In Gurgaon [a suburb of New Delhi] and elsewhere in India, the answer is that growth usually occurs despite the government rather than because of it. India and China are often considered to be the world’s rising economic powers, yet if China’s growth has been led by the state, India’s growth is often impeded by the state. China’s authoritarian leaders have built world-class infrastructure; India’s infrastructure and bureaucracy are both considered woefully outdated.
Yet over the past decade, India has emerged as one of the world’s most important new engines of growth, despite itself. Even now, with its economy feeling the pressure from global inflation and higher interest rates, some economists predict that India will become the world’s third largest economy within 15 years and could much sooner supplant China as the fastest-growing major economy.
Moreover, India’s unorthodox path illustrates, on a grand scale, the struggles of many smaller developing countries to deliver growth despite weak, ineffective governments. Many have tried to emulate China’s top-down economic model, but most are stuck with the Indian reality. In India, Gurgaon epitomizes that reality, managing to be both a complete mess and an economic powerhouse, a microcosm of Indian dynamism and dysfunction.
In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government.
To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.
“You could call it the United States of Gurgaon,” said Sanjay Kaul, an activist critical of the city’s lack of planning who argues that Gurgaon is a patchwork of private islands more than an interconnected city. “You are on your own.”
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| Emirates Stadium - Home of the Arsenal |
Portland are 5-1 in league play at their home. And yet, over the past month, a couple of opposing coaches have publicly taken issue with JELD-WEN Field’s size and suggested that it plays into the Timbers’ favor.
“The pitch, because it’s a little bit too small, when you watch the games they played at home, it’s a little pinball,” Philadelphia Union coach Peter Nowak told local reporters prior to the May 6 game in Portland. “[The Timbers] press the other team, and we’ve got to figure out a good plan for that.”
Too small?
At 70 yards wide, 110 yards long, the pitch at JELD-WEN Field is FIFA certified and meets the governing body’s guidelines as well as those of MLS. Field dimensions are not fixed from one pitch to the next and are a bit like Major League Baseball ballparks in that sense.
The oldest club in English Premier League soccer, Stoke City, play in a stadium with exactly the same dimensions as JELD-WEN. Do other EPL teams complain that it is too small?
Less than two weeks after Nowak brought it up, Columbus Crew coach Robert Warzycha chimed in with his thoughts on Portland’s success at home.
“More than anything, it’s the [artificial] turf and the field dimensions,” Warzycha told the Columbus Dispatch. “And the way they play at home. They’re scoring on set pieces.”
For the record, Portland did score on set pieces to beat both Philadelphia and Columbus. But was the size of the field really working against the opponent?
At JELD-WEN Field, the dimensions are dictated to some degree by the configuration of a stadium footprint that dates to 1926. It also has to do with sight lines for spectators. (From the press box, it is difficult to see the near touchline with out standing up.)
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| Josh Haner/The New York Times |
Perhaps the most hopeful sign nowadays is that poor countries themselves are starting to invest in agriculture in a serious way, as many did not do in the years when food was cheap.
In Africa, largely bypassed by the Green Revolution but with enormous potential, a dozen countries are on the verge of fulfilling a promise to devote 10 percent of their budgets to farm development, up from 5 percent or less.
“In my country, every penny counts,” Agnes Kalibata, the agriculture minister of Rwanda, said in an interview. With difficulty, Rwanda has met the 10 percent pledge, and she cited a terracing project in the country’s highlands that has raised potato yields by 600 percent for some farmers.
Yet the leading agricultural experts say that poor countries cannot solve the problems by themselves. The United Nations recently projected that global population would hit 10 billion by the end of the century, 3 billion more than today. Coupled with the demand for diets richer in protein, the projections mean that food production may need to double by later in the century.
Unlike in the past, that demand must somehow be met on a planet where little new land is available for farming, where water supplies are tightening, where the temperature is rising, where the weather has become erratic and where the food system is already showing serious signs of instability.
“We’ve doubled the world’s food production several times before in history, and now we have to do it one more time,” said Jonathan A. Foley, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. “The last doubling is the hardest. It is possible, but it’s not going to be easy.”
In general, these pessimists about the human future have turned out to be wrong — so far. The missing ingredient in doomsday prognostications, about the food supply or anything else, is an appreciation of the power of innovation to solve problems.
