In December, China announced that it approved 13 foreign and domestic banks who would be market movers for the yuan. If it follows through, this will change China’s long-standing micromanagement of its currency designed to keep its value from rising against the yen, pound and dollar.

Having a number of banks that are market movers for the currency would, in theory, limit the ability of China to intervene to keep the value of the yuan down.

There are a lot of reasons that China should stop such intervention, but one of the odd things is watching U.S. officials complain about the cheap yuan. The argument goes that the cheap yuan is largely responsible for the U.S. trade deficit in which the United States imports far more goods from China than it exports to that nation.

But if China is crazy enough to essentially subsidize exports to the United States, why should the United States object? The United States get goods far cheaper, raising the effective buying powers of wages, and China gets cash it uses for the capital investment necessary to continue its economic growth.

Source:

China reforms its currency market. BBC, December 30, 2005.

China Moves Toward Liberalizing Its Currency Market is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Not surprisingly, the area with the highest rate of childhood labor is Africa, where 41 percent of children aged 5 to 14 work. That compares to just 21 percent of 5 to 14-year olds working in Asia and 17 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. Due to the difference in total population however, 60 percent of all child laborers are working in Asia.

Worldwide UNICEF estimates that eight million children work in what the International Labor Organization terms “unconditional worst forms” of labor — six million bonded labor (essentially slaves); about 300,000 as soldiers in various armed conflicts around the world; and 1.8 million in the sex industry as prostitutes or the production of pornography.

Most child labor occurs in developing countries, but UNICEF estimates that about 2.4 million children 5 to 14-years old work full-time in the developed world. For example, in the United States anywhere between 300,000 to 800,000 children of Spanish-speaking immigrants are believed to work full-time in farm-related occupations. Similarly in Portugal UNICEF estimates that up to 47,000 school-aged children work full-time in industries such as shoe production rather than attend school.

Sources:

UN urges action on child labor. The BBC, February 21, 2005.

End Child Exploitation: Child Labour Today. (PDF) UNICEF, 2005.

UNICEF Report Says 211 Million Children Worldwide Work Full-Time is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Under the terms of the treaty, it would be ratified once countries representing 55 percent of greenhouse gas emissions had signed it. That point was reach when Russia ratified the treaty in November 2004.

The United States has rejected the treaty arguing that it would be too expensive too implement controls on greenhouse gases, and that it would put the U.S. at an unfair economic disadvantage to make such changes given that China, India and other countries will not be forced to make the same cuts.

President Bill Clinton signed the treaty in 1999, but the Senate has refused to ratify it ever since, and is unlikely to do so in the forseeable future.

Even among those countries which did ratify the treaty, reducing emissions is likely to turn into an accounting game with high-emissions countries trading emissions rights with low-emissions countries without making much of a dent in emissions. This is one of the reasons Russia changed course and finally ratified the treaty since it will likely benefit economically from such emissions trading. As the Washington Post summed it up,

Moreover, they [the United States and Australia] say, many countries, including Japan and several in the European Union, are unlikely to meet their emission-control targets and will have to buy “credits” — most likely from Russia, which will have plenty to sell because many of its industrial plants shut down during the economic meltdown in the 1990s.

“They are going to take credit for sagging economies and flat populations,” said James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Bush’s proposals for voluntary emission controls and incentives to develop clean technologies would have as much impact on American emissions as Europe would achieve under Kyoto, he said.

Critics counter that binding emissions quotas are needed to create the changes necessary to reduce the threat of global warming, but its difficult to see how a shell game in which major CO2 producers are exempt altogether will accomplish anything beyond symbolic.

Source:

Kyoto Treaty Takes Effect Today. Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, February 16, 2005.

Kyoto Protocol comes into force. The BBC, February 16, 2005.

