreen provides a useful corrective to that stereotype. For, as much as Eichengreen has studied episodes in economic history, he seems more attuned to connecting the past to the present. At the same time, he is mindful that “lessons” have a way of taking on lives of their own. What’s taken as given among economic historians today may be wholly rejected in the future.
Barry Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, his hometown. He is known as an expert on monetary systems and global finance. He has authored more than a dozen books and many more academic papers on topics from the Great Depression to the recent financial crisis.
Eichengreen was a keynote speaker at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s research conference, Current Policy under the Lens of Economic History, in December 2012. Mark Sniderman, the Cleveland Fed’s executive vice president and chief policy officer, interviewed Eichengreen during his visit. An edited transcript follows.
Sniderman: It’s an honor to talk with you. You’re here at this conference to discuss the uses and misuses of economic history. Can you give us an example of how people inaccurately apply lessons from the past to the recent financial crisis?
Eichengreen: The honor is mine.
Whenever I say “lessons,” please understand the word to be surrounded by quotation marks. My point is that “lessons” when drawn mechanically have considerable capacity to mislead. For example, one “lesson” from the literature on the Great Depression was how disruptive serious banking crises can be. That, in a nutshell, is why the Fed and its fellow regulators paid such close attention to the banking system in the run-up to the recent crisis. But that “lesson” of history was, in part, what allowed them to overlook what was happening in the shadow banking system, as our system of lightly regulated near-banks is known.
What did they miss it? One answer is that there was effectively no shadow banking system to speak of in the 1930s. We learned to pay close attention to what was going on in the banking system, narrowly defined. That bias may have been part of what led policymakers to miss what was going on in other parts of the financial system.
Another example, this one from Europe, is the “lesson” that there is necessarily such a thing as expansionary fiscal consolidation. Europeans, when arguing that such a thing exists, look to the experience of the Netherlands and Ireland in the 1980s, when those countries cut their budget deficits without experiencing extended recessions. Both countries were able to consolidate but continue to grow, leading contemporary observers to argue that the same should be true in Europe today. But reasoning from that historical case to today misleads because the circumstances at both the country and global level were very different. Ireland and the Netherlands were small. They were consolidating in a period when the world economy was growing. These facts allowed them to substitute external demand for domestic demand. In addition, unlike European countries today they had their own monetary policies, allowing them step down the exchange rate, enhancing the competitiveness of their exports at one fell swoop, and avoid extended recessions. But it does not follow from their experience that the same is necessarily possible today. Everyone in Europe is consolidating simultaneously. Most nations lack their own independent exchange rate and monetary policies. And the world economy is not growing robustly.


