Category: World economy

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Now, Voyager? Or maybe later….

Sending goods by sea is the norm. And, if you’re worried about CO2 emissions, you’ll initially be glad to hear that according to the World Shipping Council “Maritime shipping is the world’s most carbon-efficient form of transporting goods – far more efficient than road or air transport.” . They give figures of 10 grammes of CO2 to move a tonne of goods one kilometer. To do the same by rail (diesel train) takes 21, truck and trailer 59, and by air the figure is 470 grammes. But of course an electric train, depending on the source of the electricity, might do better, as might an electric truck in the future. The main problem is that world trade is so big that, even though most of it goes on ships, the total CO2 emissions are enormous.  (So are other pollutants: the fifteen largest ships produce more Nox and SO2 than all the cars in the world).

What can be done? The International Maritime Organisation, a UN specialised agency, has a target of reducing CO2 emissions from world shipping by 50 per cent by 2050. Continued technical progress in ships, engines, and fuels will all play a role. But there are also big benefits from ships going more slowly. This has been an increasing trend in any case as a cost saving measure, but it also reduces the CO2 emissions. An obvious additional step is to start taxing maritime fuel, which at the moment, like aviation fuel, is not taxed at all. The IMF has been looking at this and is quite excited about it:” In short, maritime carbon taxes are an economically and administratively promising instrument” 

Further steps to take include the electrification of rail lines, which opens up the possibility of using alternative energies in rail freight. What about trade wars? New tariffs on trade and “bringing the jobs home” should cut down on international sea freight, shouldn’t it? Well, producing locally of course reduces the need for imports and thus for freight. But it is almost certainly not the most efficient way to go. Tariffs impose a cost on consumers and they hinder growth and this means that there will be fewer resources for combatting climate change or for anything else.

There’s another development, an unfortunate by-product of climate change that may actually be useful. With global warming, new sea routes are opening up in the Arctic, the fabled Northwest and Northeast Passages. They could halve the time of sea freight voyages between some big markets.

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Ghosn but not forgotten

Pronouncing the man’s name is difficult enough. To understand the details of the Renault-Nissan linkage (also incorporating Mitsubishi) is even harder. But the effects are striking. A more or less unique enterprise was created that reflected the strong if different industrial policies of two G-7 member countries. France believes in national champions, and holds onto the best of state-owned enterprises. This is not just because their trade unions would never agree to anything else. It is also because strong French companies are seen as a projection of state power and perhaps more importantly as a basis for economic independence This policy has often been reinforced in practice by the movement of key staff to and fro between government and business. In Japan, the cohesion of government and business is not so explicit. This is because it does not need to be: national cohesion is still very strong, to the extent that most Japanese feel themselves to be part of something greater than themselves.
Renault Nissan is unique in that it is has been a more or less balanced partnership. Other multinational car industry ventures are more hierarchical. The VW group includes Spanish and Czech arms(SEAT and Skoda) but the German end calls the shots. It’s unique also because other joint ventures with the Japanese car industry have not endured (GM and Toyota, Daimler-Chrysler and Mitsubishi, Ford and Mazda, Volkswagen and Suzuki). Of course, there is  international co-operation at lower level (in engines, platforms, etc.).
But what’s the future for Renault-Nissan? Nissan has the experience on electric vehicles that will be needed for the future. Also, Japan has a lot of expertise in solid-state batteries, which are supposed to be the next big thing. But with Mr Ghosn no longer present, does Renault-Nissan have the global strategies it will need, with lots of newcomers going into electric vehicles?For such alliances to work, the lessons of the past need to be drawn from other alliances: communication is key. Without that, you cannot even begin to give and to take.

There are at least two interesting points about electric vehicles. The first one is that they are less complicated to make than the kind with internal combustion engines. One study even says that they typically have 20 moving parts as opposed to  about 2000. This seems absurd: after all if you take four wheels, four windows, five doors, three mirrors, one steering wheel, one handbrake, and two pedals, you already have a total of 20 moving parts, and then there are the windscreen wipers. But in any case we can accept that they’re easier to make. Which might lower production costs. Which might encourage new foreign direct investment in different places. Which means tariffs, especially protective ones, will change to try to keep up.

The second interesting thing about electric vehicles is that they can have very good acceleration, resulting in  higher average speeds even with the same speed limits.

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IMF projections and international trade policies

