1. The lobbying efforts by large American multinational to thwart Congressional attempts to prohibit trade involving products manufactured by the forced labour of Uighurs in Xinjiang only calls the bluff on their professions of ESG concerns and interests of stakeholders.
The bill, which would prohibit broad categories of certain goods made by persecuted Muslim minorities in an effort to crack down on human rights abuses, has gained bipartisan support, passing the House in September by a margin of 406 to 3... the legislation, called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, has become the target of multinational companies including Apple whose supply chains touch the far western Xinjiang region, as well as of business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce... Xinjiang produces vast amounts of raw materials like cotton, coal, sugar, tomatoes and polysilicon, and supplies workers for China’s apparel and footwear factories. Human rights groups and news reports have linked many multinational companies to suppliers there, including tying Coca-Cola to sugar sourced from Xinjiang, and documenting Uighur workers in a factory in Qingdao that makes Nike shoes. In a report issued in March, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, listed Nike and Coca-Cola as companies suspected of ties to forced labor in Xinjiang, alongside Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell Soup Company, Costco, H&M, Patagonia, Tommy Hilfiger and others.
This is the report of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute which documents 82 companies that potentially benefited from abusive labour transfer programs related to Xinjiang.
2. A long-form on Bill Gates and his activities during the pandemic to support development of a vaccine. However benign the motivations, I cannot see how it is good for one individual to have such an outsized influence on the global decision-making on the issue.
3. Another Times article informs that Amazon hired 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its global workforce to over 1.2 million, more than 50% from a year ago.
Starting in July, the company brought on about 350,000 employees, or 2,800 a day. Most have been warehouse workers, but Amazon has also hired software engineers and hardware specialists to power enterprises such as cloud computing, streaming entertainment and devices, which have boomed in the pandemic. The scale of hiring is even larger than it may seem because the numbers do not account for employee churn, nor do they include the 100,000 temporary workers who have been recruited for the holiday shopping season. They also do not include what internal documents show as roughly 500,000 delivery drivers, who are contractors and not direct Amazon employees... Amazon’s rapid employee growth is unrivaled in the history of corporate America. It far outstrips the 230,000 employees that Walmart, the largest private employer with more than 2.2 million workers, added in a single year two decades ago. The closest comparisons are the hiring that entire industries carried out in wartime, such as shipbuilding during the early years of World War II or home building after soldiers returned, economists and corporate historians said.
The last part is important. While those hiring of people in 'good' jobs created the foundations for the post-war boom, Amazon's hirings in 'low-paid temp' jobs may be creating the foundations for a long period of wage stagnation and low growth.
Of its 810,000 workers who are in the United States, about 85 percent are frontline employees in warehouses and operations who earn a minimum of $15 an hour. That is higher than traditional retail work, where an average sales worker makes $13.19 an hour, but lower than typical warehousing jobs.
4. NAR on the growing Chinese global trade dominance despite headwinds.
Nikkei analyzed data on 3,800 products compiled by the International Trade Center and found that there were 320 products in 2019 in which China held a share of more than 50% in export markets. By comparison, in 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, the number was 61 products. The number of products of which China had a high share stopped increasing from 2016 onwards, when U.S. President Donald Trump took office and then the trade war began, but the number increased again last year.
The indicates that Covid 19 may have boosted Chinese export shares. Further, RCEP too may boost China's trade prospects, with the country set to capture nearly half the trade increase.
According to a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, global exports will increase $500 billion in 2030 due to positive effects such as tariff cuts. China will benefit the most, with the value of its exports expected to increase $248 billion.
Over the past 10 years, India’s per capita GDP is up 35 per cent cumulatively from $1,384 in 2010 to $1,877 now. In the same period, per capita GDP in China rose 141 per cent from $4,500 to $10,839, while it doubled in East Asian countries (excluding Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong) from $4,006 to $8,195. Bangladesh saw the fastest growth with its per capita up nearly two-and-a-half times from $763 in 2010 to around $1,900 at the end of this year. And, Vietnam’s per capita rose 115 per cent from $1,628 to around $3,500. As a result, the economic gap between India and its Asian peers, including China, is now bigger than 10 years ago. For example, the average per capita GDP in East Asia was 2.9 times that of India 10 years ago. Now, it is nearly four-and-a-half times that of India. Similarly, China’s per capita GDP was 3.3 times of India 10 years ago, which has widened to nearly 6x.