A third “lesson” of history capable equally of informing and misinforming policy would be the belief in Germany that hyperinflation is always and everywhere just around the corner. Whenever the European Central Bank does something unconventional, like its program of Outright Monetary Transactions, there are warnings in German press that this is about to unleash the hounds of inflation. This presumption reflects from the “lesson” of history, taught in German schools, that there is no such thing as a little inflation. It reflects the searing impact of the hyperinflation of the 1920s, in other words. From a distance, it’s interesting and more than a little peculiar that those textbooks fail to mention the high unemployment rate in the 1930s and how that also had highly damaging political and social consequences.
The larger question is whether it is productive to think in terms of “history lessons.” Economic theory has no lessons; instead, it simply offers a way of systematically structuring how we think about the world. The same is true of history.
Sniderman: Let’s pick up on a couple of your comments about the Great Depression and hyperinflation in Germany. Today, some people in the United States have the same concerns. They look at the expansion of the monetary base and worry about inflation. Do you find it surprising that people are still fighting about whether big inflation is just around the corner because of US monetary policy, and is it appropriate to think about that in the context of the unemployment situation as well?
Eichengreen: I don’t find it surprising that the conduct of monetary policy is contested. Debate and disagreement are healthy. Fiat money is a complicated concept; not everyone trusts it. But while it’s important to think about inflation risks, it’s also important to worry about the permanent damage to potential output that might result from an extended period subpar growth. To be sure, reasonable people can question whether the Fed possesses tools suitable for addressing this problem. But it’s important to have that conversation.
Sniderman: Maybe just one more question in this direction because so much of your research has centered on the Great Depression. Surely you’ve been thinking about some of the similarities and differences between that period and this one. Have you come to any conclusions about that? Where are the congruencies and incongruences?
Eichengreen: My work on the Depression highlighted its international dimension. It emphasized the role of the gold standard and other international linkages in the onset of the Depression, and it emphasized the role that abandoning the gold standard and changing the international monetary regime played in bringing it to an end.
As a student, I was struck by the tendency in much of the literature on the Depression to treat the US essentially as a closed economy. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I was then struck by the tendency in 2007 to think about what was happening then as a US subprime crisis. Eventually, we came to realize that we were facing not just a US crisis but a global crisis. But there was an extended period during when many observers, in Europe in particular, thought that their economies were immune. They viewed what was happening as an exclusively American problem. They didn’t realize that what happened in the United States doesn’t stay in the United States. They didn’t realize that European banks, which rely heavily on dollar funding, were tightly linked to US economic and financial conditions. One of the first bits of research I did when comparing the Great Depression with the global credit crisis, together with Kevin O’Rourke, was to construct indicators of GDP, industrial production, trade, and stock market valuations worldwide and to show that, when viewed globally, the current crisis was every bit as severe as that of the 1930s.
Eventually, we came to realize that we were facing not just a US crisis but a global crisis. But there was an extended period during when many observers, in Europe in particular, thought that their economies were immune.
Sniderman: Given that many European countries are sharing our financial distress, what changes in the international monetary regime, if any, would be helpful? Could that avenue for thinking of solutions be as important this time around as it was the last time?
Eichengreen: One of the few constants in the historical record is dissatisfaction with the status quo. When exchange rates were fixed, Milton Friedman wrote that flexible rates would be better. When rates became flexible, others like Ron McKinnon argued that it would be better if we returned to pegs. The truth is that there are tradeoffs between fixed and flexible rates and, more generally, in the design of any international monetary system. Exchange rate commitments limit the autonomy of national monetary policymakers, which can be a good thing if that autonomy is being misused. But it can be a bad thing if that autonomy is needed to address pressing economic problems. The reality is that there is no such thing as the perfect exchange rate regime. Or, as Jeffrey Frankel put it, no one exchange rate regime is suitable for all times and places.
That said, there has tended to be movement over time in the direction of greater flexibility and greater discretion for policymakers. This reflects the fact that the mandate for central banks has grown more complex – necessarily, I would argue, given the growing complexity of the economy. An implication of that more complex mandate is the need for more discretion and judgment in the conduct of monetary policy—and a more flexible exchange rate to allow that discretion to be exercised.
Sniderman: I’d be interested in knowing whether you thought this crisis would have played out differently in the European Union if the individual countries still had their own currencies. Has the euro, per se, been an element in the problems that Europe is having, much as a regime fixed to gold was a problem during the Great Depression?
Eichengreen: Europe is a special case, as your question acknowledges. Europeans have their own distinctive history and they have drawn their own distinctive “lessons” from it. They looked at the experience of the 1930s and concluded that what we would now call currency warfare, that is, beggar-thy-neighbor exchange-rate policies, were part of what created tensions leading to World War II. The desire to make Europe a more peaceful place led to the creation of the European Union. And integral to that initiative was the effort was to stabilize exchange rates, first on an ad hoc basis and then by moving to the euro.
Whether things will play out as anticipated is, as always, an open question. We now know that the move to monetary union was premature. Monetary union requires at least limited banking union. Banking union requires at least limited fiscal union. And fiscal union requires at least limited political union. The members of the euro zone are now moving as fast as they can, which admittedly is not all that fast, to retrofit their monetary union to include a banking union, a fiscal union, and some form of political union. Time will tell whether or not they succeed.
But even if hindsight tells us that moving to a monetary union in 1999 was premature, it is important to understand that history doesn’t always run in reverse. The Europeans now will have to make their monetary union work. If they don’t, they’ll pay a high price.
I didn’t anticipate the severity and intractability of the euro crisis. All I can say in my defense is that no one did.
Sniderman: Let me pose a very speculative question. Would you say that if the Europeans had understood from the beginning what might be required to make all this work, they might not have embarked on the experiment; but because they did it as they did, there’s a greater likelihood that they’ll do what’s necessary to make the euro system endure? Is that how you’re conjecturing things will play out?
Eichengreen: If I may, allow me to refer back to the early literature on the euro. In 1992, in adopting theMaastricht Treaty, the members of the European Union committed to forming a monetary union. That elicited a flurry of scholarship. An article I wrote about that time with Tamim Bayoumi looked at whether a large euro area or a small euro area was better. We concluded that a small euro area centered on France, Germany, and the Benelux countries made more sense. So one mistake the Europeans made, which was predictable perhaps on political grounds, though no more excusable, was to opt for a large euro area.
I had another article in the Journal of Economic Literature in which I devoted several pages to the need for a banking union; on the importance, if you’re going to have a single currency, single financial market and integrated banking system, of also having common bank supervision, regulation, and resolution. European leaders, in their wisdom, thought that they could force the pace. They thought that by moving to monetary union they could force their members to agree to banking union more quickly. More quickly didn’t necessarily mean overnight; they thought that they would have a couple of decades to complete the process. Unfortunately, they were side-swiped by the 2007-08 crisis. What they thought would be a few decades turned out to be one, and they’ve now grappling with the consequences.
Sniderman: You’ve written about the dollar’s role as a global currency and a reserve currency, and you have some thoughts on where that’s all headed. Maybe you could elaborate on that.
Eichengreen: A first point, frequently overlooked, is that there has regularly been more than one consequential international currency. In the late nineteenth century, there was not only the pound sterling but also the French franc and the German mark. In the 1920s there was both the dollar and the pound sterling. The second half of the twentieth century is the historical anomaly, the one period when was only one global currency because there was only one large country with liquid financial markets open to the rest of the world—the United States. The dollar dominated in this period simply because there were no alternatives.
But this cannot remain the case forever. The US will not be able to provide safe and liquid assets in the quantity required by the rest of the world for an indefinite period. Emerging markets will continue to emerge. Other countries will continue to catch up to the technological leader, which is still, happily, the United States. The US currently accounts for about 25 percent of the global economy. Ten years from now, that fraction might be 20 percent, and 20 years from now it is apt to be less. The US Treasury’s ability to stand behind a stock of Treasury bonds, which currently constitute the single largest share of foreign central banks’ reserves and international liquidity generally, will grow more limited relative to the scale of the world economy. There will have to be alternatives.
In the book I wrote on this subject a couple of years ago, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System, I pointed to the euro and the Chinese renminbi as the plausible alternatives. I argued that both could conceivably be significant rivals to the dollar by 2020. The dollar might well remain number one as invoicing currency and currency for trade settlements, and as a vehicle for private investment in central bank reserves, but the euro and renminbi could be nipping at its heels.
In the fullness of time I’ve grown more pessimistic about the prospects of those rivals. Back in 2010, when my book went off to the publisher, I didn’t anticipate the severity and intractability of the euro crisis. All I can say in my defense is that no one did. And I underestimated how much work the Chinese will have to do in order to successfully internationalize their currency. They are still moving in that direction; they’ve taken steps to encourage firms to use the renminbi for trade invoicing and settlements, and now they are liberalizing access to their financial markets, if gradually. But they have a deeper problem. Every reserve currency in history has been the currency of a political democracy or a republic of one sort or another. Admittedly the US and Britain are only two observations, which doesn’t exactly leave many degrees of freedom for testing this hypothesis. But if you go back before the dollar and sterling, the leading international currencies were those of Dutch Republic, the Republic of Venice, and the Republic of Genoa. These cases are similarly consistent with the hypothesis.
