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Sunday, May 31, 2009
10 Most Poisonous Animals in the World
Malay Billionaires
That, however, is almost 29% lower than the US$3.65bil (RM12.84bil) gained last year and it only represented 7% of the entire US$36.41bil (RM127.74bil) accumulated wealth of all the 40 individuals on the list.
Prominent corporate figures Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary and Ambank group chairman Tan Sri Azman Hashim maintained their positions as the top two richest Malay men.
Syed Mokhtar’s assets are worth US$1.1bil (RM3.86bil) while Azman’s assets totalled US$470mil (RM1.65bil).
Three additional Malay magnates entering the list this year are Puncak Niaga Holding Bhd chief executive officer Tan Sri Rozali Ismail at the 31st position with US$130mil (RM456.08mil), Hard Rock Cafe Malaysia Enterprise chairman Tan Sri Syed Yusof Syed Nasir placed 37th with US$100mil (RM350.83mil) followed by Ranhill Bhd chief executive officer Tan Sri Hamdan Moha-mad at No. 38 with US$98mil (RM343.82mil).
Friday, May 29, 2009
A National School System can help realize 1Malaysia
KUALA LUMPUR, May 28 -- For 1Malaysia to succeed, the government needs to streamline the education system by having a national school system to promote national integration, said former Dewan Negara Speaker Tan Sri Michael Chen.
He said through the system, the national language would be the basic language or the medium of instruction to promote nation building, while Mandarin, Tamil and English would be taught as an option.
Chen said the system was similar to the Switzerland education system where parents were given the opportunity to choose the preferred language to be learned by their children, whether Italian, German or English, depending on their needs.
"All schools will have the same system, same finance (financial aid) and the same curriculum from the government," he said at a forum on "1Malaysia" organised by the Malaysian National News Agency (Bernama)'s Centre of Excellence and Taima Journalism Academy, here, Thursday.
Forum moderator and Bernama deputy editor-in-chief Zulkefli Salleh had earlier asked Chen for his opinion on the 1Malaysia concept mooted by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
He said the national school system would enable children of different races to seek education at the same type of school, thus promoting racial integration from an impressionable age.
"This means if the parents want their children to excel in English, Mandarin or Tamil, they can send them to any school they want," said Chen who served under three prime ministers - Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, Tun Hussein Onn and Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
However, he said, this did not mean that vernacular schools would be abolished.
"The vernacular schools will remain but will be using the national curriculum where the national language is a compulsory subject, while the other languages will be taught as an option.
"Through the proposed system, everyone will have an equal platform to get an education, thus eliminating claims of government favouritism towards certain schools when disbursing aid," he added.
-- BERNAMA
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The Two PKR Leaders admitted meeting Aminah
BUKIT MERTAJAM: A PKR supreme council member and a special assistant to a Penang executive councillor have owned up to meeting former party colleague Aminah Abdullah.
Lawyers Cheah Kah Peng and Peter Lim Eng Nam, however, denied any wrongdoing, saying they had met for lunch at Aminah’s house and the atmosphere was jovial and light-hearted.
“I feel sad because she has converted a perfectly bona fide chat into something that has turned ugly,” Cheah told a press conference yesterday.
Aminah created a storm when she claimed that two PKR leaders had offered her the Penang Municipal Council president’s post to withdraw from contesting the Penanti by-election.
She claimed that she was also offered the Penang Deputy Chief Minister I post to rejoin the party if she won.
She also claimed that she would be given RM80,000 as compensation for what she had spent so far in preparation for the May 31 by-election.
Cheah stressed that he and Lim, who is a special assistant to state Agriculture and Agro-Based Industry, Rural Development and Flood Mitigation Committee chairman Law Choo Kiang, went to Aminah’s place on her invitation.
He said they also went “in their own personal capacity” without representing any organisation, including PKR.
Cheah added that Aminah had during their lunch conversation expressed how good it would be to meet old friends and to possibly re-join the party.
“One of the things she implied during our chat was that she might not continue with her potential candidature in the by-election.
“She was inviting us to share our views on this matter. So, we gave her our two cents worth,” he said.
Cheah, who has been in PKR since 1998, said he got to known Aminah and her family a year later.
Lim, who is Batu Kawan PKR division deputy chief, said he got to know her in 2000.
They said they would visit her during Hari Raya and on other festive occasions.
Even after Aminah quit the party in 2007, Cheah said he and Lim kept in contact with her.
He said they attended her daughter’s engagement ceremony in March.
Lim said he was disappointed that Aminah, who had cooked for them, had also quietly recorded their conversation.
“I did not expect to be used this way. I feel sad and very hurt,” he said. The Star
Monday, May 25, 2009
Sultan Selangor safely home from US after heart surgery
SEPANG: Selangor Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who was in the United States for heart surgery, returned home on Monday to a warm welcome.
The private jet touched down at 3.40pm and he walked out with minimal help to greet family members, Raja Muda Perak Raja Dr Nazrin Shah, Selangor Mentri Besar Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim and 250 others at KLIA’s Bunga Raya VIP complex.
Dressed in a brown moleskin jacket over a denim shirt, black trousers and sneakers, the Sultan had some tea before going home.
His personal physician Datuk Dr Anuar Masduki said the heart surgery on May 2 involved three procedures over nine hours and went smoothly with the Sultan making satisfactory recovery.
Followup treatment would be done at Sime Darby SJMC, he said. The Star
Friday, May 22, 2009
The Chinese and Arabs are buying huge farmland abroad
Rich food importers are acquiring vast tracts of poor countries' farmland. Is this beneficial foreign investment or neocolonialism?
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EARLY this year, the king of Saudi Arabia held a ceremony to receive a batch of rice, part of the first crop to be produced under something called the King Abdullah initiative for Saudi agricultural investment abroad. It had been grown in Ethiopia, where a group of Saudi investors is spending $100m to raise wheat, barley and rice on land leased to them by the government. The investors are exempt from tax in the first few years and may export the entire crop back home. Meanwhile, the World Food Programme (WFP) is spending almost the same amount as the investors ($116m) providing 230,000 tonnes of food aid between 2007 and 2011 to the 4.6m Ethiopians it thinks are threatened by hunger and malnutrition.
The Saudi programme is an example of a powerful but contentious trend sweeping the poor world: countries that export capital but import food are outsourcing farm production to countries that need capital but have land to spare. Instead of buying food on world markets, governments and politically influential companies buy or lease farmland abroad, grow the crops there and ship them back.
