Ruchir Sharma

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A Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company office in Tainan, Taiwan. Credit An Rong Xu for The New York Times

MundoAsiaReflexionesNuevas Tecnologías

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union perpetually threatened to spark conflict in nations all over the world, including battles over the control of a vast array of natural and industrial resources. The new Cold War, between the United States and China, is increasingly focused on access to just one industry in one place: computer chips made in Taiwan.

Over the past year, Taiwan has taken a lead in the race to build thinner, faster and more powerful chips, or semiconductors. Its fastest chips are the critical building blocks of rapidly evolving digital industries like artificial intelligence and high-speed computing.…  Seguir leyendo »

Hang Ma Street in Hanoi, last month. Credit Linh Pham/Getty Images

MundoAsia

Within days of China’s announcing the first case of Covid-19, Vietnam was mobilizing to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Using mass texts, TV ads, billboards, posters and loudspeakers, the government exhorted the nation’s 100 million citizens to identify carriers and trace contacts, contacts of contacts, even contacts of contacts of contacts. Rapid isolation of outbreaks has kept Vietnam’s death rate among the four lowest in the world — well under one death per million people.

Containing the pandemic allowed Vietnam to quickly reopen businesses, and it is now expected to be the world’s fastest growing economy this year. While many nations are suffering enormous economic contractions and running to the International Monetary Fund for financial rescues, Vietnam is growing at a 3 percent annual pace.…  Seguir leyendo »

Workers at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, which is under construction in Germany. Credit Hayoung Jeon/EPA, via Shutterstock

InternacionalEconomía, ,

Imagine a country, a major Western economic power, where the coronavirus arrived late but the government, instead of denying and delaying, acted early. It was ready with tests and contact tracing to “flatten the curve” swiftly and limited its death rate to orders of magnitude lower than that of any other major Western industrial nation. Containing the virus allowed for a brief and targeted lockdown, which helped limit unemployment to only 6 percent. Amid a shower of international praise, the country’s boringly predictable leader experienced a huge spike in popular approval, to 70 percent from 40 percent.

This mirror image of America under President Trump is Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel.…  Seguir leyendo »

Indian migrant workers, daily wagers, laborers and homeless people in New Delhi, waiting for food outside a government-run shelter, in April. Credit Yawar Nazir/Getty Images

MundoAsia, , ,

I landed in Delhi on a work trip in mid-March and just over a week later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced what was soon recognized as the world’s strictest lockdown. He warned Indians to imagine “a sacrosanct line” around their homes, not to be breached for work or travel of any kind, not even a walk outdoors. Evoking the 18-day war described in the Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic, Mr. Modi said it would take 21 days to win the war on the coronavirus.

Two months later, I am still cooped up in my house off Delhi’s Ring Road, by far the longest stretch I have spent in India since I first left for work in New York nearly two decades ago.…  Seguir leyendo »

A currency exchange shop in Istanbul on Monday. The Turkish lira has plunged in value in the last week. Credit Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press

InternacionalEconomía

Falling back on a standard excuse of besieged strongmen, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is blaming traitors and outside powers for his nation’s financial crisis, and describing the strong United States dollar as among “the bullets, cannonballs and missiles” foreigners are using to wage “economic war” on his country.

Many emerging markets make themselves vulnerable to financial crisis by spending more than they can afford, and relying on foreign lenders to fund these profligate habits, but Turkey was an extreme case even before Mr. Erdogan took power in 2002. Of late, his reckless economic policies — including setting interest rates at artificially low levels, and driving up debts, deficits and inflation — have only made matters worse.…  Seguir leyendo »

Crowds near China’s Huawei Technologies stand at the Mobile World Conference in Shanghai on Wednesday. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MundoAsiaReflexionesNuevas Tecnologías,

Arriving in Beijing last month, I knew I would not be able to connect to Google, Facebook or Uber. As strange as it was to go without these staples of online life in the West, it was even stranger to find that local Chinese didn’t seem to feel deprived at all. They search through Baidu, get their social media fix on WeChat, hail rides on Didi, curate news through sites like Toutiao. And while they know Beijing is watching, they accept this surveillance as normal.

The Chinese government has carved out an alternative internet universe with its own brands, rules and culture, in which privacy doesn’t exist.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Emmanuel Macron of France, left, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada at the G20 summit in 2017. The two leaders, who were welcomed as young faces of reform, can’t seem to get much of a lift from their countries’ good economies. Credit Pool photo by Ian Langsdon

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

With Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron visiting Donald Trump this week, much of the commentary has focused on how wildly different the staid German chancellor and the globally minded French president are from the mercurial American president. But the three do share one trait: They are all unpopular at home despite the good economic times.

This is new. For most of the postwar era, voters in the big democracies rewarded leaders for strong economies and punished them for policies that hurt growth. Now the link between good politics and good economics seems to have broken.

Last year, the global economy was finally accelerating out of the long torpor that followed the financial crisis of 2008.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a meeting with foreign businessmen in 2016. The Russian economy has stagnated in the absence of reforms. Credit Olga Maltseva/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Europa,

There was never much suspense about whether Vladimir Putin would win the election on Sunday, but there is at least some question about which Putin will show up for his fourth term as Russia’s president.

It’s long forgotten now, but Mr. Putin was once a classic economic reformer. He took over as president in 2000, after a decade in which Russia was devastated by financial crisis, twice. With his country’s back against the wall, Mr. Putin in his early years pushed major economic reforms, including a simple flat tax and opening Russia to the world. His stated goal was to make Russia feel like any other European country.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a meeting with foreign businessmen in 2016. The Russian economy has stagnated in the absence of reforms. Credit Olga Maltseva/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Europa

There was never much suspense about whether Vladimir Putin would win the election on Sunday, but there is at least some question about which Putin will show up for his fourth term as Russia’s president.