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Economists consider Malthusianism, at least as understood in modern times, to be a discredited doctrine. From their perspective, one powerful lever explains why innovation always seems to come to the rescue when it is needed most: prices.
Most people intuitively understand that the reason prices rise in times of scarcity is to allocate the available supply. It may be less obvious that higher prices serve another, more crucial function: they call forth additional supply. Higher prices reverberate through an economy like a clarion call, saying to capitalists everywhere: Produce more!
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“Where Malthus and his modern-day followers go wrong is that they miss the power of prices to drive the technological change that has helped societies adapt to all kinds of events and will help us to adapt to climate change,” Michael Greenstone, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me by e-mail. “It is certainly possible that agricultural prices may end up being higher, but the apocalyptic visions of shortages are not supported by the long history of markets directing people to innovate in the areas where it is needed most.”
Without question, the potential for agriculture to adapt to climate change, to higher demand and to the other problems that confront it is substantial. Farmers can grow different varieties; they can plant them earlier to avoid hot spells; they can invest capital in water-saving systems like drip irrigation.
Within limits, agriculture can move north as the climate warms; some projections show wheat being grown in the future as far north as the shores of Hudson Bay, and even in parts of Alaska.
Gary Toenniessen, head of agricultural programs at the Rockefeller Foundation, pointed out to me that if prices got high enough, much of the United States could grow two crops a year instead of one. That is already done in parts of the country where winter wheat is grown, and it is being done even more intensively in Asia.
The dismal numbers may change the economic debate in Washington and potentially revive calls for the Federal Reserve to engage in another round of asset purchases, Mr. Ashworth said. Democrats and labor-oriented groups have also amplified their pleas for Congress to delay deficit-reduction measures.
“Living here in Washington, in the past few weeks there has been all this talk about deficits and the debt ceiling as though that were the biggest problem right now,” said Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization. “My fervent hope is that this shocks policy makers into realizing the most urgent problem in front of us right now is jobs.”
It's not too difficult to spot the sources of economic weakness in the details of the report. Manufacturing employment fell by 5,000 jobs in May after rising steadily in previous months, a testament to the worsening outlook for exports in a weakening global economy. Retail trade employment growth also tumbled, as nervous consumers trimmed spending. America's job woes have also been self-inflicted. Private firms have added over 1.7m jobs in the past 12 months, but the government has shed nearly half a million over the same period (not counting the loss of temporary Census jobs last year). Local governments alone have cut 446,000 positions since September of 2008. Some of those government jobs losses reflect a sensible rationalisation of workforces. Too many of them reflect the damaging effect of pro-cyclical budget cutting due to balanced-budget rules in cash-strapped states. More federal aid to states might have dampened the reductions, easing the drag on national growth.
Budget issues at the federal level may also be contributing to the slowdown. Unexpectedly large federal budget cuts are chipping away at quarterly growth rates with less of a cushion than previously imagined. The 0.5 percentage point drag due to slashed spending seems less problematic when the economy is expected to expand at 4%—as was once hoped for the first half of 2011—than when it's growing at less than 2%, as America's did in the first quarter, and as forecasters are increasingly predicting for the second quarter.
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| Photo credit: Oregonian |
On Jeld-Wen Stadium’s narrow pitch, two assists came off throw-ins (by Chris Pontius and Jeremy Hall) and the Dejan Jakovic penalty came off a throw. On United’s final goal, Bill Hamid could’ve been credited with a secondary assist. The dimensions are listed at 110 yards long, 70 yards wide. Oddly, there seems to be ample room to expand the playing surface to a more suitable size. The Timbers have conformed well to these tight quarters, but the matches lack elegance."Lack elegance" is one (nice) way to put it... A couple of yards sounds like nothing right? But the difference between 70 by 110 and 74 by 114 is 10% more playing area. The international standard right now for new stadia is 75 by 115, I think Portland should work with the league to allow for slightly less room behind the goals and out of touch or else this type of ugly ping pong and punting soccer is going to be the norm. Here is Goff quoting DC United coach Ben Olsen who mentions the field:
“It was about dealing with set pieces, and that’s what this field is about. Unfortunately, that’s what it is. It’s not fun to come here and play because it’s tough to play soccer. It’s about getting the balls into the box, but that’s the reality when you come here. Historically, we have lost when the field is small, when it’s turf, when it’s a real gritty game. The guys today were fed up with that and showed that they can compete physically with any team in the league.”The emphasis is mine. Note that he doesn't say it is tough to come and play against the Timbers or in front of the Army, but that it is tough to actually play the game: control, passing, movement. Instead what we get is a lot of punting the ball.