Supporters of such deals argue they provide new seeds, techniques and money for agriculture, the basis of poor countries’ economies, which has suffered from disastrous underinvestment for decades. Opponents call the projects “land grabs”, claim the farms will be insulated from host countries and argue that poor farmers will be pushed off land they have farmed for generations. What is unquestionable is that the projects are large, risky and controversial. In Madagascar they contributed to the overthrow of a government.
Investment in foreign farms is not new. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 foreign investors rushed to snap up former state-owned and collective farms. Before that there were famous—indeed notorious—examples of European attempts to set up flagship farms in ex-colonies, such as Britain’s ill-fated attempt in the 1940s to turn tracts of southern Tanzania into a limitless peanut prairie (the southern Tanganyika groundnut scheme). The phrase “banana republics” originally referred to servile dictatorships running countries whose economies were dominated by foreign-owned fruit plantations.
But several things about the current fashion are new. One is its scale. A big land deal used to be around 100,000 hectares (240,000 acres). Now the largest ones are many times that. In Sudan alone, South Korea has signed deals for 690,000 hectares, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for 400,000 hectares and Egypt has secured a similar deal to grow wheat. An official in Sudan says his country will set aside for Arab governments roughly a fifth of the cultivated land in Africa’s largest country (traditionally known as the breadbasket of the Arab world).
It is not just Gulf states that are buying up farms. China secured the right to grow palm oil for biofuel on 2.8m hectares of Congo, which would be the world’s largest palm-oil plantation. It is negotiating to grow biofuels on 2m hectares in Zambia, a country where Chinese farms are said to produce a quarter of the eggs sold in the capital, Lusaka. According to one estimate, 1m Chinese farm labourers will be working in Africa this year, a number one African leader called “catastrophic”.
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In total, says the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a think-tank in Washington, DC, between 15m and 20m hectares of farmland in poor countries have been subject to transactions or talks involving foreigners since 2006. That is the size of France’s agricultural land and a fifth of all the farmland of the European Union. Putting a conservative figure on the land’s value, IFPRI calculates that these deals are worth $20 billion-30 billion—at least ten times as much as an emergency package for agriculture recently announced by the World Bank and 15 times more than the American administration’s new fund for food security.
If you assume that the land, when developed, will yield roughly two tonnes of grain per hectare (which would be twice the African average but less than that of Europe, America and rich Asia), it would produce 30m-40m tonnes of cereals a year. That is a significant share of the world’s cereals trade of roughly 220m tonnes a year and would be more than enough to meet the appetite for grain imports in the Middle East. What is happening, argues Richard Ferguson, an analyst for Nomura Securities, is outsourcing’s third great wave, following that of manufacturing in the 1980s and information technology in the 1990s.
Several other features of the process are also new. Unlike older projects, the current ones mostly focus on staples or biofuels—wheat, maize, rice, jatropha. The Egyptian and South Korean projects in Sudan are both for wheat. Libya has leased 100,000 hectares of Mali for rice. By contrast, farming ventures used to be about cash crops (coffee, tea, sugar or bananas).
In the past, foreign farming investment was usually private: private investors bought land from private owners. That process has continued, particularly the snapping up of privatised land in the former Soviet Union. Last year a Swedish company called Alpcot Agro bought 128,000 hectares of Russia; South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries paid $6.5m for a majority stake in Khorol Zerno, a company that owns 10,000 hectares of eastern Siberia; Morgan Stanley, an American bank, bought 40,000 hectares of Ukraine in March. And Pava, the first Russian grain processor to be floated, plans to sell 40% of its landowning division to investors in the Gulf, giving them access to 500,000 hectares. Thanks to rising land values and (until recently) rising commodity prices, farming has been one of the few sectors to remain attractive during the credit crunch.
But the majority of the new deals have been government-to-government. The acquirers are foreign regimes or companies closely tied to them, such as sovereign-wealth funds. The sellers are host governments dispensing land they nominally own. Cambodia leased land to Kuwaiti investors last August after mutual prime-ministerial visits. Last year the Sudanese and Qatari governments set up a joint venture to invest in Sudan; the Kuwaiti and Sudanese ministers of finance signed what they called a “giant” strategic partnership for the same purpose. Saudi officials have visited Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, South Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam to talk about land acquisitions. The balance between the state and private sectors is heavily skewed in favour of the state.
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But where’s it going? |
That makes the current round of land acquisitions different in kind, as well as scale. When private investors put money into cash crops, they tended to boost world trade and international economic activity. At least in theory, they encourage farmers to switch from growing subsistence rice to harvesting rubber for cash; from growing rubber to working in a tyre factory; and from making tyres to making cars. But now, governments are investing in staple crops in a protectionist impulse to circumvent world markets. Why are they doing this and what are the effects?
“Food security is not just an issue for Abu Dhabi or the United Arab Emirates,” says Eissa Mohamed Al Suwaidi of the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development. “Recently, it has become a hot issue everywhere.” He is confirming what everyone knows: the land deals are responses to food-market turmoil.
Between the start of 2007 and the middle of 2008, The Economist index of food prices rose 78%; soyabeans and rice both soared more than 130%. Meanwhile, food stocks slumped. In the five largest grain exporters, the ratio of stocks to consumption-plus-exports fell to 11% in 2009, below its ten-year average of over 15%.
It was not just the price rises that rattled food importers. Some of them, especially Arab ones, are oil exporters and their revenues were booming. They could afford higher prices. What they could not afford, though, was the spate of trade bans that grain exporters large and small imposed to keep food prices from rising at home. Ukraine and India banned wheat exports for a while; Argentina increased export taxes sharply. Actions like these raised fears in the Gulf that one day importers might not be able to secure enough supplies at any price. They persuaded many food-importing countries that they could no longer rely on world food markets for basic supplies.
What to do instead? The obvious answer was: invest in domestic farming and build up your own stocks. Countries that could, did so. Spending on rural infrastructure is the third largest item in China’s 4 trillion yuan ($585 billion) economic-stimulus plan. European leaders said high prices showed the protectionist common agricultural policy needed to be preserved.