The question is why. The answer is that international investors, including central banks, are willing to hold the assets only of governments that are subject to checks and balances that limit the likelihood of their acting opportunistically. Political democracy and republican forms of governance are two obvious sources of such checks and balances. In other words, China will have to demonstrate that its central government is subject to limits on arbitrary action – that political decentralization, the greater power of nongovernmental organizations, or some other mechanism – that place limits on arbitrary action before foreign investors, both official and private, are fully comfortable about holding its currency.
I therefore worry not so much about these rivals dethroning the dollar as I do about the US losing the capacity to provide safe, liquid assets on the requisite scale before adequate alternatives emerge. Switzerland is not big enough to provide safe and liquid assets on the requisite scale; neither is Norway, nor Canada, nor Australia. Currently we may be swimming in a world awash with liquidity, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the danger that, say, 10 years from now there won’t be enough international liquidity to grease the wheels of twenty-first-century globalization.
Sniderman: It sounds to me as though you’re also trying to say that the United States should actually become comfortable with, perhaps even welcome, this development, because its absence creates some risks for us.
Eichengreen: I am. The United States benefits from the existence of a robust, integrated global economy. But globalization, in turn, requires liquidity. And the US, by itself, can’t all by itself satisfy the global economy’s international liquidity needs. So the shift toward a multipolar global monetary and financial system is something that we should welcome. It will be good for us, and it will be good for the global economy. To the extent that we have to pay a couple more basis points when we sell Treasury debt because we don’t have a captive market in the form of foreign central banks, that’s not a prohibitive cost.
Sniderman: And how has the financial crisis itself affected the timetable and the movement? It sounds like in some sense it’s retarding it.
Eichengreen: The crisis is clearly slowing the shift away from dollar dominance. When the subprime crisis broke, a lot of people thought the dollar would fall dramatically and that the People’s Bank of China might liquidate its dollar security holdings. What we discovered is that, in a crisis, there’s nothing that individuals, governments and central banks value more than liquidity. And the single most liquid market in the world is the market for US Treasury bonds. When Lehman Bros. failed, as a result of U.S. policy, everybody rushed toward the dollar rather than away. When Congress had its peculiar debate in August 2011 over raising the debt ceiling, everybody rushed toward the dollar rather than away. That fact may be ironic, but it’s true.
And a second effect of the crisis was to retard the emergence of the euro on the global stage. That too supports the continuing dominance of the dollar.
Sniderman: Economists and policymakers have always “missed” things. Are there ways in which economic historians can help current policymakers not to be satisfied with the “lessons” of history and get them to think more generally about these issues?
Eichengreen: It’s important to make the distinction between two questions – between “Could we have done better at anticipating the crisis?” and the question “Could we have done better at responding to it?” On the first question, I would insist that it’s too much to expect economists or economic historians to accurately forecast complex contingent events like financial crises. In the 1990s, I did some work on currency crises, instances when exchange rates collapse, with Charles Wyplosz and Andrew Rose. We found that what works on historical data, in other words what works in sample doesn’t also work out of sample. We were out-of-consensus skeptics about the usefulness of leading indicators of currency crises, and I think subsequent experience has borne out our view. Paul Samuelson made the comment that economists have predicted 13 out of the last seven crises. In other words, there’s type 1 error as well as type 2 error [the problem of false positives as well as false negatives].
Coming to the recent crisis, it’s apparent with hindsight that many economists – and here I by no means exonerate economic historians – were too quick to buy into the idea that there was such a thing as the Great Moderation. That was the idea that through better regulation, improved monetary policy and the development of automatic fiscal stabilizers we had learned to limit the volatility of the business cycle. If we’d paid more attention to history, we would have recalled an earlier period when people made the same argument: They attributed the financial crises of the 19th century to the volatility of credit markets; they believed that the founding of the Fed had eliminated that problem and that the business cycle had been tamed. They concluded that the higher level of asset prices observed in the late 1920s was fully justified by the advent of a more stable economy. They may have called it the New Age rather than the Great Moderation, but the underlying idea, not to say the underlying fallacy, was the same.
A further observation relevant to understanding the role of the discipline in the recent crisis is that we haven’t done a great job as a profession of integrating macroeconomics and finance. There have been heroic efforts to do so over the years, starting with the pioneering work of Franco Modigliani and James Tobin. But neither scholarly work nor the models used by the Federal Reserve System adequately capture, even today, how financial developments and the real economy interact. When things started to go wrong financially in 2007-08, the consequences were not fully anticipated by policymakers and those who advised them – to put an understated gloss on the point. I can think of at least two prominent policy makers, who I will resist the temptation to name, who famously asserted in 2007 that the impact of declining home prices would be “contained.” It turned out that we didn’t understand how declining housing prices were linked to the financial system through collateralized debt obligations and other financial derivatives, or how those instruments were, in turn, linked to important financial institutions. So much for containment.
Sniderman: I suppose one of the challenges that the use of economic history presents is the selectivity of adoption. And here I have in mind things like going back to the Great Depression to learn “lessons.” It’s often been said, based on some of the scholarship of the Great Depression and the role of the Fed, that the “lesson” the Fed should learn is to act aggressively, to act early, and not to withdraw accommodation prematurely. And that is the framework the Fed has chosen to adopt. At the same time, others draw “lessons” from other parts of US economic history and say, “You can’t imagine that this amount of liquidity creation, balance sheet expansion, etc. would not lead to a great inflation.” If people of different viewpoints choose places in history where they say, “History teaches us X,” and use them to buttress their view of the appropriate response, I suppose there’s no way around that other than to trying, as you said earlier, to point out whether these comparisons are truly apt or not.
Eichengreen: A considerable literature in political science and foreign policy addresses this question. Famous examples would be President Truman and Korea on the one hand, and President Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis on the other. Earnest May, the Harvard political scientist, argued that Truman thought only in terms of Munich, Munich having been the searing political event of his generation. Given the perspective this created, Truman was predisposed to see the North Koreans and Chinese as crossing a red line and to react aggressively. Kennedy, on the other hand, was less preoccupied by Munich. He had historians like Arthur Schlesinger advising him. Those advisors encouraged him to develop and consider a portfolio of analogies and test their aptness – in other words, their “fitness” to the circumstances. One should look not only at Munich, Schlesinger and others suggested, but also to Sarajevo. It is important to look at a variety of other precedents for current circumstances, to think which conforms best to the current situation, and to take that fit into account when you’re using history to frame a response.
I think there was a tendency, when things were falling down around our ears in 2008, to refer instinctively to the Great Depression. What Munich was for Truman, the Great Depression is for monetary economists. It’s at least possible that the tendency to compare the two events and to frame the response to the current crisis in terms of the need “to avoid another Great Depression” was conducive to overreaction. In fairness, economic historians did point to other analogies. There was the 1907 financial crisis. There was the 1873 crisis. It would have been better, in any case, to have developed a fuller and more rounded portfolio of precedents and analogies and to have used it to inform the policy response. Of course, that would have required policy makers to have some training in economic history.
Sniderman: This probably brings us back full circle. We started with the uses and misuses of economic history and we’ve been talking about economic history throughout the conversation. I think it might be helpful to hear your perspective on what economic history and economic historians are. Why not just an economist who works in history or a historian who works on topics of economics? What does the term “economic history” mean, and what does the professional discipline of economic historian connote to you?
Eichengreen: As the name suggests, one is neither fish nor fowl; neither economist nor historian. This makes the economic historian a trespasser in other people’s disciplines, to invoke the phrase coined by the late Albert Hirschman. Historians reason by induction while economists are deductive. Economists reason from theory while historians reason from a mass of facts. Economic historians do both. Economists are in the business of simplifying; their strategic instrument is the simplifying assumption. The role of the economic historian is to say “Not so fast, there’s context here. Your model leaves out important aspects of the problem, not only economic but social, political, and institutional aspects – creating the danger of providing a misleading guide to policy.”
Economists reason from theory while historians reason from a mass of facts. Economic historians do both.
Sniderman: Do you think that, in training PhD economists, there’s a missed opportunity to stress the value and usefulness of economic history? Over the years, economics has become increasingly quantitative and math-focused. From the nature of the discussion we’ve had, it is clear that you don’t approach economic history as sort of a side interest of “Let’s study the history of things,” but rather a disciplined way of integrating economic theory into the context of historical episodes. Is that way of thinking about economic history appreciated as much as it could be?
Eichengreen: I should emphasize that the opportunity is not entirely missed. Some top PhD programs require an economic history course of their PhD students, the University of California, Berkeley, being one.
The best way of demonstrating the value of economic history to an economist, I would argue, is by doing economic history. So when we teach economic history to PhD students in economics in Berkeley, we don’t spend much time talking about the value of history. Instead, we teach articles and address problems, and leave it to the students, as it were, to figure how this style of work might be applied to this own research. For every self-identifying economic historian we produce, we have several PhD students with have a historical chapter, or a historical essay, or an historical aspect to their dissertations. That’s a measure of success.
Sniderman: Well, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed it.
Eichengreen: Thank you. So have I.

