Welcome to the Chinese World Order: interests, not values - BergGruen Institute (WP)

Weekend Roundup: China is laying the groundwork for a post-American world order A China-led world order would be based on interests, not values. Nathan Gardels, Editor in Chief Visit the WorldPost at http://www.theworldpost.com

A map of the new Silk Road, connecting Asia to Europe. (Maxiphoto/Getty)

As the United States abandons the postwar multilateral system it once led, China is stepping into the breach, laying the groundwork for a post-American world order. We are already getting a glimpse of what is to come through China’s various initiatives, ranging from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to the Belt and Road project and the 16+1 group, which is developing Chinese-financed projects in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. China is also seeking to connect a global electricity grid powered by wind and solar as a means to sustain development while fighting climate change. This new order will not be like the old. At least for now, it is not multilateral but comprised of multiple bilateral relationships linked to the Chinese core. And given China’s “one world, many systems” perspective, it is based not on a convergence of values, but of interests. President Xi Jinping has cast these initiatives with a positive spin as building “a community of shared future for mankind.” The most cynical critics regard them as a thin fig leaf disguising China’s quest for global dominance and merely a means to find markets for overproduction as its domestic economy slows. Xi’s vision is also clouded by manifold reports of debt overload and kickbacks for corrupt leaders. In Sri Lanka, China has taken over a port it built because Sri Lanka couldn’t afford the debt. The same dynamic seems to be developing in Pakistan and Laos; the new Malaysian government, meanwhile, has put its Chinese-financed rail project on hold, citing corruption and disadvantageous terms negotiated by the previous regime. There is no mileage in being naive about China’s ambitions and its self-interested motives. But lining up with hostility against China’s initiatives the way Joseph Stalin and his minions did toward the Marshall Plan after World War II — which did wonders for a devastated Europe while also benefiting the United States through purchases of imports from American companies that were required to cross the Atlantic on American merchant ships — is a mistaken course for the West. And let’s not forget that the American expansion of railroads westward in the 19th century also led to a crisis of corruption and over-indebtedness. Despite the turmoil and losses, when it was all sorted out, the result in the end was a connected continent that became a foundation of American prosperity. Twenty years from now, the same will likely be true of Eurasia and Africa as a result of China’s initiatives, even with all of their faults. That is why, to diminish the downsides, the proper stance would be for the West to join with China’s efforts at global development so that the process is more transparent and less corrupt, with terms that don’t foster debt traps and amount to creditor imperialism. The experience of the “clean, lean and green” AIIB, which many Western nations — though not the United States — have joined, shows that high standards can be imposed if the West is a participant instead of an outsider as the new order is being built. After all, it is not as if Western nations on their own are going to finance and construct infrastructure around the world. No one needs reminding that the United States has been unable to build a single high-speed rail project anywhere on its vast territory. By and large, it can’t even manage to finance the repair of old infrastructure, much less invest in anything new. The European Union remains mired in deep disagreements about how to manage its own internal finances. While critics carp from the sidelines, those in need of help are grateful. “When we were faced with financial crisis, amidst the wider challenges of the E.U., China helped us,” Greece’s former prime minister George Papandreou recalled in a recent conversation with me. “China was one of the few nations to buy our sovereign bonds. This was an important vote of confidence. Then China began its investment in the Port of Piraeus, an early investment that is now one of the major components of the new maritime Silk Road. These investments showed great trust in my country’s capacity to overcome the crisis, where few others would.” In The WorldPost this week, we address these issues of a growing vacuum in the world order and China’s attempt to fill it, for good and for ill. Ali Wyne sees the demise of the American-led postwar order as less a consequence of President Trump’s wrecking ball and more a victim of its own success. That order, built to avoid another devastating world war among major powers, achieved its goal. Along with an open trading regime, it was this stable absence of global conflict that enabled China’s peaceful rise. The result of success, Wyne contends, has been a complacency that has eroded the founding urgency that sustained a broad and deep commitment of states and their publics. That makes revitalizing the order a challenge. “The modernization of the world order would ideally result from farsighted diplomacy,” writes Wyne. “It is more likely, though, that policymakers will do little more than push for incremental improvements to an inadequate system” thereby allowing “forces — ranging from external challenges to populist uprisings — to continue testing its foundations. The potential result of indefinite erosion — a vacuum in order, without a coherent alternative to replace it — is unpalatable.” Noting that the creation of new orders has historically followed upon cataclysmic events like the world wars, Wyne concludes: “In a nuclear age, though, it is terrifying to consider what might have to occur for a new order to emerge.” To the extent that China is fostering an alternative to the vacuum, Jonathan Hillman doesn’t like what he sees. “The Belt and Road is a masterstroke in geopolitical advertising. Wrapping the effort in Silk Road mythology, Xi is effectively selling a Sino-centric order to the world,” he writes from Budapest. “In practice, the Belt and Road is a sea of bilateral deals between China and participating countries, including many markets where few others dare to go. More than half of the countries participating in the Belt and Road have sovereign debt ratings that are either junk or not graded. China’s emphasis on building big-ticket infrastructure projects resonates with foreign leaders looking to impress at home and establish a legacy.” For Hillman, this mix of a debt trap with the megalomania of corrupt local autocrats will not spell stability and progress but a costly waste of resources as nations become tributaries beholden to Chinese largesse. As China extends its influence globally, it will inexorably be drawn into local conflicts, just as the United States was in its period of dominance. “For decades, Beijing refrained from meddling with sovereign nations’ internal affairs,” Denise Hruby writes from Juba, South Sudan, where the China National Petroleum Company owns a 40 percent share of the country’s largest oil fields. “As long as economic ties flourished, it would turn a blind eye toward human rights abuses and corruption. But with increasing investments abroad comes more clout, and as the United States scales back its international commitments, China is emerging as an obvious development partner.” Hruby reports that while China initially sought a direct role in ending the South Sudan conflict, which threatens its investments, it was soon overwhelmed by the complexity of militia and tribal politics. China fields its largest contingent of U.N. peacekeeping forces there, but it has reverted to a stance that “African problems must have African solutions” and looks to the African Union and other local mediators to resolve the crisis while it stands on the sidelines. Jeffrey Sachs sees Trump’s effort to staunch China’s newfound influence while abandoning America’s own successful model of development as achieving the opposite of its intent. “American prosperity since World War II has been built upon science and technology breakthroughs spurred by a powerful innovation system linking the federal government, business, academia and venture capital,” he writes. “U.S. innovation policy has been successfully emulated in Europe and Asia, most recently by China. President Trump’s trade war against China aims to slow China’s technology ascent but is misguided and doomed to fail; instead, American prosperity should be assured by doing what America does best: innovating at home and trading with the rest of the world.”