Kyoto Protocol Goes Into Effect Without United States is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Longman repeats the litany of facts that most readers of this site are already familiar with. Worldwide total fertility rates are plunging, and the end of this century is likely to see a relatively old population with fewer young people as a percentage of the population than at anytime in human history. He writes,

In the United States, the direct cost of raising a middle-class child born this year through age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture, exceeds $200,000 — not including college. And the cost in forgone wages can easily exceed $1 million, even for families with modest earning power. Meanwhile, although Social Security and private pension plans depend critically on the human capital created by parents, they offer the same benefits, and often more, to those who avoid the burdens of raising a family.

The claims about the cost of raising children are, in my opinion, simply nonsense. First of all, the USDA did not measure what it costs to raise a child, but rather what parents of differing income levels actually spend. There is an important difference between the two.

Second, the methodology behind the USDA, is goofy, as even its own study notes. For example, the largest part of the “cost” of raising children in that $200,000 estimate is more than $53,000 for housing costs. How did the USDA arrive at that figure? It simply assumes that if a couple has two children and a house valued at $200,000, then each family member incurs $50,000 in housing costs,

Unlike food and health care, no research base exists for allocating estimated household expenditures on housing, transportation, and other miscellaneous goods and services among family members. USDA uses the per capita method in allocating these expenses; the per capita method allocates expenses among household members in equal proportions. A marginal cost method, which assumes that expenditures on children may be measured as the difference in
total expenses between couples with children and equivalent childless couples, was not used
because of limitations with this approach.

Since there’s no agreed upon methodology, the USDA simply went with one that will produce the highest possible housing costs value. Children certainly incur large costs, but the USDA figures are used inappropriately by Longman to exaggerate just how large the economic burden of children is to a typical family.

Longman goes on to argue that people in modern industrialized societies are essentially living in environments which promote childlessness,

Some biologists now speculate that modern humans have created an environment in which the “fittest,” or most successful, individuals are those who have few, if any, children. As more and more people find themselves living under urban conditions in which children no longer provide economic benefit to their parents, but rather are costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them.

. . .

. . . Once, demographers believed that some law of human nature would prevent fertility rates from remaining below replacement level within any healthy population for more than brief periods. After all, don’t we all carry the genes of our Neolithic ancestors, who one way or another managed to produce enough babies to sustain the race? Today, however, it has become clear that no law of nature ensure that human beings, living in free, developed societies, will create enough children to reproduce themselves.

It’d be nice if Longman didn’t use weasel phrases like “some biologists” (really, which ones?), but clearly the economic advantages of having children have been largely wiped out in the developed countries, leaving the urge to reproduce to compete with the urge to enjoy the material trappings of life.

But I’m still not convinced of all the dire horrors that are supposed to result from this. Yes, issues of how to create innovation and deal with medical costs 50 years down the road look immense, but then back in the 1970s the question of how to deal with the 14 billion people in the world by the end of the 21st century also looked immense and all but unsolvable. Nobody on either side of this argument gives much credit to the driving force that got us into and out of all sorts of problems, the unique human ability to respond and change in dramatic ways to circumstance.

Like the overpopulation doomsayers in the 1970s, Longman proposes any number of government meddling to produce the fertility rates he think would be optimum.

These include:

• exempting parents from having to pay into social security systems (since they already contribute so much simply by having children)
• changing the structure of education so young people are busy procreating rather than studying (“education should be a lifetime pursuit, rather than crammed into one’s prime reproductive years”)
• use legislation to make it more expensive to smoke, be fat, or sedentary (to reduce the alleged social medical costs of such activities later in life)

These are, at best, ineffective half measures that won’t work even if you agree with Longman about the nature of the problem.

Let me propose a measure that might work, if enacted widely enough — ban contraception and abortion. After all, the last time I check the problem is not that college students are not engaging in enough procreative activities, but rather that they have at their disposal any number of means to prevent procreation itself.

Of course the odds of something like that happening are about the same as the odds of adopting Paul Ehrlich’s recent recommendations to screw the developing world by abandoning free trade and liberal immigration policies. So we’ll muddle along as we always have, finding solutions to problems spontaneously, while those on the sidelines fret and worry about the next terrible crisis to face humanity.

Sources:

The Global Baby Bust. Phillip Longman, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004.