But the richest oil exporters did not have that option. Saudi Arabia made itself self-sufficient in wheat by lavishing untold quantities of money to create grain fields in the desert. In 2008, however, it abandoned its self-sufficiency programme when it discovered that farmers were burning their way through water—which comes from a non-replenishable aquifer below the Arabian sands—at a catastrophic rate. But if Saudi Arabia was growing more food than it should, and if it did not trust world markets, the only solution was to find farmland abroad. Other Gulf states followed suit. So did China and South Korea, countries not usually associated with water shortages but where agricultural expansion has been draining dry breadbasket areas like the North China Plain.
Water shortages have provided the hidden impulse behind many land deals. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, claims: “The purchases weren’t about land, but water. For with the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal.” He calls it “the great water grab”.
For the countries seeking land (or water), the attractions are clear. But what of those selling or leasing their resources? They are keen enough, even sending road shows to the Gulf. Sudan is letting investors export 70% of the crop, even though it is the recipient of the largest food-aid operation in the world. Pakistan is offering half a million hectares of land and promising Gulf investors that if they sign up, it will hire a security force of 100,000 to protect the assets. For poor countries land deals offer a chance to reverse decades of underinvestment in agriculture.
In developing countries as a whole, the average growth in cereal yields has fallen from 3-6% a year in the 1960s to 1-2% a year now, says the World Bank. This reflects, among other things, a decline in public investment. In the 14 countries that depend most on farming, public spending on agriculture almost halved as a share of total public spending between 1980 and 2004. Foreign aid to farming also halved in real terms over the same period. Farming has done worst of all in Africa, where most of the largest land deals are taking place. There, agricultural output per farmworker was the lowest in the world during 1980-2004, growing by less than 1% a year, compared with over 3% a year in East Asia and the Middle East.
The investors promise a lot: new seeds, new marketing, better jobs, schools, clinics and roads. An official at Sudan’s agriculture ministry said investment in farming in his country by Arab states would rise almost tenfold from $700m in 2007 to a forecast $7.5 billion in 2010. That would be half of all investment in the country, he said. In 2007, agricultural investment had been a mere 3% of the total.
China has set up 11 research stations in Africa to boost yields of staple crops. That is needed: sub-Saharan Africa spends much less than India on agricultural R&D. Even without new seed varieties or fancy drip-feed irrigation, investment should help farmers. One of the biggest constraints on African farming is the inability to borrow money for fertilisers. If new landlords just helped farmers get credit, it would make a big difference.
Yet a certain wariness ought to be maintained. Farming in Africa is hard. It breaks backs and the naive ambitions of outsiders. To judge by the scale of projects so far, the new investors seem to be pinning their hopes on creating technologically sophisticated large farms. These have worked well in Europe and the Americas. Paul Collier of Oxford University says Africa needs them too: “African peasant farming has fallen further and further behind the advancing commercial productivity frontier.”
But alas, the record of large farms in Africa has been poor. Those that have done best are now moving away from staple crops to higher-value things such as flowers and fruit. Mechanised farming schemes that grow staples have often ended with abandoned machinery rusting in the returning bush. Moreover, large farmers are often well-connected and spend more time lobbying for special favours than doing the hard work.
Politics of a different sort poses more immediate problems. In Madagascar this year popular hostility to a deal that would have leased 1.3m hectares—half the island’s arable land—to Daewoo Logistics, a South Korean company, fanned the flames of opposition and contributed to the president’s overthrow. In Zambia, the main opposition leader has come out against China’s proposed 2m-hectare biofuels project—and China has threatened to pull out of Zambia if he ever came to power. The chairman of Cambodia’s parliamentary foreign-affairs committee complains that no one has any idea what terms are being offered to Kuwait to lease rice paddies.
The head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, dubs some projects “neocolonialist”. Bowing before the wind, a Chinese agriculture-ministry official insists his country is not seeking to buy land abroad, though he adds that “if there are requests, we would like to assist.” (On one estimate, China has signed 30 agricultural co-operation deals covering over 2m hectares since 2007.)
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Chinese neocolonialism going down well with Mozambique’s elite |
Objections to the projects are not simply Luddite. The deals produce losers as well as winners. Host governments usually claim that the land they are offering for sale or lease is vacant or owned by the state. That is not always true. “Empty” land often supports herders who graze animals on it. Land may be formally owned by the state but contain people who have farmed it for generations. Their customary rights are recognised locally, but often not accepted in law, or in the terms of a foreign-investment deal.
So the deals frequently set one group against another in host countries and the question is how those conflicts get resolved. “If you want people to invest in your country, you have to make concessions,” says the spokesman for Kenya’s president. (He was referring to a deal in which Qatar offered to build a new port in exchange for growing crops in the Tana river delta, something opposed by local farmers and conservationists.) The trouble is that the concessions are frequently one-sided. Customary owners are thrown off land they think of as theirs. Smallholders have their arms twisted to sign away their rights for a pittance.
This is worrying in itself. And it leads to so much local opposition that some deals cannot be implemented. The Saudi Binladin Group put on hold a $4.3 billion project to grow rice on 500,000 hectares of Indonesia. China postponed a 1.2m hectare deal in the Philippines.
Joachim von Braun, the head of IFPRI, argues that the best way to resolve the conflicts and create “a win-win” is for foreign investors to sign a code of conduct to improve the terms of the deals for locals. Various international bodies have been working on their versions of such a code, including the African Union, which is due to ratify one at a summit in July.
Good practice would mean respecting customary rights; sharing benefits among locals (ie, not just bringing in your own workers), increasing transparency (current deals are shrouded in secrecy) and abiding by national trade policies (which means not exporting if the host country is suffering a famine). These sound well and good. But Sudan and Ethiopia have famines now: should they be declining to sign land deals altogether? Many of the worst abuses are committed by the foreign investors’ local partners: will they be restrained by some international code?
There are plenty of reasons for scepticism about these deals. If they manage to reverse the long decline of farming in poor countries, they will have justified themselves. But like any big farming venture, they will take years to reveal their full impact. For the moment, the right response is to defer judgment and keep a watchful, hopeful but wary eye on their progress. The Economist
The Mandailing Story
The Mandailing or often called as "The Mandailing Batak" is a traditional cultural group in Southeast Asia. They are found mainly in the northern section of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, the Mandailings are considered as a part of the Batak people.
They came under the influence of the Kaum paderi who ruled the Minangkabau of Tanah Datar. As a result, the Mandailing were influenced by Muslim culture and converted to Islam. Previous to their conversion, they practised Hinduism and Parmalim (Batak native religion).
There are also a group of Mandailing in Malaysia, especially in the states of Selangor and Perak but they refuse to be considered as a part of Batak people.
