Ben Muse

The Byrd Amendment is going down, slowly

In November and December, both the House and Senate adopted budget bills containing provisions to repeal the Byrd Amendment.   The Senate acted last week:

In a compromise reached between House of Representatives and Senate conferees, the repeal will be delayed for two years and Byrd Amendment distributions will continue for entries made prior to October 1, 2007. The conference report now heads back to the House for final action to resolve discrepancies between the House and Senate reports that are unrelated to repeal of the Byrd Amendment. President Bush is expected to sign the legislation soon. (CITAC news release)

No one is happier about repeal than the members of the Consuming Industries Trade Action Coalition (CITAC) - an industry group representing firms using imported inputs.  Their web page has some background:

What made Mauritius grow?

It's pretty dark in Alaska right now.  Of course the shortest day came shortly before Christmas. 

In Juneau, the light that day lasted about 6 1/2 hours.  But Juneau's daylight might not be considered real daylight elsewhere. Clouds screened out a lot of the light we might have had.  Moreover, the sun lies low on the horizon, even when it's up, and much of the time we're in the shade of the mountains that crowd close around us.

It's worse further north - in Barrow (on the shore of the Arctic Ocean) they won't see the sun for weeks.  The New York Times just ran a story on Alaska's dark days, highlighting "seasonal affective disorder" - the dark induced depression that many feel at this time: In Alaska, Darkness and Depression Descend (Associated Press, December 18):

Winter is a drag to some extent for one out of five Americans, studies suggest. A smaller fraction - mostly women and young adults - suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, a type of depression stemming from decreased daylight.

Nearly 10 percent of Alaskans suffer from the disorder to some degree, according to a 1992 study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Symptoms include lethargy, a heightened desire for sleep, cravings for carbohydrates, feelings of melancholy, fuzzy thinking and loss of libido or sociability, said Suzanne Womack Strisik, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Severe cases can be debilitating, even prompting thoughts of suicide. Experts say, however, suicide rates actually peak with increasing spring light.

"You don't have enough energy to make a plan before then," Ms. Strisik said. "It's too much trouble. Once the light starts coming back, there's more energy, but reasoning is still off. "

So, naturally one's thoughts turn to warmer, sunnier, more cheerful places.  Like tropical Mauritius:

Mauritius, an island nation, is located in the Indian Ocean.  This Air Mauritius route map shows where:

There have been a number of impressive growth episodes in Africa: Growing in Africa ...

The (relatively) peaceful 21st Century

The Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia has published its first Human Security Report (The Human Security Report 2005.  War and Peace in the 21st Century), and things are looking pretty good.

For this report, the authors focus on violent threats to individuals.  (They note that this is a narrow definition of human security, and that a broader definition would include threats such as hunger, disease, and natural disasters).

Battle deaths are down (Figure 1.9 Numbers of Battle Deaths, 1946-2002):

The annotation on this figure reads: "The regional focus of battle-deaths has shifted from decade to decade. In this ‘stacked graph’, the number of deaths in each region each year is indicated by the depth of the band of colour, and the total number of deaths is indicated by the top line on the graph.  Source: Lacina and Gleditsch, 2004"

Battle deaths are only a part of the human security picture.  But things are looking pretty good across a range of human security metrics:

Aleut Island Christmas: 1880

Alaska was Russian before it was part of the United States, and the Russian influence is still felt - especially in the Orthodox religion and religious architecture.  In 1879-80, the Pribilof Aleuts celebrated the Russian Orthodox Christmas, rather than the Western, December 25th, Christmas.

In 1879, Libby Beaman followed her husband to St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs - remote islands in the middle of the Bering Sea - when he was appointed as a government agent to supervise the local fur seal harvest.  Beaman was a remarkable woman - the ship captain who took her thought she was the first western woman to go to the Aleutians and the Pribilofs.  She was repeatedly warned off, because of the rigors of life there.

The Beamans arrived in May 1879, basing themselves in the village of St. Paul on St. Paul Island:

The village of St. Paul... presented a pretty picture.  It is built up a steep slope away from the harbor, where small boards of skin called bidarkahs and the bidarrahs are pulled up on the little wharf.  Low hills surround the village... Government House... sits high on the central slope overlooking the roofs of the other houses.  But it is not Government House that dominates the scene.  The vivid blue onion dome of the Orthodox church gives cohesion and charm to the scene and gathers unto itself the neat white frame buildings of the Alaska Commercial Company and the eighty white frame houses of the eighty Aleut Families it serves.

St.Paul Island was uninhabitated when the Russians arrived in Alaska.  The Russians introduced the Aleuts to the island in the 1790s to harvest fur seals.  When the Beamans arrived in 1879, the Aleuts had been there for almost 90 years,  almost 80 of these under the Russians, and just over ten under the Americans.