08 fevereiro 2013

Escândalos contábeis da China

O escândalo contábil da Caterpillar, que adquiriu um empresa chinesa com milhares de dólares em estoques inexistentes, chamou a atenção para as fraudes na China. Mas chama a atenção a simplicidade das fraudes:

O que une a suposta fraude na subsidiária chinesa da Caterpillar, a Siwei, com os métodos descritos por Gillis são sua simplicidade. Enquanto Enron escondeu suas perdas através da realização de operações de derivativos com seus próprios veículos fora do balanço e Bernard Madoff escondeu seu esquema Ponzi com uma suposta estratégia de negociação "split-strike", as empresas corruptas chinesas infla as vendas nos negócios de fabricação e inventando clientes falsos.

23 janeiro 2013

Lei de Benford e dados econômicos da China

Aplicação da Lei de Benford nas estatísticas econômicas oficiais do governo chinês:

A mathematical tool devised by an American physicist in the 1930s underscores doubts about the quality and reliability of Chinese economic data, according to research by Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (ANZ)

The results are based on “Benford’s Law,” which holds that in any series of numbers, certain patterns will be found only if the statistics are naturally generated. The rule, created by former General Electric Co. (GE) engineer Frank Benford, suggests patterns for the first and second digits in a numeric series and can be used to detect phony data, Li-Gang Liu, ANZ’s chief economist for Greater China, and colleague Louis Lam said in a Jan. 8 report.





Benford’s work has already been adapted to show Greece should have been suspected of manipulating its data before the European debt crisis and that now-jailed financier Bernard Madoff was overstating investment returns.

The ANZ economists studied China’s annual nominal gross domestic product data from 1952 to 2011 to measure how frequently numbers from one to nine appeared as the first digit. While the 24 occurrences of “one” is higher than the 18 suggested by the rule, the economists said the statistics largely abide by what Benford’s Law allows. The same is true of industrial production data.


Suspicions emerged when the data was probed more deeply and reported in percentage terms, the ANZ report said, adding that the guilty party was often the second digit. An examination of the quarterly GDP growth rate from December 1991 to September 2012 shows zero occurred as the second digit 21 times, much higher than what Benford would calculate and suggesting a rounding-up to achieve a bigger leading digit. One through four also appeared more regularly than the law reckons, while seven through nine featured less.


Inflation reported on a percentage basis also failed to fit the law. “Non-conformity to the Benford’s law does not always indicate data manipulation, but nevertheless it raises doubts about the quality of Chinese data,” the authors said. “Our statistical analysis seems to have confirmed the long-rooted suspicion on quality and reliability of Chinese data.”


Fonte: aqui

22 janeiro 2013

Caterpillar

A empresa Caterpillar anunciou que irá amortizar 580 milhões de dólares referente a compra fracassada de uma empresa na China. Depois que fez a aquisição, a Caterpillar descobriu que o inventário real era diferente do inventário existente "nos livros".

Segundo o sítio Quartz os problemas com o capitalismo chinês podem ocorrer por algumas razões. Em primeiro lugar, muitos chineses precisam de obter moeda estrangeira, que o governo restringe fortemente. A segunda razão é a corrida pela riqueza. Terceiro, a China não está muito disposta a ajudar os reguladores de outros países.

25 dezembro 2012

BRICs: "conceito" sem sentido

BRICs, the now familiar term for Brazil, Russia, India, China and the growth of their economies and influence, have formalized their club and extended their reach by inviting South Africa to join. But do their meetings and joint statements really allow them to punch above their individual weight? What do these countries share beyond a common interest in bolstering their global clout?