Nathan Gardels, Editor in Chief Kathleen Miles, Executive Editor  Dawn Nakagawa, Vice President of Operations Peter Mellgard, Features Editor  Alex Gardels, Video Editor  Clarissa Pharr, Associate Editor  Rosa O’Hara, Social Editor  The WorldPost, a partnership of the Berggruen Institute and The Washington Post, is an award-winning global media platform that aims to be a place where the world meets. We seek to make sense of an interdependent yet fragmenting world by commissioning voices that cross cultural and political boundaries. Publishing op-eds and features from around the globe, we work from a worldwide perspective looking around rather than a national perspective looking out.

O livre comercio de Trump: pela via da reciprocidade mercantilista - American for Limite Government

Os partidários de Trump estão contentes com sua abordagem do livre comércio, que começou com a sua recusa do TPP, o enterro do Trans-Atlantic esquema (com a UE), a denúncia do Nafta e de acordos bilaterais de livre comércio, e que agora quer, porque quer, um acordo de livre comércio com a UE, mas à sua maneira, sem qualquer preparação, estudo, consistência, como sempre, na base de um tweet, como é o seu hábito.

Acho que vai demorar um pouco...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Trump trade deal with Europe proves ‘fair and reciprocal’ lowering of trade barriers only sustainable path to free trade

July 26, 2018, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement praising President Donald Trump’s trade agreement with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker: 

“The U.S-European agreement to zero out tariff and non-tariff trade barriers on non-auto industrial equipment and to lower other barriers for other products is a huge win for the Trump Trade Doctrine and the entire world. It’s proves that the President’s tough approach on tariffs will bring trade partners to the table. Moreover, the President’s determination to get a better deal for the U.S. proves that the only sustainable way to get to free trade is through the ‘fair and reciprocal’ lowering of barriers where all parties act in concert. Whereas past presidents were just fine with the U.S. lowering its barriers while the rest of the world didn’t, finally we have a leader who is fully engaged on trade and will ensure the U.S. is no longer taken advantage of.