As usual, the IMF World Economic Outlook has been published in connection with the annual meeting of the World Bank and the IMF. The new report has a special emphasis on the impact of changes in trade policy, which as we know has seen a lot of action in the field of tariffs, with sanctions also playing a role. The revision of the NAFTA agreement, involving Canada, Mexico and the United States, is a further factor.
Behind the world economic survey is a huge amount of data and forecasting work, which encompasses broad economic and policy variables, giving a detailed picture in macroeconomic terms of each country as well as its various aggregates, up to the year 2023 in the case of the current survey. This data is of interest in its own right, but it is also interesting to compare the forecasts made at a detailed level this year with those made last year. Looking at the NAFTA countries, it seems that Mexico has had its expectations increased quite a lot. Compared with last year’s survey, Mexico’s GDP is almost 25% higher in all the years from 2018 to 2022. Canada has had its forecast increased by something over half a percent in the later years. Apart from Mexico, a big beneficiary of the revision of the projections has been the United States, where the US GDP in 2022 is 6.8 per cent higher than the estimate made last year. China’s increases on the other hand, are pretty small, with the GDP estimate for 2022 being revised upwards by 0.1 per cent
At world level the picture is a negative one. The IMF now thinks that world GDP growth in 2022 will be 3.58 per cent, while a year ago it was forecasting 3.76 per cent. Eurozone growth in 2022 is now forecast to be 1.45 per cent (previously 1.49 per cent).
Do these IMF forecasts imply that the US will be a slight beneficiary of its recent confrontational trade policies, since the US GDP forecast has been revised upward and world growth forecasts revised downwards? Well, perhaps, but macroeconomic forecasts embody a lot of things, such as structural change, technological change, resource constraints and so on, some of which the forecasters themselves may be not even be aware of. In other words, trade policies may not be the only factors at work.
And even if you do think that confrontational trade policies benefit the US, you should also ask yourself whether losses for the rest of the world won’t reduce the impulses for US growth farther down the line. And you should consider how much better it would be if the US and its trade partners were reducing barriers to trade (and investment) rather than increasing them.

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Moving Up the Value Chain

Moving Up the Value Chain
This is one of the most used and least defined phrases in discussions of business strategy and sometimes national policy also. It has been used to describe improving profitability, improving productivity, better marketing, innovation and a lot of other things. Moving up the value chain is always assumed to be a good thing. The “chain” itself is never described, nor is the process by which one is to move up it, or what will happen if everyone does this. The chain is apparently static, a kind of ladder on which one may climb from link to link, provided one has the right consultants and follows their advice.
This is not to say that value chains aren’t important. Global Value Chains (GVCs) are a big policy focus in industrial policy, and a subject of considerable analysis. But the terminology might need to be revised. Why a chain, anyway? As I have said elsewhere, the use of the word “chain” suggests something linear and also something fairly sturdy and difficult to break.
Such an image is not really helpful in trying to understand global production systems. In practice these often involve parallel sections, where there are multiple sources and destinations. Production location will often be determined by the need to be near supplies or near consumers, so duplicate plants will be needed. And the need to ensure continuous availability of inputs will often require supplies to be drawn from more than one source.
Earlier this year I had an interesting discussion with the Statistical Division of the United Nations. Apart from the huge range of activities they have in the established fields of data such as commodity trade, national accounts and so on, they are now taking an additional approach in order better to understand GVCs, selecting one sector and exploring it in depth, breaking it down by ownership and identifying business functions to see the impact of particular processing stages.
It’s great that this is being done at an international level. Firstly it complements the multisector work continuing in the OECD on so-called “trade in value added”. Secondly, by carrying it out at the UN Statistical Division, a body with huge experience in trade and industry data, the work can be contextualised more readily and can draw on co-operation from governments worldwide. Because of the reach and the impact of GVCs they are of strong policy interest, not just to individual governments in particular cases, but also to all concerned with the stability and future of the world economy.

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Competitiveness Liga

People like numbers, as long as there are not too many. And people have a broad grasp of rankings: they know the difference between coming first in a race and coming last. From this comes some of the appeal of competitiveness rankings. I understand this appeal: I worked myself in that area for many years, supporting the National Competitiveness Council in Ireland, and also involved in policy benchmarking at EU level and being part of an international competitiveness network. However, in our NCC reports we resisted the temptation to have an aggregate ranking, because we felt that it would conceal more information than it revealed.
Nevertheless, competitiveness rankings are well established. The two big ones, the IMD and the World Economic Forum rankings, are widely quoted and governments and businesses appear to take them seriously enough. Both reports work in the same basic way, gathering indicators of what are believed to be the factors of competitiveness and putting them together in composite sub-rankings which are then combined into a single ranking for those who want an overview. The key results are here:

RankIMD 2017IMD 2018WEF 2017-2018
1Hong Kong USASwitzerland
2SwitzerlandHong Kong SARUSA
3SingaporeSingaporeSingapore
4USANetherlandsNetherlands
5NetherlandsSwitzerlandGermany
6IrelandDenmarkHong Kong SAR
7Denmark UAE Sweden
8Luxembourg Norway UK
9Sweden Sweden Japan
10UAE Canada Finland

 

Clearly there are similarities, but also surprises.  For IMD,  the United Arab Emirates ranks seventh in the world, and, unlike WEF, IMD finds no places in the top ten for large advanced economies such as Germany, the UK and Japan.

The IMD 2018 Report came out in May 2018 and the website gives the rankings for 2017 and rankings and scores for both 2017 and 2018. By scores is meant a composite index prepared in order to provide a ranking. A quick look at these shows three things
1. First of all the top ten doesn’t change very much. As in a football league, two drop out (Ireland and Luxembourg) and two are promoted (Norway and Canada).
2. If we look at all 43 countries covered by IMD, we find that the most competitive countries are most similar. The top ten are closer to each other than lower groups are.
3. These single rankings actually don’t tell us very much: the underlying data is probably far more interesting.