The most durable thing about the BRICs is the acronym itself. They cannot be ignored — emerging markets accounted for two-thirds of global economic growth over the past five years, a figure that could rise to as much as 75 percent by 2015. But combining individual countries into classes based on catchy acronyms adds neither influence to their groupings nor insight into their futures.
There are four main reasons why the BRICs will never function as a single coherent interest group.
First, we often say BRICs when we really mean China. In the post-World War II era, the Group of 7 major industrialized countries set the international agenda, and the United States was the driving force. But China’s dominance of the BRICs is even more pronounced. With a G.D.P. of $7.3 trillion, the Chinese economy is the second largest in the world — and larger than all the other BRICs put together.
South Africa’s economy is roughly equivalent to that of China’s sixth largest province. Developments inside China — from its resource appetites and cyber capacity to its political and military might — will drive the actions of the other BRICs. Russia, India and Brazil will be responding to China, both cooperatively and antagonistically, much more than they will coordinate with it.
Second, when it comes to their political systems, the BRICs are apples and oranges…and pears and pineapples. Brazil and India are democracies; Russia and China are autocracies.
But Brazil’s democracy is much more centralized and less diverse than India’s. Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous province, has roughly the same population as all of Brazil (and four times South Africa’s). With more than a dozen official languages and a remarkably decentralized structure, India is a challenge all its own. It is also the least international in its outlook: despite a population of 1.2 billion people, India has about the same number of diplomats as little New Zealand.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin uses hollow democratic institutions to secure one-man rule. China’s leadership is a cohesive group of party men, aligned in their most basic interests, who negotiate over the details of reform to preserve an increasingly untenable status quo rather than to undertake a large-scale overhaul. The bottom line: if you wanted to pick four major global economies with as little as possible in common in their politics, the BRICs would be a decent bet.
Third, their economic systems are wildly different as well. In Russia and China, the state is the dominant force in the economy. There are significant economic reasons for both to move away from a state capitalist system that will decay over time, but both governments have political incentives to keep things as they are to protect the near-term security of their governments. Brazil and India lean closer to free market capitalism than to the state-dominated variety.
Nor are the BRICs particularly tied to one another. Brazil has deepened commercial ties with China, its largest importer, but Russia accounted for only about 2 percent of China’s trade in 2011, and China and India have no bilateral trade agreements. There are still no direct flights between Beijing or Shanghai and Mumbai. Each BRIC depends more on its ties with America and Europe than with other members of its club.
Finally, there is the difference in their most immediate needs. Russia and Brazil are major resource exporters. China, on the other hand, is the second largest importer of crude oil, and India is fourth. But beyond the competing interests of buyers and sellers, there are the frictions within these groups.
India and China are not yet seriously competing with one another for resources, but as the demographics shift in the two countries and as India becomes more urban and spends more on its infrastructure, the frictions will grow. Take water, for example: China and India are home to 37 percent of the global population, but only 10.8 percent of its water. The population will grow — and so will strains on that water as industrialized processes and more upscale (and water-intensive) eating habits take hold.
For its part, Russia is increasingly threatened by the energy revolution taking place in the Western hemisphere. Moscow depends on oil sales for state revenue, and the break-even oil price at which Russia’s budget balances has skyrocketed from $34 a barrel in 2007 to $117 in 2012. Brazil, by contrast, has enough energy to fulfill its own needs and to sell beyond its borders. As the geopolitics of energy and basic resources like food and water shift dramatically over the coming decade, differences among the BRICs will only grow.
In short, the BRICs can agree to disagree with the global status quo. They will sometimes use their collective weight to obstruct U.S. and European plans. But the BRICs have too little in common abroad and too much at stake at home to play a single coherent role on the global stage.

07 dezembro 2012

EUA e China

O organismo regulador do mercado acionário norte-americano iniciou processo administrativo contra os braços chineses das grandes empresas mundiais de auditoria, sob a acusação de que elas se recusaram a entregar documentos exigidos em investigações de fraudes contábeis.

O caso revela divergências entre os governos dos dois países em relação ao grau de transparência de companhias abertas e poderá inviabilizar a negociação de ações de empresas da China em Bolsas dos Estados Unidos.

As auditoras sustentam que são impedidas pela legislação chinesa de apresentar a documentação exigida, que é classificada como "segredo de Estado" - um amplo e nebuloso conceito usado pelo governo como instrumento de controle político e econômico.

Patrick Chovanec, professor da Universidade Tsinghua, considera que o impasse entre a SEC e as autoridades de Pequim é um "Armageddon contábil", que poderá obrigar o cancelamento do registro em Bolsas norte-americanas de todas as companhias abertas chinesas, incluindo pesos pesados como Sinopec, China Unicom e China Life.

Anunciada anteontem, a ofensiva da Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) atinge as operações chinesas da BDO e das quatro gigantes globais de autoria: Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG e PricewaterhouseCoopers.

As cinco empresas são acusadas de violar legislação do mercado acionário, segundo a qual firmas estrangeiras de contabilidade devem atender às solicitações da SEC de papéis de auditoria relativos a qualquer companhia listada em Bolsas dos EUA.

Segundo nota publicada no site da SEC, os documentos foram requeridos na investigação de nove empresas chinesas que têm ações no mercado americano. As cinco auditoras se recusaram a atender à solicitação.

O diretor da Divisão de Sanções da SEC, Robert Khuzami, afirmou que o acesso aos papeis é essencial para o organismo cumprir sua função de proteger os investidores de fraudes contábeis. "Firmas que realizam auditorias sabendo que não podem cumprir as leis que exigem acesso a esses papeis de trabalho enfrentam sérias punições."

Ofensiva. Paul Gillis, professor de contabilidade da Universidade de Pequim, diz que a ofensiva da SEC marca o começo do processo de cancelamento dos registros dos braços chineses das empresas de auditoria junto aos órgãos reguladores norte-americanos, o que provavelmente também levará à saída das companhias chinesas das Bolsas dos Estados Unidos.

Chovanec e Gillis observaram que as restrições no acesso a documentos contábeis pode afetar companhias multinacionais que atuam na China e precisam auditar suas operações locais. Para fazer o trabalho, as firmas de autoria precisam estar registradas no Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), um organismo subordinado à SEC. Mas é pouco provável que obtenham ou mantenham esse status caso sejam condenadas sob a acusação de desrespeitarem a legislação norte-americana.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers divulgou nota na qual afirma que há um conflito entre as leis dos EUA e da China, que precisa ser resolvido pelos governos dos países. A Deloitte lamentou que os as autoridades não tenham conseguido chegar a um acordo sobre o assunto, mas se disse esperar que uma solução "diplomática" seja alcançada.

Segundo Chovanec, os gestores dos braços chineses das auditorias foram alertados pelas autoridades de Pequim de que poderão ser condenados à prisão perpétua caso entreguem documentos que obtiveram no exercício de seu trabalho.


CLÁUDIA TREVISAN, CORRESPONDENTE /PEQUIM - O Estado de S.Paulo - 5 de dez de 2012

25 novembro 2012

Como a China tornou-se capitalista?



Os grifos são meus.