6. Tata Power has fully repaid the bank loans taken on the Mundra UMPP, Coastal Gujarat Power Limited. That's a very encouraging development. Now, as a reasonable counterfactual to assess corporate groups, it would be interesting to know the repayment status of Adani Power's Mundra UMPP. Both underwent the same set of challenges.
7. Disturbing trend with tax revenues in India
For the last few years, the buoyancy factor for Central taxes has been on a steady decline. It rose in 2014-15 and 2015-16, but it has been falling steadily since then. From 1.63 in 2015-16, the buoyancy factor for the Centre’s gross tax collection fell to 1.54 in 2016-17, 1.05 in 2017-18, 0.77 in 2018-19, and -0.5 in 2019-20.
8. Harish Damodaran on the shift from entrepreneurial to conglomerate capitalism in India. This example of the rise and fall of Andhrapreneurs is interesting,
“Andhrapreneurs” or businessmen from undivided Andhra Pradesh (AP). The promoters of GVK, GMR, Lanco, Madhucon, NCC, Nagarjuna Fertilisers, Navayuga, Soma Enterprise, Progressive Constructions, Sujana, IVRCL, Ramky Infra, SEW Infra, Transstroy, Sri City and Gangavaram Port were all liberalisation’s children... It is not a coincidence that the fortunes of the “Andhrapreneurs” grew precisely when its politicians were vital to propping up coalition governments at the Centre... There are very few survivors from the earlier-mentioned names — most have been consumed by the debts contracted during a not-too-distant past when animal spirits truly reigned. GVK only recently was forced to sell its prized Mumbai International Airport to the Adani Group, which has also acquired Navayuga’s Krishnapatnam Port... In many industries — from telecom, airlines, steel, cement and aluminium to synthetic fibres, polymers, toiletries, tea and biscuits — there are now two, at most three, players holding dominant market position. Some groups have leadership straddling multiple sectors: Reliance (petrochemicals, telecom and retail), Tata (steel, commercial vehicles, salt and IT services), Aditya Birla (cement, aluminium and chlor-alkali) and Adani (ports, private power, branded edible oil and, next, airports).
Its implications for polity,
The political scientist Adam Ziegfeld has shown that regional parties thrive when coalition governments are the order of the day. On the other hand, if single-party majority rule becomes the norm, political actors have little incentive to establish or join state-level parties that can share the spoils of power at the Centre. A corollary to this is that the regional capitalist no longer has ministers or MPs through whom he can get things done in New Delhi. They are as powerless as he is.
9. A nice round-up of renewables news from Vandana Gombar.
This is very impressive achievement,
Dogger Bank, the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, being developed off the east coast of England, achieved financial closure last month for the first 2.4 Gw of capacity — involving an investment of $8 billion. The plant is being developed by UK utility SSE and Norway’s Equinor. The project will use giant 13-megawatt turbines from General Electric that reach up 248 metres.
The British government takes the lead in the transition from internal combustion to electric vehicles,
The UK aims to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 in a bid to promote electric vehicles... This is part of the UK’s “10 Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution”. It is a very ambitious goal, given that electric vehicles made up only 3.2 per cent of passenger vehicle sales in the UK in 2019. To support this effort, £2 billion ($2.7 billion) will be spent on electric vehicle subsidies, charging infrastructure and electric vehicle and battery manufacturing.
She also reports of a record low solar tariff auction by SECI at Rs 2 (2.7 US cents) per unit by Saudi Aljomaih, Sembcorp Industries, and NTPC. Whatever the drivers, not sure this is viable.
9. It has been a constant feature of misplaced priorities in education in developing countries that primary education is a poor second cousin to high school education. It's reflected in the recruitment standards, the postings, the administrative reviews, the financial allocations etc on school education.
Covid 19 response too has been on same lines. While the western countries have sought to prioritise the opening of primary schools and leave higher grades run online, India has chosen to prioritise the opening up of higher grades (9 to 12 grades).
Despite the pandemic resurfacing, most European countries have chosen to keep the schools and day care centres open. In general, children below 10 have been schools have been found to transmit the virus less and the contribution of schools to cases less than 5%.
10. The crazy world of tech company valuations.
DocuSign is worth $42bn, more than Ford. Okta, a way to make sure people online are who they say they are, is valued at nearly $32bn, about the same as Hilton Hotels. Coupa, used just for tracking business spending, is worth $22bn.