The etymology of 'Mandailing' is said to be a compounding of the words manda, meaning 'mother', and ilang, meaning 'lost'. Thus, the name is said to mean 'lost mother'.
Some research has suggested that the Mandailing are the descendants of the Toba Batak, who migrated to the south centuries before the coming of the Portuguese and Dutch colonisation of Sumatra.
There they converted to Islam and intermarried with Minangkabau and the Malay peoples. Mandailing society is patriarchal, employing family names, or marga, in the same manner as the Toba Batak.
The same marga can be found, such as Lubis, Nasution, Siregar, Hasibuan, Harahap, Dalimunthe (originally from Munthe), Matondang, Rangkuti, Parinduri, Pulungan, Rambe, Daulae(y), Pohan, Batubara (not to be confused with the Batu Bara people from the east coast of Sumatra), Barus and Hutajulu. They are closely related to the Angkola, who are mixed between Muslim and Christian adherents.
'Mandailing' is the name of region (Luat Mandailing) which is now almost in Mandailing Natal Regency in North Sumatra Province. The first group who came to this region were the Lubis and Nasution later followed by the Siregar, Harahap and so forth. These groups migrated from the northern region, which now belongs to North Tapanuli Regency and Tobasa Regency. One of these groups, the Harahap, left, which makes their identification to the region difficult.
Matondang, Rangkuti and Parinduri are the local groups of Luat Mandailing. Harahap and Siregar dwell almost in Luat Angkola, which now belongs to South Tapanuli Regency, situated between Mandailing-Natal Regency and North Tapanuli Regency.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Barack Obama must just not scold Israel's leader but also promote his own plan soon
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FOR the first time in many years, an Israeli government is scared stiff that an American administration may squeeze it until its pips squeak. That is surely a good thing, if it makes the Israelis more amenable to giving the Palestinians the fair deal—in essence, a proper state of their own—that might bring peace to the two peoples and to the wider region of the Middle East. So when Barack Obama meets Binyamin Netanyahu in the White House on May 18th, he must be tough with him.
Mr Netanyahu refuses publicly to accept the notion of two states. He seems to want to continue to squeeze the Gaza Strip until its elected government, run by the Islamist movement, Hamas, is toppled. He says he will not give Syria back the Golan Heights, which Israel conquered in 1967. He now adds a demand that the Palestinians should not just recognise Israel as a country but as a specifically Jewish state. He refuses to freeze the growth of Jewish settlements that continue to bite into what is left of a barely contiguous Palestinian state on the West Bank. And, most pressingly, he seeks to link peace with the Palestinians to a prior deal between the West and Iran to ensure that the Islamic Republic is prevented from having a nuclear bomb. His stance on these issues makes him appear an unpromising partner in negotiation; but much the same was said of Menachem Begin, whom the Americans persuaded to make peace with Egypt 30 years ago, so it’s certainly worth Mr Obama’s while to put some political capital into budging him.
Mr Obama must tell Mr Netanyahu that he is flat wrong on all those counts. No more settlements can be built or expanded—on pain of a reduction in American aid. On Iran, Mr Netanyahu’s logic is back-to-front. For sure, sensible leaders the world over, including Arab ones, want Iran to forgo the bomb. But how much easier it would be to persuade the Iranians to drop their ambitions if they were unable to invoke the unresolved conflict over Israel as part of a holy nuclear cause.
It is not just for the Palestinians’ sake that Mr Obama needs to take a tough line. Being too kind to the Israelis, as American administrations have been in the past, does them no favour in the long run either. Israel’s long-term security can be ensured only by America cajoling and even threatening its leaders in the hope that they will accept that the Israeli state’s safety depends overwhelmingly on the viability of a Palestinian one.
Mr Netanyahu does, however, have one good question to pose to the American administration. Who would govern the Palestinian state the world wants him to create in the West Bank and Gaza? Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party run the West Bank under Israeli supervision but are chronically weak. Hamas is strong. Both movements say that Israel must withdraw from every inch of land occupied in 1967 and accept back to what is now the Jewish state all the Arab refugees who fled more than 60 years ago. But unlike Fatah, which has explicitly accepted the idea of two states, Hamas, while groping towards a de facto acceptance of Israel, has yet to renounce its desire eventually to liberate all of Palestine from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.
So far Mr Obama has held his cards to his chest. But if he is to push Israel into concessions he needs to answer the Hamas conundrum. Unlike George Bush’s team, Mr Obama’s has endorsed the idea of a Palestinian government that would include Hamas and so talk with more authority to the Israelis, making any agreement more likely to stick. The snag is that the two halves of the Palestinian movement are at daggers’ drawn and have fluffed repeated opportunities to reconcile.
The chances are that Mr Netanyahu’s rendezvous at the White House will not end in a public fracas. The Israeli leader is too clever for that, and shouting in public is not Mr Obama’s style. More likely, the pair will frankly acknowledge differences. Mr Netanyahu is a practised opportunist—and may indeed edge towards an acceptance of the two-state idea over time. After all, he says he accepts Mr Bush’s “road map” that led nowhere but clearly affirmed a two-state solution.
Still, if the meeting does end in a stalemate, it will not be enough merely for Mr Obama to mutter doleful thoughts about reassessing America’s special relations with Israel—and then back off. Former administrations told the Israelis and Palestinians that, in the end, it was for the two sides to negotiate peace. It is now plain that this approach does not work. America too needs to be deeply involved from start to finish.