More Overwrought Hype About the Birth Dearth is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Drug resistant strains of HIV has become increasingly common in people with HIV as the disease adapts to various treatment therapies over time. But in this case the disease was drug resistant in a newly diagnosed individual, and the disease progressed to full-blown AIDS much faster than normal — taking only 2 to 20 months to progress to AIDS rather than the typical average of 10 years. According to news reports, the strain of HIV was resistant to 19 of 20 antiretrovirals used to treat AIDS.

On obvious possibility is that the man contracted this especially virulent form of HIV from unprotected sex with another HIV positive individual who has been undergoing anti-AIDS treatment. Or it could represent a spontaneous mutation of the disease that only this particular patient contracted.

Or, as infectious disease expert Dr. Craig Pringle speculated,

The extensive use of anti-retroviral drugs in the community may have selected this unwelcome triple drug-resistant variant. . . [And a possible] outbreak of HIV not amenable to treatment with currently available drugs is in the offing.

Such a possible outbreak would be devastating, especially if it made its way to the developing nations already plagued by the less virulent forms of HIV.

Sources:

Drug-resistant HIV strain found. The BBC, February 12, 2005.

Multi-drug-resistant HIV strain raises alarm. Shaoni Bhattacharya, NewScientist.Com, February 14, 2005.

Drug Resistant Strain of HIV Reported in U.S. is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Surprisingly there isn’t actually a lot of research looking at how free trade affects industrialized countries, but Virginia Postrel published an article in the New York Times in January that explored just this topic.

She reported on an academic study of the effects of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. The study, by Daniel Trefler of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Trefler’s study focused on the effects that liberalizing tariffs between the two countries had. Postrel writes,

Before the agreement went into effect in 1989, more than one in four Canadian industries were, in fact, protected by tariffs of more than 10 percent. Those industries included not only businesses known for their protectionism, notably apparel makers, but manufacturers of a wide range of products, from beer and pretzels to coffins, plastic pipes and paper bags.

Before the agreement, imports from the United States faced an average tariff of 8.1 percent and an effective tariff of 16 percent. The effective rate included import taxes on the final product and tariffs plaid on raw materials. Someone importing a chair could face a direct tariff on furniture, for example, but could also pay indirect tariffs on wood and upholstery fabric.

At the very beginning of the free trade agreement, those industries that were the most heavily protected took big hits as imports from the United States became even cheaper. According to Trefler, such industries, saw employment declines of as much as 12 percent, and the free trade agreement as a whole reduced employment by 5 percent in industries that had previously been protected by tariffs.

But, over the long run, the Canadian economy regained those jobs and has one of the healthier industrial bases in the developed world. According to Trefler,

Within 10 years, the lost employment was made up by employment gains in other parts of manufacturing. . . The average effect of the U.S. tariff cuts on Canadian employment was thus a wash: the employment losses by less-productive firms offset the employment gains by more productive firms.

And rather than force Canadian wages into a downward spiral, as had been predicted by opponents of the free trade agreement, Canadian wages increased by 3 percent over the eight years studied. A small increase to be sure, but not the predicted decline.

So what did Canadians get out of the free trade agreement if employment was a net wash and wages increased just slightly? It got a big productivity boost. Postrel writes,

The big story is that lowering tariffs set off a productivity boom.

Formerly sheltered Canadian companies began to compete with and compare themselves with more-efficient American businesses. Some went under, but others significantly improved operations.

The productivity gains were huge. In the formerly sheltered industries most affected by the tariff cuts, labor productivity jumped 15 percent, at least half from closing inefficient plants. “This translates into an enormous compound annual growth rate of 1.9 percent,” he [Trefler] wrote.

But closing plants is not the whole story, or even half of it. Among export-oriented industries, which expanded after the agreement, data from individual plants show an increase in labor productivity of 14 percent. Manufacturing productivity as a whole jumped 6 percent.

Free trade — its good for you. Even you folks in the industrial world. So loosen up those protectionist tariffs and quotas already, and give the developing world a fair chance.

Source:

What happened when two countries liberalized trade? Pain, then gain. Virginia Postrel, The New York Times, January 27, 2005.