John Tapogna, president of economics consulting firm EcoNorthwest and a seasoned researcher of school spending statistics, said the prospects for Oregon schools to return to above-national-average spending -- or to feel they've shed the constant need to cut back offerings, jobs or both -- are dim.
The main reason Oregon spends less is that Oregonians earn less than the national average -- so they have less to spend. As a whole, Oregonians consistently contribute 4 percent of their collective income to public schools, he said.
Oregon's economy and per-capita income would have to grow faster than the nation's to make it natural for Oregonians to increase their spending on schools faster than the nation, he said. And that's unlikely, according to the state economist and others.
In recent weeks, there is growing legislative support for giving K-12 schools some additional money, likely $50 million to $100 million from the education reserves. In everyday terms, that money could pay for up to 1,100 teachers or a full week of school for all students in the state.
In March, the co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Ways and Means recommended a $5.7 billion budget for K-12 schools, but said they would consider an additional $56 million for 2012-13 if the economy improves. But advocates haven't given up, saying that money is needed immediately to help blunt devastating reductions.
Their goal is still the additional $100 million they asked for initially, but as end-of-session negotiations intensify, many say $56 million is turning into viable middle ground that could help meet a variety of needs. The $56 million figure would give schools the same amount that they received for 2009-11.
The state's Education Stability Fund is intended to help buffer schools during an economic recession. Three-fifths of each legislative chamber must approve any action to remove any of that money -- expected to grow to $300 million over the next two years. State legislators can tap the fund only in times of economic crisis or if the governor declares an emergency. As the state revenue forecasts begin to improve, some advocates fear that lawmakers will not be able to make those funds available during next year's session, as they originally intended.
"I think everyone can agree that there's at least $56 million available for K-12," said Democratic Majority leader Dave Hunt. "It's in the Education Stability Fund. Do we leave it under a mattress or invest it in our kids? I think that's an easy choice."
Messi grew homesick when he arrived with his father from Argentina, club officials said. He missed his mother and sometimes cried himself asleep. Quickly enough, though, he immersed himself in the Barcelona style, which demands flair and creativity, not mere utility. He played the keep-away game called El Rondo, in which one player stands inside a circle trying to steal passes made in tight spaces. He mastered the system known as tiki-taka, built around short, rhythmic passes and movement described by Iniesta as “receive, pass, offer,” triangular exchanges that form a spellbinding geometry.
In the NHL, home ice alone is worth about a 3-4 percent advantage. In Major League Baseball, home field is worth 5-6 percent. In the NBA, homecourt is worth 7-8 percent. In the NFL, home field is 8-10 percent.
In MLS, home field generally gives teams a half-goal advantage, Patterson said.
"A half-goal is worth more than 10 percent," he said. "It's huge. It's really big."
Some countries, like China, essentially fix the price of their currency. But since the early 1970s, the United States has let the dollar’s value move in response to changes in the supply and demand of dollars in the foreign exchange market. The Treasury no more determines the price of the dollar than the Department of Energy determines the price of gasoline. Both departments have a small reserve that they can use to combat market instability, but neither has the resources or the mandate to hold the relevant price away from its market equilibrium value for very long.
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...Perhaps if government officials could talk about the exchange rate forthrightly, there would be more understanding of the issues and more rational policy discussions.
Such discussions would start with some basic economics. The desire to trade with other countries or invest in them is what gives rise to the market for foreign exchange. You need euros to travel in Spain or to buy a German government bond, so you need a way to exchange currencies.
The supply of dollars to the foreign exchange market comes from Americans who want to buy goods, services or assets from abroad. The demand for dollars comes from foreigners who want to buy from the United States.
Anything that increases the demand for dollars or reduces the supply drives up the dollar’s price. Anything that lowers the demand for dollars or raises the supply causes the dollar to weaken.
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But in a depressed economy, it isn’t so clear that a strong dollar is desirable. A weaker dollar means that our goods are cheaper relative to foreign goods. That stimulates our exports and reduces our imports. Higher net exports raise domestic production and employment. Foreign goods are more expensive, but more Americans are working. Given the desperate need for jobs, on net we are almost surely better off with a weaker dollar for a while.