Jordan’s King Abdullah, reasserting the Arab peace initiative of 2002, has boldly called for all Muslim governments to state clearly that they would accept Israel. They must make Hamas do so too. Next month Mr Obama goes to Egypt on his first presidential visit to an Arab country. That would be the perfect moment to unveil his detailed plan for peace, along with a promise that under his administration America intends at last to implement the two-state vision, not just talk about it. The Economist
Enhance, not review language switch
| M Bakri Musa |
Minister of Education Muhyiddin Yassin is doing our nation a great disservice in further delaying the critical decision on the teaching of science and mathematics in English (TSME, or its Malay acronym, PPSMI – Pengajaran dan Pembelajaran Sains dan Matematik Dalam Bahasa Inggeris) in our schools. His indecision merely compounds the uncertainty, especially among educators, parents and students. What he should be doing instead is to explore ways of enhancing the implementation of the policy, not review it. He should be focusing on finding ways to get more competent teachers, explore innovative teaching techniques, and provide inexpensive textbooks.He should also be busy eliminating such expensive but ineffective teaching gimmicks as the “computerized teaching modules” with their laptops and LCDs that our teachers are unable to handle. Those machines are now either stolen or crashed because of viruses and dust. The conditions of our students today have not changed from 2003 when the policy was first introduced. If any they are worse. Whatever the rationale was for adopting the policy back in 2003, it is still very much valid today. Today's many critics of the policy are latecomers. Where were they when the policy was first mooted six years ago? These critics have yet to answer the basic question on whether the policy itself is flawed or that the deficiencies are with its implementation. They are unable to answer this important question as they are entirely confused over the issue. Their opposition is based more on emotions rather than rational thinking. Laureates' misguided concerns Consider the joint statement of our five living National Laureates in Literature. First, the facts they cited were clearly erroneous. Stating that most Nobel Prize winners are from non-English-speaking countries is not only incorrect but missed the essential point that most of those luminaries are English literate. Similarly our National Laureates’ plea that we should emulate the Scandinavian countries missed the important point that their students and citizens are all fluently bilingual if not multilingual, with English being the most common second language. Indeed we should emulate the Scandinavian countries and ensure that our students are truly bilingual. The Laureates’s concerns are grossly misguided. No one is questioning the status of the Malay language, or its importance in nation building. We all subscribe to that. It is unclear from their statement whether they are against our students learning a second language or against English as that second language. They went on to make the totally irrelevant point that Mandarin would soon replace English as the most widely spoken language. Having made that observation, they failed to follow up on it. That is, even the Chinese government is now encouraging, no, forcing their students to learn English.  These laureates and other critics missed the essence of the current policy, which is to enhance our students’ ability to read and understand English. It is not the policy’s intention that we should learn English at the expense of Malay. In short, the policy aims to expand our students’ intellectual horizon, not curtail it.The laureates' muddled thinking only produces only muddled conclusions. In truth, it is too early to pass any judgment on the wisdom of the policy. Any policy, especially one pertaining to education and social matters, takes time to discern its effects. To evaluate this policy credibly, one would need to let at least three to five cohorts of students finish the program. Meaning, a time period of about 15 years! Consider that we are only now recognizing the damaging effects of our educational reforms that were introduced back in the 1970s! Yet we have “researchers” from the Universiti Perguruan Sultan Idris (UPSI) confidently declaring the policy “ineffective” barely four years after the policy was implemented. Earlier, just a few months after the policy’s adoption, a Ministry of Education’s “study” pronounced the remarkable “improvement” in test scores of our students taught under the new programme. Who do these folks think they are kidding? I could not get a copy of the Ministry’s paper, but I have the UPSI professors’. Suffice to say that it would never appear in the pages of refereed journals, except perhaps the Ulu Langat Bulletin of Education. Frankly if I had been an academic, I would be embarrassed to append my name to such a shoddy paper. This policy would not have triggered its many belated critics had the leadership showed more resolve and greater commitment. They became vociferous and assertive only when former Minister of Education Hishamuddin Hussein misguidedly re-opened the issue. Why he did it is best left for him to answer, but I venture that the then looming Umno leadership contest had plenty to do with it. Old Hishamuddin needed to display his nationalistic manhood once again, especially after the spectacular flop of his earlier unsheathing the keris. Flawed implementation I have not seen any change in the Ministry of Education operations since or in response to the adoption of the policy. I would have thought that at least there would be a dozen English-medium teachers’ training colleges by now to provide for the necessary trained teachers. Likewise our universities should be expanding the number of classes in science and mathematics taught in English so there would be an ample supply of graduate teachers competent to implement the new policy. Similarly, the ministry should have by now commissioned textbook writers and publishers. Failing that, I would have expected these officials to be contracting with established foreign publishers to buy their texts. The fact that none of these measures have been undertaken reflects incompetence or lack of commitment to the new policy, or both. The fault then lies not with the policy but with those entrusted with the awesome responsibilities of carrying it out.  Those Malay language nationalists and other strident critics of TSME fail to recognise one glaring reality. That is, our current educational policy is failing our students and our nation. Those who can or have other options for their children have already abandoned our system. We see this especially among the non-Malays. Increasingly, more and more Malays are also following suit. This leaves those poor village folks who have no other choice; they are trapped in the current system. And they are almost all Malays. They are the ones left out, victimised by their own kind, the language nationalists on one side and the incompetent education bureaucrats on the other.If not for the public sector and the various GLCs acting as employers of last resort, graduates of our current educational system would simply be without jobs. There is however, a limit to the government’s capacity as employer, and we are already way beyond that point. For a society to advance, it must first come to terms with itself. A major part of that exercise involves recognising our own weaknesses, for unless we acknowledge that we cannot even begin to overcome them. Malays must recognise that a major problem with our community is that we are not competitive, not even in our native land let alone the global arena. A major contributor to this sorry state of affairs is our defective education system that continues to produce graduates who have abysmal language and mathematical skills, as well as being science illiterate. 'Zero-sum mentality' We have completely indoctrinated our young and ourselves with a "zero-sum mentality," that learning another language could only come at the expense of our own. Worse, we have gone further and mentally programmed our young that fluency in another language is not an asset but an expression of hatred for one’s own. In so doing, we exposed our own collective limited intellectual capacity, and an inability to expand it. That is the sorry part.  We are only deluding our young by appealing to their base emotions. Exhortations of Ketuanan Melayu will never make them competitive or guarantee them a place under the sun, not even the sun in our Tanah Melayu. Unless we are competitive, we cannot survive, let alone be Tuan. On the other hand when we are competitive, we would be Tuan even in lands other than Tanah Melayu.The other part of the exercise involves our willingness to learn from others, especially those more advanced. The ancient Arabs learned from the Greeks, the medieval Europeans from the Arabs, and the Japanese from the West. It saddens me that our luminaries by their actions and words are sending precisely the wrong message to our young. That is, we have nothing to learn from others. Our political leaders are too preoccupied with their own short-term political survival and gamesmanship instead of leading the way forward. Unfortunately our children’s children will bear the burden of our current leaders’ stupidities. Malaysiakini |
Sunday, May 17, 2009
No Anifah apology for Anwar
| May 17, 09 5:42pm Malaysiakini |
Foreign Minister Anifah Aman said today he will not apologise to opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim for claiming that he had been offered the deputy prime minister’s post as an incentive to join Anwar’s Pakatan Rakyat.  Anifah said this at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport upon his return from the United States, adding that he had no time to worry about Anwar or his threat to file a defamation suit against him.On Thursday, at a joint press conference after meeting with United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington DC, Anifah was asked about the fresh sodomy charge against Anwar, which the US State Department had earlier said was politically motivated. As part of his response, Anifah was also reported to have said: “And I was personally offered to jump into the opposition and offered a very lucrative position - it’s like a deputy prime minister (post in the Pakatan government). And this is not known to the world at large.”  Anwar has denied making such an offer and plans a defamation (libel) suit against Anifah.Lawyer Sankara Nair, who is representing the opposition leader said: “At no time were any such offers made to Anifah by Anwar. The allegations made in the said story are baseless, untrue, defamatory and made with malicious intent to tarnish Anwar’s reputation.” “We have instructions to file a defamation (libel) suit against Anifah if he does not retract and make an apology within 24 hours,” said Sankara on Saturday. |
Friday, May 15, 2009
The internet is killing newspapers and giving birth to a new sort of news business
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THE race is crowded, but San Francisco stands a fair chance of becoming the first major American city without a daily newspaper. The San Francisco Chronicle, founded in 1865, is trimming its already pared-down staff in an attempt to avoid closure. And if it does disappear? “People under 30 won’t even notice,” says Gavin Newsom, the city’s mayor.