Surprise — Free Trade Works Out In The End is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

According to the IJF’s annual report (emphasis added),

The IFJ casualty toll includes all employed staff, including freelance who work in all sections of the media industry. Our list includes all journalists and support staff as well as employees who are in the firing line and who are victims because their media have been targeted. We include personnel such as drivers, fixers and translators who died during newsgathering activities. We also include people who have been killed because of
accidental causes while on duty. We recognize that other organizations do not include some of the victims we have identified. We believe that by ensuring all media employees involved in the support and promotion of journalistic activity are covered by this report it is possible to give a fuller picture of the extent of casualties within the media workforce.

Iraq was, not surprisingly, the most dangerous place for media workers, with almost 50 reporters and other media workers killed in that country. Most of those killed were the victims of terrorist attacks that indiscriminately target civilians, but the IFJ also criticized the United States for failing to conduct thorough and open investigations of killings of media employees by its soldiers.

The next most dangerous place for journalists was the Philippines where 13 reporters were killed in 2004. Not a single person has been detained in the murders of journalists in that country according to the IFJ.

In the United States, the IFJ recorded just a single on-the-job death — a journalist who was killed in Texas when a mobile news van’s broadcast mast collided with powerlines and 23-year-old Matthew Moore was electrocuted.

Sources:

‘Deadliest’ year for journalists. Chris Morris, The BBC, January 18, 2005.

Journalist and Staff Killed in 2004. International Federation of Journalists, 2005.

2004 Was Deadly Year for Journalists is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The duties will hit Vietnam especially hard as shrimp exports account for two-thirds of that country’s exports and 2 million people are employed in the industry.

The U.S. Commerce Department ruled that the two countries were exporting shrimp to the United States at below market prices. This is the standard dumping claim which the United States has repeatedly used to enact protectionist measures against competitors.

Rather, shrimpers in Vietnam and China tend to fish shrimp on large farms and, of course, labor costs in Vietnam and China are significantly lower than in the United States, allowing those two countries to sell shrimp cheaper. That’s not dumping, that’s comparative advantage. (Ironically, the U.S. shrimp industry complains about use of antibiotics, which is odd since that is an objection other countries frequently offer against U.S. beef and other products).

Even if the dumping claim were true, under the logic of the free trade principles that the United States pushes other countries to adopt, it shouldn’t matter. If China and Vietnam want to sell shrimp below market prices that would be rather foolish of them, but it would be a great boon to American consumers.

Source:

US slaps duties on Asian shrimps. The BBC, July 6, 2004.

Shrimp Duties May Shake The. Associated Press, July 5, 2004.

U.S. Once Again Sets Bad Example with Shrimp Duties is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Under the provisions that the UN Population Fund money is allocated, it cannot be given to the agency if the State Department determines that there is a direct link between the UNPF and China’s practice of coercive abortion as part of its one child policy.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said of the withheld funds,

These Chinese programs have penalties that amount to coercion. THerefore we feel, by funding these programs, we would be indirectly helping the Chinese to improve their management of programs that result in coercive abortion, and that’s prohibited by our law.

Sources:

US cuts UN funds in abortion row. Jill McGivering, The BBC, July 17, 2004.

U.S. Blocks Aid to U.N. Population Fund. Barry Schweid, Associated Press, July 16, 2004.

U.S. Withholds $34 Million from the UN Population Fund is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

In its 2004 update to its Condoms Count report, Population Action International estimated that the developing world needed 10 billion condoms in 2002, but aid agencies supplied only about 2.5 billion condoms.

It notes that in South Africa between 1998-2002, the number of donated condoms amounted to only 2.6 condoms per man per year (in contrast, more than 60 condoms are produced each year in the United States for each man).

PAI and others blame the United States in part for the Bush administration’s emphasis on abstinence as a solution to the AIDS crisis.

Source:

World falling short on condom provision. NewScientist.Com, July 12, 2004.

Counting Condoms: Donors Coming Up Short. Press Release, Population Action International, July 14, 2004.

The Developing World Needs More Condoms is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.