At this time, the fur seal harvest was conducted by the Alaska Commercial Company.  The Company had leased the harvesting rights from the government.  Jeanne van Nostrand tells the story of the seal harvest during this period: “The seals are about gone…” (American Heritage, June 1963).  van Nostrand is critical of the Company's operations, and of the government agents - implicitly including Beaman's husband - who supervised them.

Here is St. Paul in 1896, about 16 years after the Beamans were there:

This picture was obtained from a University of Washington online collection.  Several other 1896 photos of St. Paul Island are available there.

When the Russian Christmas arrived, in early January, 1880, Libby Beaman recorded her impressions: 

Castronova and virtual economies

Thousands of players interact in online role playing games.   Assets are created within the games (think of a magic sword stolen from a troll's hoard), and these contribute to a player's status and success.

Markets have sprung up in the real world, where players can buy or sell these electronic game assets.

Edward Castronova of Indiana University has made his name studying the interaction between  the virtual economies in the games, and the real economies outside.  Clive Thompson reports on Castronova's work his article Game Theories  (The Walrus):

Maps, maps, maps...

Sun Bin is a blog "dedicated to business strategy, and also business issues related to China" among other things.

This post collects maps using different techniques to illustrate the relative populations, wealth, and GDP of the world's nations.

Following The Hong Kong Ministerial

The WTO's Hong Kong meeting of trade ministers begins tomorrow.  The ministers will be trying to make progress on the Doha Round of trade negotiations.

Here are some helpful sources of information:

Where the people are:

A map of the world, with the country sizes proportional to population sizes:

From Asiapundit, who got it from BoingBoing .

Wal-Mart and wages

There is evidence that Wal-Mart benefits consumers, especially poor consumers .

There is also evidence that new stores reduce wage income in local labor markets, and that the impact of new stores on employment is unclear.   David Neumark, Junfu Zhang, and Stephen Ciccarella look at  The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets:

Dipak Patel and Doha

Less developed countries (LDCs) don't have a lot of resources to use in trade negotiations, like those involved in the Doha Round.

Alan Beattie brings this home in his story Dipak and the Goliaths (Financial Times, Dec 9 - access not restricted).  He personalizes issues by telling them incidentally to the story of Dipak Patel, the Zambian trade minister.

Physical and human infrastructure is limited:

"Foreign Affairs" on Multilateral Trade

Daniel Drezer reports that the magazine Foreign Affairs has published a special issue on multilateral trade - and made it all available on line.  See his post for extracts and links: Everything you always wanted to know about trade but were afraid to ask .

Wal-Mart benefits consumers, especially poor consumers

Say Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag in a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study (Consumer Benefits from Increased Competition in Shopping Outlets: Measuring the Effect of Wal-Mart):

The abstract:

Consumers often benefit from increased competition in differentiated product settings. In this paper we consider consumer benefits from increased competition in a differentiated product setting: the spread of non-traditional retail outlets.

In this paper we estimate consumer benefits from supercenter entry and expansion into markets for food. We estimate a discrete choice model for household shopping choice of supercenters and traditional outlets for food. We have panel data for households so we can follow their shopping patterns over time and allow for a fixed effect in their shopping behavior.

We find the benefits to be substantial, both in terms of food expenditure and in terms of overall consumer expenditure. Low income households benefitthe most.

I've done the division into paragraphs.

The Best Business Blog in Canada

John Palmer's EclectEcon blog (under its old title "Eclectic Econoclast") is running for the title "Best Canadian business blog". 

Voting is not limited to Canadians - you can vote daily through Friday (December 9): 2005 Canadian Blog Awards.

Effects of liberalizing agricultural trade

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has just released a handy survey of economic research on The Effects of Liberalizing World Agricultural Trade: A Survey  (Dec 2005, the author is Bruce Arnold).

Note this right off:

Countries typically adopt trade-distorting agricultural policies—tariffs, tariff-rate quotas, production-distorting subsidies, and export subsidies—to benefit their domestic agricultural producers. In doing so, however, they often impose costs on their consumers (who must pay more for agricultural products subject to tariffs and tariff-rate quotas), domestic taxpayers (who must pay for any subsidies), and competing foreign producers (who lose sales). The costs to domestic consumers and taxpayers alone are usually greater in dollar terms than the benefits to domestic producers. Therefore, eliminating those policies is generally beneficial.

Growing in Africa

Post-war Africa has been the scene of impressive growth episodes.  Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Roy document sixteen of these at the start of a recent article on one of the most impressive:

("Who Can Explain the Mauritian Miracle? Meade, Romer, Sachs, or Rodrik?," from In Search of Prosperity.  Analytic Narratives on Economic Growth, edited by Dani Rodrik.

Revised: "impressive growth episodes" instead of "a lot of impressive growth episodes."    January 4, 2006