Editor's note: Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald Coase and Professor Ning Wang are the authors of a new book, "How China Became Capitalist." The book outlines China’s 30-year transition from a closed, communist, agrarian economy to a rapidly growing industrial economy. THE AMERICAN Editor-in-Chief Nick Schulz recently asked the authors about the transformation of the Chinese economy, the legacy of the Tiananmen massacre, and why “capitalism with Chinese characteristics is impoverished by the lack of a free market for ideas.”
Nick Schulz: In a famous 1978 communiqué, communist party leaders in China admitted that “one of the serious shortcomings in the structure of economic management is the over-concentration of authority.” What prompted the Chinese leadership to acknowledge this fact and embrace devolving economic authority?
Ronald Coase and Ning Wang: This was not the first time for the Chinese leadership to acknowledge the problem. As early as 1956, even before China’s first Five-Year Plan (1953–1957) ended, Mao realized centralization of power in the Chinese economy had dampened the incentives of local officials as well as those of the state enterprises in cities and communes and production teams in rural areas. Mao pushed decentralization in 1958, but it was quickly absorbed into the “Great Leap Forward,” when more than 30 million Chinese peasants perished in Mao’s great famine. In the eyes of Chinese economic planners, decentralization was the culprit. Afterward, centralization was restored.
By 1978, the Chinese government came back to Mao’s diagnosis, though its prescription went one step further than Mao’s, since it knew that Mao’s did not work. Mao devolved economic authorities only to provincial and sub-provincial local governments. Now, state enterprises were given some autonomy in their operation.
NS: You write that “China became capitalist with marginal revolutions.” What do you mean?
RC & NW: A key empirical finding of our book is that there are actually two Chinese reforms. One was dictated by Beijing. The other resulted from grassroots initiatives. Starving peasants started private farming and township and village enterprises; city residents without a job in the state sector set up the first private businesses in Chinese cities; Shenzhen and other Special Economic Zones were set up as an experiment to co-opt capitalism to save socialism. They all operated outside the protected boundary of socialism.
During the first decade of reform, “marginal revolutions” introduced entrepreneurship and market forces back to the Chinese economy, while the state-led reform was desperately trying to improve the state-owned enterprises and save socialism. In this sense, China became capitalist with marginal revolutions.
NS: You point out that China’s reforms of its state-owned enterprises were a disappointment. What accounted for that?
RC & NW: China’s reforms of state enterprises as the “central link” of the whole reform program lasted for more than two decades, from the very beginning to 2003. Before the mid-1990s, privatization of state enterprises was strictly prohibited, and reform mainly consisted of delegating some economic rights to state enterprises and giving them some incentives. Even though the state enterprises gained more autonomy and better incentive structures, they were never subject to market discipline. For example, poor-performing state enterprises were not allowed to go bankrupt. Not surprisingly, state enterprises were quickly outperformed by private enterprises, which were poorly equipped in terms of financial and human capital but had to face strict market selection.
In the 1990s, increasing competition from the private sector made more and more state enterprises insolvent, adding financial burden to local governments. This led many local authorities to let go of the state enterprises under their jurisdiction. Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese government started to privatize state enterprises, and the number of remaining state enterprises was reduced dramatically.
Today, the central government controls less than 120 state-owned enterprises, but many of them are state monopolies, still not subject to market discipline. As a special interest group, the remaining state enterprises pose a serious challenge to market order.
[...]Universities and even libraries in China were shut down during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Under Deng’s leadership, Chinese universities were reopened in 1977. College students were desperate for new knowledge and new sources of knowledge. It did not take long for them to figure out that the United States had the best to offer.
NS: The Student Movement and the collapse of the Soviet Union led to deep antipathy on the part of China’s communist leaders toward markets. Are you surprised that the Tiananmen massacre did not ultimately lead to a full-scale rejection and reversal of economic reforms?
RC & NW: China’s economic reform was under heavy political and ideological attack from 1989 to 1991. Many market reforms were reversed. The private sector was chastened as the root source of China’s political and economic problems.
Nonetheless, China kept its commitment to opening itself to the West. Even the most conservative Chinese leaders realized that China could not afford a return to isolation, and that China had too much to learn from the West. On November 28, 1990, at the 10th anniversary of the Special Economic Zone, Shenzhen was hailed as “a vanguard in conducting reform and opening up to the outside world.”
Moreover, the first decade of reform had generated many economic gains and improved the lives of so many Chinese that a full-scale rejection of reform would jeopardize further the legitimacy of the government. As long as pragmatism prevailed and the Chinese government continued to “seek truth from facts,” China’s reform and opening up had a great chance to survive.
NS: You write, “The most extraordinary feature of Chinese economic reform is perhaps that the Chinese Communist Party has survived, and indeed thrived, over the three decades of market transformation.” What accounts for this survival and thriving?
RC & NW: After Mao’s death, the Chinese Communist Party quickly distanced itself from a radical revolutionary party committed to fighting capitalism and spreading communism. With the return of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the new party leadership returned to pragmatism and jettisoned radical ideology. As the fledging private sector outperformed the state sector and the marginal revolutions outshined the state-led reform, the party gradually embraced the market economy.
Even though the Chinese Communist Party still monopolizes political power, it is no longer an ideology-driven political party. Indeed, it is communist only in name. It welcomes global capitalism and claims its legitimacy on peace and prosperity. Its political philosophy is no different from the “Mandate of Heaven.” It is this de-politicization of the party, its continuous adaptation, and self-transformation that has allowed the party to grow with the Chinese market economy.
Today, the Chinese government faces enormous challenges, including corruption from within and the increasing demand for political participation from without. As we have argued in the book, an open market for ideas offers a gradual and viable path for China to further reform its political system.
NS: You note that “capitalism with Chinese characteristics is impoverished by the lack of a free market for ideas.” What hope is there of that changing?
RC & NW: We are cautiously optimistic that China in the coming decades will embrace the market for ideas, just like it embraced the market for goods three decades ago. Our optimism mainly rests on the following three considerations. First, in the early 1980s Steve Cheung predicted that China would go capitalist because the potential economic gains were simply so overwhelming. Today, a similar but stronger argument can be made for China’s move toward a market for ideas. Second, the market for ideas is politically neutral. A market for ideas can work in many different political systems. As long as the Chinese government continues to commit itself to pragmatism, upholding practice as the criterion of testing truth, it will come to realize that an open market for ideas is indispensable for the Chinese people to realize their potential. Third, a free market for ideas has long been respected in China as a political ideal, as captured by the Chinese aphorism, “let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend.” Only an open market for ideas can turn that dream into reality.
NS: You are critical of much modern economics, saying it has been transformed “from a moral science of man creating wealth to a cold logic of choice and resource allocation.” How did this happen? Where did economics go wrong?
RC & NW: Adam Smith, the founding father of modern economics, took economics as a study of “the nature and causes of the wealth of nations.” As late as 1920, Alfred Marshall in the eighth edition of Principles of Economics kept economics as “both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man.” Barely a dozen years later, Lionel Robbins in hisEssay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932) reoriented economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” Unfortunately, the viewpoint of Robbins has won the day.
The fundamental shift from Smith and Marshall to Robbins is to rid economics of its substance — the working of the social institutions that bind together the economic system. Afterward, economics has turned into a discipline without a subject matter, advocating itself as a study of human choices. This shift has been assisted by what Hayek (1952) criticized as the growing trend of scientism in the study of society, which took mathematical formalism as the only secure route to truth in the pursuit of knowledge. As economists become more and more interested in formalism and related technical sophistication, it becomes secondary whether the substantive questions that they choose to perfect their methods or to illustrate their theoretical models bear any resemblance to the real world economy. By and large, most of our colleagues are not bothered by the fact that what they profess is mainly “blackboard economics.”
[...]


