Tianjin, China

Gobi Desert

Altar

Dragon

 
   
 
 

Shrine

 
   
 
 

Tower

Chinatown

 
  Chinatown by Donato Scarano on 500px

Chinatown

 
  Chinatown by Donato Scarano on 500px

Global Manufacturing Ranking

The leaders of global manufacturing are changing rapidly, China, India and Russia are rising and Germany, Japan, UK, and Canada are sliding. The following chart simplifies the evolution of global manufacturing economies over the last four decades.

The tallest building in the world in 90 days

China is trying not only to establish a new world record when it comes to empty buildings but now even with construction time, the tallest building in the world in 90 days.
Just wondering how long it will take to fill it up after construction.

Gizmodo reports China Will Build the Tallest Building In the World in Just 90 Days.

According to its engineers, this will be the tallest skyscraper in the world by the end of March of 2013. Its name is Sky City, and its 2,749 feet (838 meters) distributed in 220 floors will grow in just 90 days in Changsha city, by the Xiangjiang river. Ninety days!

It's not a joke. According to the construction company, the skyscraper will be built in just 90 days at the unbelievable rate of five floors per day.

Pre-Fab Magic

They will be able to achieve this impossibly fast construction rate by using a prefabricated modular technology developed by Broad Sustainable Building, a company that has built 20 tall structures in China so far, including the a 30-story hotel [constructed in 360 hours - see link for time-lapse video].

Record numbers

Unlike the Burj Khalifa, the tower will be mostly habitable. Its final height will be 2,749 feet high (838 meters). Compared that to the Burj's 2,719 feet (829 meters), which include the spire at the top resulting in a total of 163 floors.

Sky City will use an astonishing 220,000 tons of steel. The structure will be able to house 31,400 people of both "high and low income communities". The company says that the residential area will use 83-percent of the building, while the rest will be offices, schools, hospitals, shops and restaurants. People will move up and down using 104 high speed elevators.

The record figures don't stop there: in addition to the 90-day construction time—as opposed to the 210 days initially reported by the Chinese media—the company claims it will cost $1,500 per square meter as opposed to the Burj's $15,000 per square meter, all thanks to the prefab technology.

They also claim it will be able to sustain earthquakes of a 9.0 magnitude and be resistant to fire for "up to three hours," as well as be extremely energy efficient thanks to thermal insulation, four-panned windows and different air conditioning techniques that were already used in their previous constructions.

Artist's Rendition

Trust and productivity

Relatively recent academic evidence explains how productivity works in places with underdeveloped legal institutions and cultural norms.
In 2009, Hsieh Chang-Tai and Peter Klenow found that a big part of the reason why China and India are so much poorer than the United States is that wildly unproductive firms are more likely to survive in those countries than in America.
After running a novel experiment, Nicholas Bloom, of Stanford University concluded that these firms were so unproductive because they were horribly managed (as opposed to having worse workers or inferior equipment). He speculated that the unproductive firms were able to survive because better-managed businesses were limited in their ability to expand thanks to uncooperative capital markets and, intriguingly, a dearth of trustworthy managers.

The problem is not the absence of people who know how to run businesses but the society at large.

In another paper, Mr Bloom and his colleagues argued that entrepreneurs in poorer countries are reluctant to trust people who are not directly related to them to manage any part of their enterprises. They are afraid that people from outside the family will steal from them and that the judicial system will not protect them. This (not unjustified) fear limits the ability of good firms to expand. Once you run out of siblings and cousins, you can't open more factories. The result is that bad firms are not driven out of business. Conversely, countries with higher levels of "social capital," i.e., trust, generally have higher productivity and are therefore richer, precisely because good firms have more resources available to drive out the bad ones and increase the standard of living through creative destruction.

This was the inspiration behind Paul Romer's ill-fated Charter Cities project, which ran aground in Honduras. The goal was to import the values and institutions of societies with high levels of "social capital" to poor countries in the hope that it would allow them to become richer and more productive. Ironically, the Honduran mission failed precisely because the agency that was supposed to ensure transparency refused to allow outsiders to audit agreements made between the government and private firms.

China Investments in Africa

Since 2010, when China pledged over $100 billion to develop commercial projects in Africa, the continent is rapidly being harvested by China for resources. Map below show China's interests in Africa since 2010.

