Economics & Business Archive

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had a pleasant, two-day summit last week in Beijing. The agreeable nature of their public encounter was evident when Hu thanked the Russian government for its assistance to the victims of the May 12 earthquake in southwest China, which may have killed as many as 80,000 people. “Between friends, there can be no other kind of relations,” Medvedev replied, while offering to provide additional help. Their only unpleasant comments were directed at third parties. The two governments expressed resentment of Western criticism regarding their human rights practices and actions abroad. A […]

Earlier this month, Royal Dutch Shell and Spain’s Repsol pulled out of a proposed Iranian natural gas development project that was estimated to be worth over $10 billion. The decision by the two European energy firms to pull out of phase 13 of the South Pars project was seen as a setback for Iran’s efforts to court foreign interest in its energy sector at a time when the Bush administration is actively trying to discourage it. Shell and Repsol executives did not publicly comment on their reasons for pulling out of South Pars. But whether it was due to concerns […]

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov traveled to the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol May 10-11 to mark the 225th anniversary of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. During that weekend, he made several inflammatory comments to the effect that the port and city still legally belong to the Russian Federation. Luzhkov’s remarks have further strained relations between Russia and Ukraine, which also differ on other issues, especially Ukrainian aspirations to join NATO. The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) responded by designating the Moscow mayor persona non grata. The SBU claimed that Luzhkov ignored “a warning regarding the unacceptability of actions harming Ukraine’s national interests […]

An investment bank economist first grouped the nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China together based on two shared characteristics: large populations and rapid economic growth. The so-called BRIC nations had little else in common — they covered the full scale of democratization, with varying degrees of financial transparency and vastly different economies. Yet after Goldman Sachs’ 2001 report that coined the acromym was released, the BRIC nations became inexorably linked, at least in the collective mind of the investment community. Last week, the BRIC nations took their union out of the realm of analyst reports and formed a political […]

HONG KONG — Soaring world rice prices are finally showing real signs of abating, easing worst-case fears that inflation-fueled food shortages could lead to widespread starvation and social unrest. A bumper crop in Pakistan, an improved harvest in Thailand and a boost in exports from Japan resulted in a 14 percent drop in the price of rice over the last five trading days, its biggest fall since July 2004. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), rice prices skyrocketed by 76 percent between December 2007 and April. However, traders said a decision by Islamabad to export 1 million […]

The latest figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute show a precipitous decline in the volume of Russian weapons sales to the Chinese military. Although Beijing remains the single largest recipient of Russian arms, the figures show a 63 percent decrease in the value of major Russian weapons deliveries to China, which is the lowest level in a decade. The decrease contributed to a 29 percent reduction in Russia’s overall export of major conventional weapons systems between 2006 and 2007. In addition, China and Russia have not signed any major new arms contracts in recent years and are […]

In a recent announcement that went virtually unnoticed in the Western media, an official of Saudi Aramco — Saudi Arabia’s national oil company — stated that Saudi Arabia aims to double its oil exports to China from last year’s levels, reaching 1 million barrels per day by 2010. Should this goal be realized, China will soon rival the United States and Japan as one of the top destinations for Saudi petroleum. In addition, the China National Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec) already has an agreement with Iran to buy 250 million tons of liquid natural gas from the country over 30 years, […]

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a curious export phenomenon occurred in the countries of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. In spite of the fact that none of these countries had major domestic mining operations, their exports of copper, gold, diamonds and coltan jumped drastically. Not coincidentally, these were the exact same minerals found in abundance in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the jump in mineral exports coincided perfectly with the invasion of DRC by these three countries. While each country justified its invasion based on security concerns, the United Nations found that the battlefields were […]

In March, India’s Tata Group made headlines with its $2.3 billion acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover (JLR) from Ford, the latest in a series of high-profile mergers and acquisitions in which well-known Western brands such as IBM, Barclays Bank, Tetley Tea and Corus steel have been bought, in part or entirely, by multinational corporations from developing economies. Those with a longer historical view might recall that it was private business — the British East India Company — that imposed imperial control over the “brightest jewel in the empire,” before crown rule was implemented in 1858. With Tata scooping up […]

WEST POINT, New York — It was a decades-old Army tradition that junior officers would eat lunch together every day in Army-run dining halls. There they would trade ideas they’d picked up in their training. But in the last decade, to save money, contractors such as Kellogg, Brown and Root have replaced the old dining halls with civilian-style cafeterias, some boasting big-screen TVs. The officers stopped gathering . . . and stopped talking. That had the effect of isolating young leaders, preventing them from getting answers to life-and-death questions — and from sharing their own answers they might have learned […]