Most industries are suffering at present, but few are doing as badly as the news business. Things are worst in America, where many papers used to enjoy comfortable local monopolies, but in Britain around 70 local papers have shut down since the beginning of 2008. Among the survivors, advertising is dwindling, editorial is thinning and journalists are being laid off. The crisis is most advanced in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but it is happening all over the rich world: the impact of the internet, exacerbated by the advertising slump, is killing the daily newspaper.
Does that matter? Technological change has destroyed all sorts of once-popular products, from the handloom to the Walkman, and the world has mostly been better for it. But news is not just a product: the press is the fourth estate, a pillar of the polity. Journalists investigate and criticise governments, thus helping voters decide whether to keep them or sack them. Autocracies can function perfectly well without news, but democracies cannot. Will the death of the daily newspaper—the main source of information for most educated people for at least the past century, the scourge of corrupt politicians, the conscience of nations—damage democracy?
A newspaper is a package of content—politics, sport, share prices, weather and so forth—which exists to attract eyeballs to advertisements. Unfortunately for newspapers, the internet is better at delivering some of that than paper is. It is easier to search through job and property listings on the web, so classified advertising and its associated revenue is migrating onto the internet. Some content, too, works better on the internet—news and share prices can be more frequently updated, weather can be more geographically specific—so readers are migrating too. The package is thus being picked apart.
The newspaper’s decline is both cause and effect of the worrying finding by the Pew Centre that the number of Americans aged 18-24 who got any news at all the previous day has dropped from 34% to 25% over the past ten years. But that figure may be less troubling than it looks. Because newspapers pack together all sorts of different content, many of those who claimed in the past to have seen some news probably did so for a few seconds before turning the page to the sports scores. Acquaintance as shallow as that with the news is probably no great loss to society; Pew surveys of general knowledge suggest that young people are about as well (or badly) informed as they used to be.
And the newspaper companies’ tribulations do not necessarily presage the demise of the news business, for they stem in part from the tumultuous and expensive transition from paper to electronic distribution. News organisations are currently bearing two sets of costs—those of printing and distributing their product for the old world, and providing digital versions for the new—even though they have yet to find a business model that works online.
Up to now, most have been offering their content free online, but that is unsustainable, because there isn’t enough advertising revenue online to pay for it. So either the amount of news produced must shrink, or readers must pay more. Some publications, such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, which has more than 1m online subscribers and has just promised to develop a new system of micropayments for articles, already charge for content. Others will follow: Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, has said he expects his other titles to start charging too. With news available free on Google and Yahoo!, readers may, of course, not be prepared to pay even for deeper or more specialised stuff; but since they do in the paper world, where free-sheets and paid-for publications coexist, there seems no reason why they wouldn’t online.
Better mobile devices may encourage them to do so. Apple’s iPhone is the first reader-friendly mobile phone, and the latest update to its software, due shortly, will enable news providers that currently give away content on the iPhone to start charging for it. Amazon has just unveiled a new, larger version of the Kindle, its e-book reader, better suited to displaying newspapers. Similar devices are available from other firms, with many more on the way. Better technology coupled with new payment systems will not solve the acute problems faced by newspapers today, but should eventually provide new models to enable news to flourish in the digital age.
And already, there are signs that it will (see article). New sources of news are proliferating online. Many, it is true, are unreliable. Most are badly funded. Some are the rantings of deranged extremists. But some—like Muckety, an American site which enriches news stories with interactive maps of the protagonists’ networks of influence, and NightJack, the revealing and depressing blog of an anonymous British policeman, which won the Orwell prize last month—enhance society’s understanding of itself, and could not have existed in the old world.
But the only certainty about the future of news is that it will be different from the past. It will no longer be dominated by a few big titles whose front pages determine the story of the day. Public opinion will, rather, be shaped by thousands of different voices, with as many different focuses and points of view. As a result, people will have less in common to chat about around the water-cooler. Those who are not interested in political or economic news will be less likely to come across it; but those who are will be better equipped to hold their rulers to account. Which is, after all, what society needs news for.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Astronauts plucks Hubble Space Telescope from orbit
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is seen in this March 9, 2002 NASA file photo with the Earth as a backdrop. REUTERS/NASA By Irene Klotz
HOUSTON - Space shuttle astronauts plucked the Hubble Space Telescope from orbit on Wednesday and tucked the observatory into their ship's cargo bay for a long-overdue overhaul.
Speeding through space, commander Scott Altman maneuvered the shuttle Atlantis to within about 35 feet of the telescope as crewmate Megan McArthur used the ship's robot arm to latch on to the telescope at 1:14 p.m. EDT (1714 GMT) as the spacecraft soared far above Australia.
"Houston, Atlantis. Hubble has arrived onboard Atlantis," Altman radioed to Mission Control.
NASA last visited Hubble in 2002 and had planned to return for a fifth servicing call a couple of years later, but the destruction of the shuttle Columbia as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere in 2003 derailed those plans.