Beer Production Report

One of the fastest growing businesses in the world is Beer! In 2011, it rose by another 60 million hectoliters to 1.9 billion hectoliters, and was 38.3% higher than in 2000, according to the annual beer and hops report by Barth-Haas Group.


Although in this case as well growth is being fuelled by emerging economies. In most developed countries, production dropped.
In the US, it edged down 1.6% last year and 5.7% since 1990—despite a significant increase in the population.
In Germany, it stabilized recently, but had plunged 20.5% since 1990.
Production in the UK had skidded 27.5% during that time, though it ticked up last year.
In Japan, production is down 14.7% since 1990, and down 3.6% from 2010, the seventh straight year of declines.
But the rest of Asia is on a binge mission. Well, except India, the only major country that hasn’t yet discovered a taste for beer.
The driver in worldwide beer production growth was China, up 9.3% in 2011, and up an astonishing 600% since 1990. Of the 60 million hectoliters in growth worldwide last year, 42 million where brewed in China.
Vietnam made huge strides; in percentage terms a 2,680% melt-up since 1990.
Beer production also grew in Africa and Latin America.
Russia is a special case: in the Soviet Union in 1990, beer production was zero.
By 1996, Russian beers and Heineken were available, but hard to find in smaller towns or on trains, though vodka (served in water glasses or by the bottle) was everywhere. Since then, Russia has shot up to third place in beer production, knocking off Germany and other countries.





Today, the Czech Republic and Austria are the top two beer-drinking nations in the world with 143 and 108 liters per capita respectively.


 In 2011, 51.8% of the world’s beer was produced by six mega-brewing groups.

In June, ABInBev announced that it would acquire 7th ranked Grupo Modelo, giving the company a 21.5% share of the worldwide market. Without further acquisitions, the top six will brew 54.7% of all beer in 2012.
Germany still has about 1,250 breweries, four times as many as the rest of the EU combined. They range from brewpubs to mega breweries. About half of them are in Bavaria. And there are almost 5,000 brands.

Peak Oil Pain is back!

For anyone interested to understand what is the effect of peak oil on economy I would recommend reading this excellent article on The Telegraph, brief excerpts below:

[Energy costs at 9pc of global GDP] That proved to be the pain barrier in the 1970s and again in 2008, and we are just shy of that level right now. “Oil is already capturing a higher level of European GDP than in 2008,” said Francisco Blanch from Bank of America.

The unpleasant fact we must all face is that the relentless supply crunch - call it `Peak Oil’ if you want, or `Plateau Oil’ - was briefly disguised during the Great Recession and is already back with a vengeance before the West has fully recovered.
The IEA said non-OPEC production stalled in 2010 and 2011. There was no net increase. While there was a boost from Canada’s tar sands, and America’s shale-oil, and Brazil’s offshore rigs, this was offset by the relentless erosion of the North Sea fields and Mexico’s operations, a collapse in the Sudan, and Libya’s woes.
Meanwhile OPEC spare capacity has fallen to 2.5m barrels a day (bpd), compared to 3.7m this time last year during the Arab Spring, the event that caused a comparable spike in crude prices and arguably triggered the sharp global slowdown a few months later.

The issue is not whether Iran has the military kit to close the Straits of Hormuz and cut off 18pc of global oil shipments for more than a few days (probably not), but whether an Israeli/US attack on the regime’s nuclear facilities would later set off an uncontrollable chain of events in the Middle East.
There is clearly danger of a spill-over into Bahrain and the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, home to the Kingdom’s aggrieved Shia and most of its oil. Even so, the Iran risk premium in global crude prices is only $10 to $15. We must still face the overwhelming fact that global energy supply is on a knife-edge regardless of events in the Gulf - with no relief in sight.

The IEA warned in its annual report that energy demand will rise 40pc by 2035. 

China alone will be adding 125m cars to its roads over the next five years, with auto production targets of 30m annually by 2016. India is spending $1 trillion on infrastructure projects over the next five years.
Variants of this are happening across Asia and Latin America. Two billion people in the emerging world are joining the global economy and competing toe-to-toe for scare resources with the West.

Top Tax Evaders

British accountant Richard Murphy estimates global tax evasion at 5% of the global economy. He found the following ten countries to have the largest absolute levels of evasion.