“Finally, Trump’s agreement with the EU to reform the World Trade Organization to stop the theft of intellectual property and forced technology transfer by China is another big win for manufacturers, particularly in the technology sector, who have been raided by Chinese companies in the past. This serves notice on China that the WTO will no longer be a vehicle to enable China’s unfair trade practices. 

“Real reform at the WTO is imperative. If the WTO cannot hear trade cases when there are hundreds of billions of dollars on the line in a timely manner or address currency manipulation which is a subsidy on goods, then the U.S. will have no choice but to act. Trump’s agreement with the EU should precipitate urgently needed action to fix the WTO.  In the meantime, the U.S. could simply block Chinese imports that violate U.S. intellectual property laws or levy additional tariffs on those that utilize currency depreciation subsidies. China, which runs a huge surplus, has a lot more to lose in a trade battle than the U.S. President Trump has it exactly right to put the outmoded WTO rules on the table. It’s about time.”

Attachments:

“‘Very big day for free and fair trade’ President Trump declares as European trade concessions prove tough tariffs are working,” By Robert Romano, July 26, 2018 at http://dailytorch.com/2018/07/very-big-day-for-free-and-fair-trade-president-trump-declares-as-european-trade-concessions-prove-tough-tariffs-are-working/

A Destruição da Venezuela por Chavez, Maduro e os cubanos - Foreign Affairs

A Venezuela foi completamente destruída pela total incompetência econômica, pelo roubo deliberado, e pelo socialismo anacrônico dos bolivarianos, controlados pelos comunistas cubanos.
A economia brasileira também foi destruída, embora não completamente, pela incompetência econômica, pelo estatismo idiota, pela corrupção gigantesca dos lulopetistas, interessados tanto no enriquecimento pessoal quanto em sustentar seus mestres cubanos.
Ambos países sofrem de inépcia e corrupção, embora no caso do Brasil também exista o patrimonialismo dos mandarins do Estado.
Vai ser duro reconstruir, mas pelo menos não chegamos perto da tragédia venezuelana.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Foreign Policy, Washington DC – 26.7.2018

How Venezuela Struck It Poor

The tragic — and totally avoidable — self-destruction of one of the world’s richest oil economies.

Keith Johnson

In the spring of 1959, at a secretive meeting at a yacht club in Cairo, Venezuela’s then-minister of mines and hydrocarbons, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, hatched a plan to give big oil-producing countries more control over their black gold — and a greater share of the wealth it promised to create. A year later, his scheme would be formally christened the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. Venezuela, which sits atop what are arguably the biggest petroleum reserves in the world, was the only non-Middle Eastern country to be included — a testament to its importance to the global oil business.

Venezuela was considered rich in the early 1960s: It produced more than 10 percent of the world’s crude and had a per capita GDP many times bigger than that of its neighbors Brazil and Colombia — and not far behind that of the United States. At the time, Venezuela was eager to diversify beyond just oil and avoid the so-called resource curse, a common phenomenon in which easy money from commodities such as oil and gold leads governments to neglect other productive parts of their economies. But by the 1970s, Venezuela was riding a spike in oil prices to what looked like a never-ending economic bonanza. Complemented by years of stable democracy, it seemed a model country in an otherwise often troubled region.

Such success makes the sorry state of Venezuela’s oil industry today, not to mention that of the country at large, all the more surprising — and tragic. The same state that, six decades ago, dreamed up the idea of a cartel of oil exporters now must import petroleum to meet its needs. Crude production has tanked, hitting a 28-year low last fall when it dipped under 2 million barrels a day. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a collapse of that magnitude [anywhere] without a war, without sanctions,” said Francisco Monaldi, a Latin America expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Venezuela has not, of course, fought a war in recent years. But the combination of plummeting oil revenues and years of government mismanagement has virtually killed off the country’s economy, sparking a humanitarian crisis that threatens to engulf the region. Caracas refuses to track inflation (or at least publish its findings), but the National Assembly calculates the annual rate to be more than 4,000 percent, and the International Monetary Fund predicts it could hit 13,000 percent this year. Given how much prices have already risen since January, the real number could be 10 times higher.