The mission was restored after engineers came up with a rescue plan in case Atlantis suffered damage during launch like that blamed for the Columbia disaster, which killed its seven crew members.
A second shuttle is poised for liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in case the astronauts need another ride home, as Atlantis is flying too far from the International Space Station for the crew to seek refuge there in case of an emergency.
Atlantis sustained no serious damage during its launch on Monday. Scratches across four heat shield tiles on the right wing that were discovered during an in-flight inspection on Tuesday are not considered a danger.
NASA said no additional inspections of the area would be needed, freeing the seven-member Atlantis crew to focus on the primary goal of their mission -- fixing up Hubble.
Three of the telescope's five science instruments are broken and it is using its last set of positioning gyroscopes, a backup computer for formatting data to relay to the ground and 19-year-old batteries that can only hold half a charge.
Without an upgrade, NASA would be hard-pressed to justify continuing telescope operations, project scientist David Leckrone said.
Astronauts plan five consecutive days of spacewalks to outfit Hubble with new imagers and other gear and to fix two of its broken cameras. Telescope operators also hope to resurrect an infrared camera after Hubble is released back into orbit.
If the refurbishments are successful, Hubble should be back in service in two to three months with an observation program even more ambitious than what it has accomplished since its debut in 1990.
Hubble has provided evidence of how planets are formed and contributed to the still-unexplained realization that the universe is expanding at an increasingly faster rate.
It also gave astronomers a front-row seat for watching a comet smash into Jupiter and made the first measurements of gases in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system.
NASA hopes the improvements will keep Hubble operational until at least 2014 so it can work in tandem with its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope.
The first spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday.
© REUTERS 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Ganesan Says he is the legitimate Speaker
| Andrew Ong | May 13, 09 5:55pm |
In a proceeding that would have put wrestling bouts to shame, MIC's R Ganesan was elected as the new speaker for the Perak state legislative assembly.  At a press conference in Ipoh today, the 57-year-old former state assemblyperson explained why he is the legitimate speaker and sheds a little light on the dark episode of May 7, when the state assembly convened for the first time since Barisan Nasional seized control of the state.According to him, Pakatan Rakyat Speaker V Sivakumar, who was literally dragged out of the House, could not chair the motion to sack him (Sivakumar) because he was an interested party. "We brought a motion to remove him. When we do that, he cannot table the motion because he is an interested party. It is against the rules of natural justice," he said. Ganesan said deputy speaker Hee Yit Fong then took over the proceedings from Sivakumar and allowed the motion moved by BN Menteri Besar Zambry Abdul Kadir to be passed, based on Article 36A of the state constitution. "Naturally, the deputy speaker has to take the place of the speaker. This has been done correctly," he said, adding that the motion was seconded by Hamidah Osman (Sungai Rapat) and supported by 29 state assemblypersons. This was followed by the taking of oath and donning of the speaker's regalia, said the two-term (1999-2008) Sungkai assemblyperson. "So, 31 (state assemblypersons) elected me. How can you say I'm not the legitimate speaker? It was legally done. I have no doubts about it," said the lawyer by training. 'Sivakumar ignored my warnings' On Sivakumar's unceremonious ejection, Ganesan said he sought the help of the police to remove the Pakatan speaker after he refused to budge from the coveted seat. He said that he had given Sivakumar ample warning before asking the sargent-at-arms to take action. But when the sargent-at-arms was unable to break the Pakatan state reps' human shield around Sivakumar, the police were called after Ganesan invoked his "residual powers" under Standing Order 90. "Strangers can be allowed in the house. The Standing Orders (even) allow me let them speak during debates," he said. |
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Khir Toyo faces suspension
By V Shankar Ganesh
SHAH ALAM, Tues:Former Selangor Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Dr Mohd Khir Toyo may be suspended without pay as a state assemblymen for breaking the assembly’s rules.
Dr Khir and the assemblymen faced the committee for about 30 minutes this morning to answer the charges against them.
The other assemblymen are Datuk Warno Dogol ( Sabak), Mohd Isa Abu Kasim (Batang Kali), Datuk Marsum Paing (Dengkil) and Datuk Mohamed Idris Abu Bakar (Hulu Bernam).
The five came with a team of seven lawyers, who were allowed to accompany them in the closed-door hearing.
Among the charges Dr Khir faced are disrespecting the Select Committee on Competency, Accountability and Transparency by not attending its hearing and questioning its validity.
The other assemblymen are accused of issuing statements criticising the committee.
Teng said the committee would now deliberate on the matter and a decision would be reached by next Tuesday, and it would be tabled for approval in the next State assembly sitting.
He said among the punishments that can be meted out if they were found guilty were suspension without pay, a warning or asking them to apologise to the House.
He said the charges against the five were brought to the committee under Section 70 of the Standing Orders.
On whether there was a conflict of interest as he sat in both committees, Teng said as the Speaker, he had been vested with a lot of power.
“I can punish anyone. I can be the complainant, the prosecutor and also the judge in this case. All this is allowed according to the law.”
However, he said they could appeal any decision by moving a motion for review in the assembly and the Speaker had to allow it.
Teng said a police report had also been lodged against Dr Khir wife, Datin Seri Zaharah Kechik for not attending the committee’s hearing.
He said police can act against her under the Contempt of House Enactment 2008, which provides a jail sentence up to three years or RM10,000 fine.
Warno Dogol is one of two BN lawmakers in the privilege committee, but he will not be allowed to exercise his right to vote in this case.
The other is Kuala Kubu Baharu assemblyman Wong Koon Mun.
The other members are speaker Teng Chang Khim, deputy speaker Haniza Mohamed Talha, Subang Jaya assemblyman Hannah Yeoh, Rawang assemblyman Gan Peh Nei and Bangi Assemblyman Dr Shafie Abu Bakar.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Perak MB claims unfair reporting by media
Perak Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir today expressed regret over what he claimed as unfair reporting by some local media with regard to the ruckus at the Perak State Assembly sitting on Thursday.
"Some pictures published, portrayed as if Barisan Nasional (BN) was responsible to start the ruckus...if the media did not support BN, it is okay but reports must be fair. We are not happy with reports of some media," he told reporters after a meet-the-people session at Changkat Jering here today.
Dr Zambry said the fiasco only started when the opposition crossed over to the section where BN representatives were seated, when he tabled a motion.
"Who started the ruckus?...it was they (opposition) who initially attacked us and that was an irresponsible and uncivilized action," he said.