It’s long forgotten now, but Mr. Putin was once a classic economic reformer. He took over as president in 2000, after a decade in which Russia was devastated by financial crisis, twice. With his country’s back against the wall, Mr. Putin in his early years pushed major economic reforms, including a simple flat tax and opening Russia to the world. His stated goal was to make Russia feel like any other European country.…  Seguir leyendo »

Workers assembling shoes in a factory in eastern China’s Zhejiang province. The country will have to revise growth targets to prevent growing too quickly and becoming unstable. Credit CHINATOPIX, via Associated Press

MundoAsia

When President Xi Jinping of China took power in 2012, digital cash hardly existed. Last year, the Chinese made $9 trillion in mobile payments, 80 times more than Americans. Chinese consumers pay for 25 percent of their purchases with digital cash delivered by a mobile phone app, and about one in seven carry no paper currency. In big cities like Shanghai, it’s hard to use paper to pay taxi fares or restaurant bills.

The rapid rise of a cashless society is a vivid example of how China broke out as a tech superpower in Mr. Xi’s first term. Left largely unregulated and free to innovate — on condition that they cooperate with government censors — the New China’s private-sector tech giants have made stunning advances.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Next Economic Powerhouse Poland

EuropaUnión Europea

If getting rich is hard for individuals, it is harder still for nations. Of more than 190 countries tracked by the International Monetary Fund, fewer than 40 count as wealthy or advanced economies. The rest are known as emerging nations, and many of them have been emerging forever. The last large country to make it into the advanced class was South Korea, 20 years ago. The next major nation likely to join that club could be Poland, an under-the-radar economic star that President Trump will visit this week on his second overseas trip in office.

Mr. Trump will meet with leaders of the ruling Law and Justice party, who are thrilled that he has chosen to visit Warsaw before Berlin, Paris or Brussels, and participate in a meeting to promote regional economic ties in Eastern Europe.…  Seguir leyendo »

Emmanuel Macron in Arras, France, on Wednesday. Credit Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

EuropaUnión Europea,

The world keenly watched the first-round vote for president in France last Sunday because of the rise of Marine Le Pen, who wants to take the country out of the European Union and shut immigrants out of France. But she came in second to a centrist, Emmanuel Macron, who positioned himself as anti-Le Pen and “anti-system.” He attributes the nation’s woes not to outsiders — European officials and immigrants — but on France’s own “sclerotic” and unsustainable welfare state.

The next French revolution now seems unlikely to be a populist uprising. Polls predict Mr. Macron will easily beat Ms. Le Pen in the May runoff, and if he does, his government would work to strengthen the European Union rather than hold a vote on whether to leave.…  Seguir leyendo »

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waving as he arrives at the Bharatiya Janata Party headquarters on Sunday. Associated Press

MundoAsia,

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is a mesmerizing orator, in the way of a talk-show host with an acerbic tongue, and this month a campaign crowd of more than 50,000 showed up in Deoria, a hardscrabble town in the state of Uttar Pradesh, to hear his story. They knew and loved the part about how this son of a tea seller rose through the party ranks with no help from family connections. But the rest of his rags-to-power tale is changing fast.

Mr. Modi took office in 2014 billing himself as a pragmatic business reformer who could restart economic growth in India.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalOrden Mundial

The age of globalization generated great prosperity. As the flow of goods, money and people across borders surged, millions benefited. But the elite gained the most. And as inequality rose, it stirred pockets of fierce resentment among those left behind. When the great shock came, the discontented turned to nationalist firebrands, who promised to impose controls on free trade, global banks and immigrants. Globalization stalled. A new age of deglobalization hit full stride.

That great shock came in 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, and it ended an extraordinary four-decade period of rising migration and trade. But that era provides clear parallels to the globalization boom that gained momentum in the 1980s and stalled during the financial crisis of 2008.…  Seguir leyendo »

A vendor waits for customers at a market in an urban village under demolition in Zhengzhou, Henan province, in May. China Stringer Network/Reuters

InternacionalEconomía

For years now, Donald J. Trump has been sounding the alarm on China, calling it an economic bully that has been “eating our lunch.” The crux of Mr. Trump’s attack is that Beijing manipulates its currency to keep it cheap and give Chinese exports an unfair advantage. But that narrative is so last decade. China is now a threat to the United States not because it is strong but because it is fragile.

Four key forces have been shaping the rise and fall of nations since the 2008 financial crisis, and none of them bode well for China. Debts have risen dangerously fast in the emerging world, especially in China.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

Still-smoldering protests from Egypt to Brazil have set off a race among scholars and journalists to identify the roots of this summer of discontent in the emerging world. Each major theory starts at the bottom, with the protesters on the street, and notes a common thread: young, Twitter-savvy members of a rising middle class. In this telling, the protests represent the perils of success, as growing wealth creates a class of people who have the time and financial wherewithal to demand from their leaders even more prosperity, and political freedom as well.

This is a plausible story, often well told. Yet it is a bit too familiar to be fully persuasive.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

More than half of Americans think China is already the world’s leading economy — an astonishing misperception, given that China’s gross domestic product is still less than half of America’s. As George Orwell once observed, “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” China has grown at a breakneck pace for so long that its aura of invincibility has grown to outsize proportions in the Western imagination.

Now, however, there are signs that China’s growth is slowing to a rate that is ideal for the interests of the United States: fast enough to remain an important pillar of global economic growth, but not fast enough for China to remain a disruptive threat to American power.…  Seguir leyendo »