Venezuela’s murder rate, meanwhile, now surpasses that of Honduras and El Salvador, which formerly had the world’s highest levels, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory. Blackouts are a near-daily occurrence, and many people live without running water. According to media reports, schoolchildren and oil workers have begun passing out from hunger, and sick Venezuelans have scoured veterinary offices for medicine. Malaria, measles, and diphtheria have returned with a vengeance, and the millions of Venezuelans fleeing the country — more than 4 million, according to the International Crisis Group — are spreading the diseases across the region, as well as straining resources and goodwill.

What explains the country’s precipitous decline from being one of Latin America’s richest and most stable states? Mark Green, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, blames President Nicolás Maduro — who, in May, won another six-year term in elections widely denounced as fraudulent — and his “delusional” policies. But while there’s no question Maduro is partially culpable, to fully understand how a country blessed with the world’s biggest oil endowment could end up so crushingly poor requires going much further back. The fuse for the bomb that is now blowing up Venezuela’s oil industry — and the country along with it — was deliberately lit and fanned by Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, the strongman Hugo Chávez, not long after he swept into power in the late 1990s.

The decline and fall of Venezuela’s oil industry essentially begins with its nationalization in 1976, a time of booming crude prices and rising resource nationalism. President Carlos Andrés Pérez sought a much greater role for the state over the economy and especially wanted to use the country’s fast-growing oil wealth to turbocharge development. That year, to gain full national control over the oil fields, Caracas banished foreign oil firms and created a new, state-run oil monopoly called Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). The moves marked the capstone to Pérez Alfonso’s decades-long dream of Venezuela grabbing full control of its destiny. It was also the logical outcome of the widely held belief that the country’s oil, discovered in 1922 on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, was national patrimony.

At first, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company stood out from peers such as Petróleos Mexicanos in many ways. A large number of its executives, for example, had previously worked for foreign companies in the country and imbued the new firm with a business-oriented outlook and a high degree of professionalism. PDVSA had a lean workforce, an efficient cost structure, and a global outlook: A decade after its creation, the company acquired half of Citgo, the big U.S. refiner, and stakes in a pair of European refineries.

Yet none of these assets proved much help when a global oil glut in the mid-1980s depressed prices and hammered the national economy. OPEC members struggled to prop up prices by cutting back output. By the middle of the decade, Venezuelan production had fallen below 2 million barrels a day, or about 50 percent less than during the heyday right before nationalization.

When oil is cheap, it becomes very tempting for countries to pump more crude — even if that extra production ends up keeping prices low. And so, to right the reeling Venezuelan economy in the early 1990s, the government sought to reopen the oil industry to international companies. The outsiders would be especially useful in accessing Venezuela’s mother lode, the Orinoco heavy oil belt, which holds more than a trillion barrels of tarlike bitumen. Unlike regular light crude oil, which can be pumped straight out of the ground and sold as is, heavy oil is more difficult to extract and then needs to be upgraded to something resembling liquid oil before sale. Doing all that takes the kind of cash and sophisticated know-how PDVSA lacked at the time.

By the mid-1990s, international firms, including Chevron and ConocoPhillips, had moved back into the country and were hard at work unlocking Venezuela’s massive heavy oil deposits. But in 1998, the price of oil collapsed again, dipping to $10 a barrel. The impact on Venezuela — which, like many oil-rich countries, had never managed to diversify its economy despite a bout of reform efforts in the 1970s — was severe, given that petroleum exports then represented about one-third of the state’s revenues. Then along came Chávez, a former army lieutenant colonel who’d served time in prison for an abortive coup attempt in 1992. He won the 1998 presidential election on the promise to reshape and restore Venezuela’s reeling economy.

Among his first targets: the technocrats at PDVSA, especially the company’s deeply knowledgeable then-chairman and CEO, Luis Giusti, who’d led the drive to reopen the country’s oil sector. “Chávez saw Giusti as a potential rival. In fact, Chávez used the slogan ‘PDVSA is part of a state within a state,’” said Juan Fernández, a former PDVSA manager who would also fall afoul of the strongman. Giusti, alarmed by Chávez’s plans for the oil company, resigned just as he took office in early 1999; he was then replaced by a revolving cast of political appointees. The departure of Giusti, who’d spent three decades in the Venezuelan oil business and had won international plaudits for overhauling and modernizing the state-run firm since taking over in 1994, would prove to be bad news for PDVSA’s fortunes.