11. From an obituary of FC Kohli, the size of the Indian IT industry,
According to NASSCOM, India's IT and IT enabled services sector has annual revenues of about $191 billion and employs over 4 million professionals.
12. Scott Galloway makes an very important point about the continuation of the trend of death of distance, this time in the form of persistence of work from home practice in the post-pandemic era,
Today we have social distancing — tomorrow the distancing will be structural. In a dispersed world we’ll have fewer encounters involving diversity of skin color, economic status, and gender/sexual/political orientation. When we do have these encounters, they are in the wrong context. Arguing with a stranger over a mask isn’t likely to produce tolerance as much as it will reinforce existing stereotypes. The structural distancing of the Great Dispersion presents an enormous threat to our commonwealth, a further erosion in empathy. We no longer go to movies, the subway, malls, public school, the grocery store or our polling station. We don’t experience the mentally ill vet panhandling at the freeway off-ramp, the single mom bringing us our food, the immigrant drying our car. Poor kids won’t see that rich kids are no different then they, and vice versa.
This snippet on inequality is stunning but not at all surprising,
Jeff Bezos is worth more than every citizen in Vermont, Alaska, and Wyoming combined, while a fourth of Americans can’t pay their rent.
13. Nice NYT investigation on how the Covid 19 frontline Italian town of Bergamo dithered on lockdown and spread the pandemic across Italy.
14. Economic Times has an editorial on the Supreme Court directive to videograph all areas within police stations and offices of central investigation agencies so as to prevent police brutality. It raises several questions on this latest attempt to use technology to improve governance,
Suppose the court order is complied with, in full, and policemen converted into so many fish inside glass bowls, whose every movement and every sound is recorded and stored away; is that sufficient to eliminate torture? What is to prevent the police from arranging interrogation rooms outside police stations, where to carry out their third-degree practices? What is the guarantee that CCTV cameras will not suffer convenient outages or that the recordings would not be damaged, say, by water pouring from a leaky roof ? Is electronic surveillance the optimal utilisation, from the point of view of advancing the cause of justice, of the enormous sums that would be required to install cameras in every room and corridor of every police station in the country? Do we have the bandwidth to back up the videography recording in the cloud?
15. Jagriti Chandra has a very good field report in The Hindu on the use of digital work-flow and data to address the issue of maternal and child nutrition, bringing down anemia in them, and increasing birth weight through the Poshan Abhiyan.
The government had initiated the Integrated Child Development Services - Common Application Software (ICDS-CAS) in 2018 to capture data on pregnant women, mothers and children and monitor their health and nutrition outcomes. This was classic tracking of service delivery and use of data as decision support. The ICDS workers and nurses were given smartphones and tablets to implement the ICDS-CAS.
The report points to the well-known expected implementation problems,
However, server points and Internet issues plague the system right here, too. Also, smartphones which got to the employees to simplify their duties have doubled their work. Workers at the moment are anticipated to notice down particulars not solely of their telephones but additionally in registers. In Churu, the server has been down for over two months. Since the ICDS-CAS platform is widespread for the entire nation, which means monitoring actions throughout greater than 26 States the place the ICDS-CAS is working have been hampered.
And the problems with large over-engineered and centralised IT systems which seek to ensure top-down control.
The less said about ICDS-CAS, the better. The data have not been available, and we can’t use the software tool the way we would like. So, we use our application called Sampark, where we log the data of children, mothers as well as the status of welfare schemes such as PDS, BPL, labour cards accessible to beneficiaries…,” says a consultant of the Madhya Pradesh authorities... “The guidelines for a supplementary nutrition programme allow States to decide what food they would like to distribute, but the ICDS-CAS is a common application for the entire country which doesn’t allow us the flexibility to record and monitor data as per the specifics of our scheme... If we want the data of the past two or three months, for instance, to study the impact of our interventions, we don’t have them,” says Rajasthan’s Women and Child Development Secretary, Krishna Kant Pathak... “There are no data available. We have requested the Central government for access, but beyond their templated dashboard, nothing is available to us. We haven’t even received a response from the Centre,” says Annapurna Garu, Joint Project Co-ordinator, National Nutrition Mission... the Rajasthan government is now planning to launch an AAA app or the ‘Auxiliary Nurse Midwife, Anganwadi and ASHA’ app, to make sure that all three of them are related via the identical software. Andhra Pradesh, too, says that a pre-existing app known as NutriTask, which was put aside after the ICDS-CAS was concieved, might now be revived.
No comments:
Post a Comment