1. Several interesting insights about India's labour market trends from Mahesh Vyas,
Urban India accounted for 32 per cent of total employment in 2019-20 but it accounted for 34 per cent of the total loss of employment in 2020-21 till December 2020... Women account for a mere 11 per cent in total employment. But, they accounted for 52 per cent of the job losses... All age groups below the age of 40 suffered a fall in employment till December 2020 this year while all age groups above 40 years of age have seen a small gain in employment... while twenty per cent of the working age population is in their twenties, they account for a lower 19 per cent of the employed persons. Worse still, these twenty-somethings account for 80 per cent of the job losses as of December 2020. Folks in their thirties account for 17 per cent of the working age population. They account for a higher 23 per cent of the total workforce... but they accounted for 48 per cent of jobs lost as of December 2020. There were job gains in senior age groups – those over 40 years of age. Evidently, India’s workforce aged in 2020-21 during the lockdown. The share of those over 40 years of age, which was 56 per cent in 2019-20 increased to 60 per cent by December 2020... Graduates and post-graduates had a 13 per cent share in total employment in 2019-20. Their share in the loss of jobs was 65 per cent. Of the 14.7 million jobs lost, 9.5 million were those of graduates and post-graduates. Finally, salaried employees who accounted for 21 per cent total employment in 2019-20, accounted for 71 per cent of the total job losses.
2. As he leaves office the balance sheet of President Trump's trade actions in terms of US trade balance against China is not flattering.
3. Hugo Erken and Michael Every of Rabobank argue that India was wise not to join RCEP. Their central argument is that since most of RCEP members are net exporters, their major share of trade is external to the bloc whereas it forms 70% of India's trade, India has among the highest average tariffs and lowest non-tariff barriers (NTBs) while it's the reverse in case of the major RCEP members, and since RCEP does not cover NTBs, India entering RCEP would make it something like a buyer of last resort, thereby worsening its trade balance and hurting domestic businesses.
$80.7 billion of Warren Buffett’s $81 billion net worth was accumulated after his 50th birthday. Seventy-eight billion of the $81 billion came after he qualified for Social Security, in his mid-60s... 99% of Warren Buffett’s net worth came after his 50th birthday, and 97% came after he turned 65.
5. Damien Ma, Houze Song, and Neil Thomas at Macro Polo have a report on Global Value Chains. It uses the examples of Li-ion batteries, OLED displays, and AI chips to discuss GVCs. This about the Li-ion supply chain,
These raw materials and the main components of the battery—cathode, anode, separator, electrolyte—constitute the upstream and midstream segments of the supply chain. For inputs such as lithium, cobalt, and graphite, countries like Chile, Argentina, DRC, China, and Australia dominate. For the key components of the battery in the midstream, that supply chain is dominated by Japan, South Korea, and China, with the US playing a role in supplying separators. In terms of downstream production of battery cells, China commands a 61% global share, while the US share of 9.5% is centered almost entirely on a single company: Tesla.
On OLED displays that are a feature of smartphones,
An important component in any OLED screen is glass, particularly the specialty Gorilla Glass that is manufactured by US-based Corning... Beyond the cover glass, other types of specialty glass are used in the various layers of the OLED display such as the encapsulation. Other layers of the display include the front plane, which is the emissive layer composed of organic materials, and the backplane that includes the IC driver and TFT. These different layers constitute the upstream and midstream of the supply chain. The main raw material for glass is silica sand, which is abundant around the world, with the United States (40%) and China (27.5%) being the two leading producers. The midstream—composed of the display glass, IC drivers, and OLED materials—is dominated by South Korea, Japan, and the United States. When it comes to display glass, the United States and Japan are basically at about 48% and 47% global market share, respectively. America is also a leading supplier of OLED materials, with roughly a 45% market share, while South Korea and Taiwan combined make up some 80% market share of IC drivers. Finally, South Korea’s Samsung dominates the downstream OLED display production, accounting for 90% of the global end-use production capacity.
And on AI chips, or customised chips that support the computational demands of AI technologies,
Most chips are built on top of core underlying architectures whose intellectual property (IP) is held by a handful of key firms... Manufacturing a chip requires core IP, design, fabrication, and assembly, which together form the midstream segment of the supply chain. Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom dominate the chip IP segment, with UK’s ARM holding nearly a 45% market share. China so far has one company that is competitive in this arena, but it only holds a 1.8% market share. The United States, the Netherlands, and Japan dominate the crucial market for semiconductor manufacturing equipment used in fabrication. Dutch company ASML virtually monopolizes the supply of photolithography machines, which each cost around $120 million. Taiwan plays a crucial role in the actual fabrication of chips. Taiwan’s chip foundries make up more than 80% of the global market, while mainland China’s SMIC foundry has just 6.6%. But China is gaining ground on Taiwanese firms when it comes to the final stage of chip assembly, which is typically handled by low-margin outsourced contractors. The downstream segment, which is determined by global sales of semiconductors, is dominated by the United States, South Korea, and Japan. In fact, no Chinese company yet appears in the top ten in terms of global sales. American companies occupy 35% of this market, while Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese companies combined make up roughly one-third.
The global interdependencies in all the three are very clear, making disruptions in one place a matter of global concern.
This has excellent graphical data about all the three industries.
6. Contrary to opinions that question the wisdom of establishing a well-capitalised Development Finance Institution for infrastructure funding, there is a real need for such an institution. And it needs to be state-owned to make any meaningful difference. Even with the inevitable political economy risks, if infrastructure financing has to be mobilised, there are few other alternatives. This long paper makes a very detailed case.
7. The Economist has a briefing on innovation and public support for it. This about how the post-war years were characterised by technologies that people and firms used,
The post-second-world-war years were not only marked by a growth in government r&d spending, but also by the scientific excellence of in-house laboratories at companies such as at&t and ibm. In the 1960s researchers at DuPont published more articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the field’s leading journal, than mit and Caltech combined. The production of scientific knowledge and the desire to solve real-world commercial problems were closely entwined. Science was being pulled into the economy, not just pushed; this was the environment in which, in the 1960s, the term r&d was invented... corporate science has gone into decline, with big firms increasingly choosing to license research from universities rather than do it themselves. Further removed from production, the universities which serve as the primary research focus in many countries are not so focused on useful invention. If the current innovation system is simply less good at creating growth-boosting innovations than it was, then spending more on r&d will not raise incomes as much as it might. It may simply produce more research papers.
This is a claim which deserves much greater scrutiny,
Amazon claimed to spend $36bn on “technology and content” last year, more than the science budgets of Britain and France combined.
I struggle on this. Spending $36 bn to tweak algorithms and software and doing data analytics??? Is this more of accounting gymnastics?
8. Gillian Tett points to signatures of return of inflation,
What was the best-performing asset class in 2020? If you think “tech stocks” or “bitcoin”, think again. Instead, as the Bridgewater hedge fund recently wrote to its clients, “among the more interesting and least recognised outcomes” of 2020 was that US inflation-linked bonds beat other assets by delivering a 35 per cent return, on a risk-adjusted basis, as investors hedged against inflation risks.
9. India's credit growth decline problem in a graphic
No comments:
Post a Comment