16 setembro 2012

Brics, bricões e briquinhos

Brics, bricões e briquinhosMarcelo de Paiva Abreu*
O Estado de São Paulo, segunda-feira, 3.9.2012

Muitos analistas têm sublinhado a heterogeneidade dos países que compõem o Brics: Brasil, Rússia, Índia, China e África do Sul. Com toda a razão, quando se trata do desempenho nas últimas décadas: enquanto o cerne do grupo, Índia e China, tem crescido a 8% ou 10% ao ano, as demais economias crescem a metade ou um terço disso. Fazer parte do Brics pode satisfazer a vaidade brasileira e alimentar esperanças quanto a articulações diplomáticas, mas é um erro tratar o grupo como homogêneo no que se refere aos temas essenciais.

Há, entretanto, lições úteis a extrair da comparação entre as experiências dos Brics e que explicam a heterogeneidade do seu desempenho. Nos quatro países, a estratégia econômica ao longo da história foi calcada em dois pilares fundamentais. De um lado, a ideia de que faria sentido reduzir a dependência do mundo exterior e dar prioridade à substituição de importações. De outro lado, a crença de que o Estado deveria jogar papel fundamental na economia não apenas como regulador, mas também como provedor de bens e serviços.

Na Rússia, a ênfase em autarquia e Estado precedeu a União Soviética. Já na Rússia czarista, a partir do final do século 19, o modelo econômico foi calcado em ação do Estado e substituição de importações. Depois de 1917, essa ênfase foi levada ao extremo. Na Índia, após período relativamente liberal entre a independência, em 1947, e a morte de Nehru, no início da década de 1960, o modelo enfatizou os mesmos alicerces até o fim dos anos 1980. Na China pré-1980, o modelo socialista ortodoxo combinava em versões extremas a intervenção do Estado e a autarquia. O isolamento da África do Sul sob o apartheid implicou que, antes de 1994, a estratégia econômica dependesse da minimização à exposição externa e de alto grau de interferência do Estado na atividade econômica.

No Brasil, a partir de meados do século 19, houve continuidade na estratégia econômica que combinava autarquia e intervenção estatal. Desde cedo no Império, as tarifas de importação eram muito altas, inicialmente justificadas por razões fiscais, mas depois claramente protecionistas. Na Primeira República, as políticas públicas deixaram de ter como alvo a correção de falhas de mercado em relação à atração de imigrantes e investimento direto estrangeiro e partiram para a administração dos preços de café, explorando o poder de mercado brasileiro. Com a grande depressão, somou-se o controle cambial à tarifa alta. Em 1944, na famosa controvérsia Gudin-Simonsen prevaleceu, na prática, a visão de Simonsen - a despeito de suas fragilidades analíticas - quanto à centralidade dos pilares calcados em autarquia e Estado.
Essa visão sobreviveu galhardamente ao golpe militar e começou a ser erodida na década de 1980 em meio de altíssima inflação combinada à estagnação. As reformas de Fernando Collor e Fernando Henrique Cardoso, baseadas em visão crítica da potencialidade de longo prazo dos pilares tradicionais, promoveram a abertura comercial e a privatização. Mas o que se tem visto desde 2003, e ainda mais desde 2011, é uma regressão às visões mais primitivas de estratégia econômica calcada em proteção alta e aumento do peso do Estado.

Nas economias mais dinâmicas do Brics - Índia e China -, o que se vê é exatamente o contrário da experiência brasileira no período recente. Na Índia, desde o final dos anos 1980, e na China, desde o final da década de 1970, houve verdadeiras revoluções quanto à abertura dos mercados, a expansão das exportações, atração de capitais estrangeiros e redução do peso do Estado na economia. Nos dois casos houve aumento significativo da formação bruta de capital fixo e, consequentemente, das taxas de expansão do PIB. A formação bruta de capital fixo na Índia tem sido da ordem de 35% do PIB, saindo de um patamar, nos anos 1980, apenas um pouco melhor do que os atuais míseros 17% do Brasil. Na China, o número estaria em torno de 45%, embora haja significativas distorções de medida provavelmente significativas. Mesmo nos membros do Brics menos bem-sucedidos, Rússia e África do Sul, nos quais a abertura das economias e a redução do peso do Estado mereceram ênfase bem menor, a formação bruta de capital fixo tem sido da ordem de 23%. Além disso, sempre é bom relembrar que a tara nacional com relação à manutenção de altos índices de conteúdo nacional nas compras feitas, diretas ou indiretamente, pelo governo faz com que aos baixos níveis de investimento corresponda expansão da capacidade ainda mais limitada, em vista do encarecimento dos bens de capital.

Impressiona a teimosia do Planalto em deixar de reconhecer que a atual estratégia brasileira de crescimento apenas assegura que a economia alterne voos de galinha com pousos forçados. A estratégia que poderia superar a mediocridade do desempenho econômico do País deveria, com o benefício das lições que podem ser extraídas das experiências da China e da Índia, ser baseada na retomada da abertura gradual do mercado brasileiro, na reversão da nova onda estatizante e no aumento da poupança doméstica. Só então seria possível pensar em deixarmos de ser briquinho.

*Doutor em economia pela Universidade de Cambridge, é professor titular no Departamento de Economia da PUC-Rio

11 agosto 2012

China na África: mercados x democracia

Stephan Richter é editor chefe do "The Globalist".
Valor Econômico -09/08/2012

As formas e meios pelos quais os chineses estão penetrando no continente africano são tema de debates acalorados em todo o mundo - e em nenhum lugar mais do que nos EUA. A visita de 10 dias de Hillary Clinton, secretária de Estado dos EUA, a toda a África colocou o debate em foco detalhado.