Asked if any action would be taken against such media, Dr Zambry said the Perak state government respected press freedom and would not restrict or bar any media.
"We are not going to impose any restriction like what Nizar (former Perak MB) did to Utusan Malaysia or what happened in Penang when the New Straits Times was barred," he said.
The fiasco caused the first session of the second term of the assembly which was opened by the Regent of Perak, Raja Dr Nazrin Shah, to be delayed by six hours.
The commotion started with a motion to remove V. Sivakumar, from DAP, as State Assembly Speaker, and the appointment of Datuk R. Ganesan, from MIC, as the new Speaker. - Bernama
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Ministry awaiting ILO's risk assessment report on Retrenchment Fund
He said once the assessment report was completed, his ministry would forward a proposal on the fund to the Cabinet for its further action.
"The ministry asked the ILO, which has the actuarial experts on this, to conduct a study based on the situation in our country and recommend a suitable system for the fund.
"We are open on this, if what the ILO suggests meets our needs and can be implemented, the government is willing to go ahead with it," he told reporters after attending the Titiwangsa MIC's annual delegates meeting here today.
He said this when asked to comment on the announcement by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak recently that the government would be adopting two specific measures for the benefit of workers as a result of the global economic crisis.
They were the setting up of the Retrenched Workers Fund to assist workers that were laid off and as a pension scheme for private sector workers for social security during their old age.
One the pension scheme, Subramaniam said his ministry was holding discussions with the relevant parties to realise it.
On other matters, he said he welcomed the announcement by Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein yesterday that 13 Internal Security Act detainees, including three members of the outlawed Hindu Rights Action Force, would be released soon.
Friday, May 8, 2009
A new pecking order in Europe's balance of economic power but don't expect it to last for long
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FOR years leaders in continental Europe have been told by the Americans, the British and even this newspaper that their economies are sclerotic, overregulated and too state-dominated, and that to prosper in true Anglo-Saxon style they need a dose of free-market reform. But the global economic meltdown has given them the satisfying triple whammy of exposing the risks in deregulation, giving the state a more important role and (best of all) laying low les Anglo-Saxons.
At the April G20 summit in London, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel stood shoulder-to-shoulder to insist pointedly that this recession was not of their making. Ms Merkel has never been a particular fan of Wall Street. But the rhetorical lead has been grabbed by Mr Sarkozy. The man who once wanted to make Paris more like London now declares laissez-faire a broken system. Jean-Baptiste Colbert once again reigns in Paris. Rather than challenge dirigisme, the British and Americans are busy following it: Gordon Brown is ushering in new financial rules and higher taxes, and Barack Obama is suggesting that America could copy some things from France, to the consternation of his more conservative countrymen. Indeed, a new European pecking order has emerged, with statist France on top, corporatist Germany in the middle and poor old liberal Britain floored.
It is easy to dismiss this as political opportunism. But behind it sits a big debate not only about the direction of the European Union, the world’s biggest economic unit, but also about what sort of economy works best in the modern world. Thirty years after Thatcherism began to work its cruel magic in Britain (see article), continental Europe still tends to favour a larger state, higher taxes, heavier regulation of product and labour markets and a more generous social safety-net than freer-market sorts like the Iron Lady would tolerate. So what is the evidence for the continental model being better?
The continental countries certainly have not escaped the recession: France may be doing a bit better than the world’s other big rich economies this year, but Germany, dragged down by its exporting industries, is doing significantly worse. Yet Mr Obama is right to admit that in some ways continental Europe has coped well. Tough job-protection laws have slowed the rise in unemployment. Generous welfare states have protected those who are always the first to suffer in a downturn from an immediate sharp drop in their incomes and acted as part of the “automatic stabilisers” that expand budget deficits when consumer spending shrinks. In Britain, and to an even greater extent in America, people have felt more exposed.
The downturn has also confirmed that the continental model has some strengths. France has a comparatively efficient public sector, thanks in part to years of investment in better roads, more high-speed trains, nuclear energy and even the restoration of old cathedrals (see article). Nor is it just a matter of pumping in ever more taxpayers’ cash. By any measure France’s health system delivers better value for money than America’s costlier one. Germany has not just looked after its public finances more prudently than others; its export-driven model has forced its companies to hold down costs, making them competitive not only in Europe but also globally. By design as well as luck, much of continental Europe avoided the debt-fuelled housing bubbles that popped spectacularly in Britain and America (though Spain did not, see article).
But will it last? The strengths that have made parts of continental Europe relatively resilient in recession could quickly emerge as weaknesses in a recovery. For there is a price to pay for more security and greater job protection: a slowness to adjust and innovate that means, in the long run, less growth. The rules against firing that stave off sharp rises in unemployment may mean that fewer jobs are created in new industries. Those generous welfare states that preserve people’s incomes tend to blunt incentives to take new work. That large state, which helps to sustain demand in hard times, becomes a drag on dynamic new firms when growth resumes. The latest forecasts are that the United States and Britain could rebound from recession faster than most of continental Europe.
Individual countries have specific failings of their own. Even if it did everything else right, Germany’s overreliance on exports at the expense of consumer spending has proved a grave weakness in a downturn (see article); its banks also look weak. The rate of youth unemployment in France is over 20% and it can be twice as high in the notorious banlieues where Muslim populations are concentrated. Italy and Spain have seen sharp rises in unit labour costs and their labour-productivity growth has stalled or gone into reverse. It may not be long before the fickle Mr Sarkozy is re-reading his Adam Smith.
If there is to be an argument about which model is best, then this newspaper stands firmly on the side of the liberal Anglo-Saxon model—not least because it leaves more power in the hands of individuals rather than the state. But the truth is that the governments on both sides of the intellectual divide could go a long way to making their models work better, without changing their underlying beliefs.
On the continental side, there is nothing especially socially cohesive about labour laws that favour insiders over outsiders, or rules that make the costs of starting a business excessive. Even Colbert might admit that Europe’s tax burdens are too onerous today, particularly since they are likely to have to rise in the future to meet the looming cost of the continent’s rapidly ageing populations.
For the liberals, even if the cycle swings back in their direction, the financial crisis and the recession have shown up defects in the way they too implemented their model. Getting regulation right matters as much as freeing up markets; an efficient public sector may count as much as an efficient private one; public investment in transport, schools and health care, done well, can pay dividends. The pecking order may change, but pragmatism and efficiency will always count.The Economist
