The Custom-House

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:

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 .