De um lado, os que afirmam que os chineses estão comportando-se como neocolonialists (ocidentais), ansiosos por explorar as vastas riquezas de matérias-primas e minerais do continente. Eles veem a China como interessada em ocupar cada espaço não coberto por empresas multinacionais ocidentais.

Do outro lado, principalmente fora dos EUA e predominantemente na África e nos mercados emergentes, estão os que aplaudem a ascensão da China e apontam para os seus sucessos como uma forma tardia de justiça econômica. Estes acreditam que finalmente é hora de uma potência não ocidental rica e mirando horizontes de tempo de longo prazo emergir como parceira viável para o continente.

Melhor ainda, argumentam essas vozes, os chineses - com a sua proposta de construção de infraestrutura em t roca da exploração de matérias-primas - estão apenas cumprindo o que acabaram revelando-se promessas vazias, feitas há um século pelas potências ocidentais.
Construção de ferrovias ligando áreas do interior à costa? A eventual perspectiva de formar uma rede cobrindo a África Subsaariana? Formação de redes de rodovias e autoestradas de quatro pistas a preços acessíveis em todo o continente? Disponibilizar moderníssimos complexos de escritórios, construídos dentro de orçamentos que as nações africanas têm condições de custear?

Essas são, certamente, metas que os líderes africanos vêm perseguindo há muito tempo. Mas, no passado, uma combinação tóxica de sua própria corruptibilidade, laços obscuros entre ex-países colonizadores (e suas elites empresariais) e os novos governantes, bem como estruturas de planejamento excessivamente complexas, muito frequentemente resultaram em projetos proibitivamente caros.


Considerando que o crescimento econômico da África tem sido retardado pela inexistência de infraestrutura de transportes confiável - nos países e entre eles - essa é uma oferta mais que tentadora. Ela representa uma oportunidade de proporções históricas.

Sim, o continente tem uma abundância de aeroportos e de telefones celulares, mas devido à infraestrutura totalmente insuficiente, o comércio continua sendo dificultado de uma maneira reminiscente da Europa pré-1820.

Nesse sentido, as iniciativas empreendidas pelos chineses na África são, agora, o equivalente histórico do que as guerras napoleônicas trouxeram para um país como a Alemanha. Representam um há muito tempo necessário brado de alerta para o abandono de tradições ultrapassadas, para um avanço à era de intercâmbio e comércio modernos.
Sem ignorar os problemas inerentes à maneira como os chineses operam, inclusive o fato de que empregam predominantemente mão de obra de suas próprias empresas de construção civil, mesmo para projetos no interior da África subsaariana, a visão chinesa é muito distinta da abordagem ocidental nos últimos 50 anos.


A fórmula do Ocidente aplicada à África pós-independência, pós-1960, é priorizar a construção da democracia em detrimento da construção de mercados. Os chineses, como se sabe, optam exatamente pelo oposto.

Em tese, é sempre preferível concentrar-se em estruturas democráticas. E a secretária Clinton certamente referiu-se enfaticamente a isso durante sua visita. Mas em países onde a pobreza continua excessiva, um contra-argumento desconfortável pode ser sustentado, apoiado no histórico dos últimos 50 anos.

E se uma democracia atrofiada constituiu-se em obstáculo ao surgimento de um verdadeiro mercado para as economias nacionais? Nessas circunstâncias, não será preferível privilegiar a construção de um mercado para produzir uma estrutura mercantil suficientemente distribuída?

Esse é, sem dúvida, um dilema bastante desconfortável para ser analisado pelos ocidentais. Mas, claramente, são os africanos que precisam optar por seguir ou não o conceito ocidental de "democracia primeiro".


Melhor ainda, os defensores da estratégia chinesa para a África podem apontar para o fato de que a África não é a China. A preservação do poder em um Estado de partido único não está em causa na maior parte da África.

Em outras palavras, concentrem-se primeiro em acabar com a fome; depois, disseminem-se os benefícios não tão materiais da democracia. Esse foco assegura a formação de um eleitorado com melhor formação educacional e autoconfiante, não suscetível à compra barata de votos.
Essa abordagem também implica que o desenvolvimento econômico produza desenvolvimento político. Coincidentemente, isso é bastante semelhante ao que ocorreu na história da Europa. Lá, a tomada das rédeas da economia catalisou a demanda por mais direitos políticos por parte das classes mercantis, que terminou por colocar a Europa no rumo de democracia plena.


Por enquanto, em grande parte da África, a evolução política permanece tão atrofiada quanto o desenvolvimento econômico. Dito de outro modo, mas em última análise no mesmo sentido, a maturidade política - no sentido de democracia suficientemente robusta para que as eleições resultem em mudança efetiva no poder - só funciona praticamente em países como Gana, onde o desenvolvimento econômico é suficientemente avançado e amplo.

Ponderar esse tipo de sequenciamento é certamente desconfortável para os ocidentais que têm uma preferência instintiva pela democracia. Apesar disso, essa preferência é também desconcertante - especialmente tendo em vista a forte ênfase dos americanos em economia de mercado em seu país. Os americanos, como sabemos, foram afortunados em seu caso histórico especial, onde os desenvolvimentos econômico e político caminharam de mãos dadas.
É muito desconcertante observar nesse debate sobre construção de mercado versus construção de democracia - que são os chineses, e não os americanos - que podem argumentar persuasivamente que seu foco na África é a criação de futuros clientes e parceiros comerciais.

Esse foco em clientes parece contrário à doutrina marxista. E, de fato, os chineses podem citar ninguém menos que o admirável Adam Smith como sua testemunha principal. Ao avaliar estratégias econômicas de grandes impérios, escreveu ele: "Fundar um grande império com o propósito único de criar um povo de clientes pode, à primeira vista, parecer um projeto capaz de servir a uma nação de lojistas. Trata-se, porém, de um projeto totalmente impróprio para uma nação de lojistas. Mas extremamente adequado a uma nação cujo governo é influenciado por lojistas".

Embora os direitos ao voto não possam ser considerados um luxo, na realidade africana, ao menos, o foco central na construção da democracia, em vez da construção de mercados, tem tido o efeito perverso de asfixiar, e não de promover, o crescimento econômico.


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