Chávez’s goal was to exert control of PDVSA and maximize its revenue, which he needed to fund his socialist agenda. But achieving the latter required cooperating with the rest of OPEC, which, as in the 1980s, wanted to cut production in order to raise prices. The problem for Chávez was that many of the PDVSA’s then-managers wanted to increaseproduction, by continuing the development of Venezuela’s technically challenging heavy oil fields. To do so, they needed to reinvest more of the company’s earnings rather than hand them all over to the government. So the managers had to go.

Unfortunately for Venezuela, Chávez — like many of the people he appointed to run PDVSA — knew nothing about the business that was so central to the country’s prosperity. “He was ignorant about everything to do with oil, everything to do with geology, engineering, the economics of oil,” said Pedro Burelli, a former PDVSA board member who left the company when Chávez took power. “His was a completely encyclopedic ignorance.”

But Chávez wasn’t the type to let that stop him. In 2001, the former paratrooper pushed through a new energy law that jacked up the royalties foreign oil firms would have to pay the government. It also mandated that PDVSA would lead all new oil exploration and production; foreign firms could only hold minority stakes in whatever partnerships they struck with the national company.

Para acessar a íntegra:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/how-venezuela-struck-it-poor-oil-energy-chavez/

This article originally appeared in the July 2018 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Gustavo Franco vs Roberto Gianetti: debate sobre politicas económicas

Creio que Gustavo Franco, como sempre, foi primoroso: elegante, sem deixar de ser impiedoso, explícito, sem deixar de ser irônico.
Cada parágrafo de seu artigo vale por uma aula de história econômica, de economia política, aliás de puro bom senso e adesão à realidade...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 
(cliquem para ler melhor)

Portal da Capes: biblioteca virtual

BIBLIOTECA VIRTUAL

Capes disponibiliza plataforma científica com mais de 60 milhões de registros

Ferramenta Scopus inclui cerca de 130 mil livros, além de periódicos revisados, publicações e artigos de editoras internacionais

publicado: 03/08/2017 10h29, última modificação: 23/12/2017 10h53

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Visitantes encontram no acervo a plataforma multidisciplinar Scopus - Foto: Arquivo/ Agência Brasil

O acervo da biblioteca virtual do Portal de Periódicos da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Capes) disponibiliza a plataforma Scopus. O ambiente abrange pesquisas e trabalhos científicos.

A Scopus trata das Ciências Sociais, Exatas, Humanas e Biológicas, com resumos e citações de diversos tipos de arquivos. O conteúdo inclui cerca de 130 mil livros (10 mil títulos incluídos por ano), e mais de 60 milhões de registros, que incluem periódicos revisados, publicações comerciais e articles-in-press de editoras internacionais, como Cambridge University Press, Springer Nature e Wiley.

Mais de quatro mil publicações de acesso aberto, anais de conferências, páginas da web com conteúdos científicos e patentes de escritórios podem ser encontrados na plataforma.

O usuário pode ainda utilizar ferramentas de apoio à análise de resultados (bibliometria), como identificação de autores e filiações, análise de citações, análise de publicações e índice H. Atualizada diariamente, a plataforma conta com recursos que auxiliam o pesquisador nas buscas, tais como criação de alertas e listas para armazenar documentos durante a sessão de busca.

A área de Materiais didáticos do Portal de Periódicos abriga dois documentos sobre a Scopus para que os usuários esclareçam dúvidas. Os arquivos oferecem informações sobre tipos de busca, forma de selecionar alertas e feeds, opções de exportação dos resultados, quantidade e tipos de publicações disponíveis, diferenciais do conteúdo, entre outros pontos.

Para explorar os recursos da plataforma Scopus, acesse a opção Buscar base do Portal de Periódicos.

Fonte: Portal Brasil, com informações da Capes

Academia.edu distingue o trabalho da semana

Your Weekly Analytics Snapshot   profile views   paper views View Your Analytics View Analytics Last week you received:   83 New Readers   11 New Profile Visitors   40 New Search Terms Your Top Paper Carreira na diplomacia: ingresso, requerimentos, desempenho 40 Views View Your Analytics

Minireflexao sobre o momento presente: a importancia da educacao - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Minireflexão sobre o momento presente: a importância da educação

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

(www.pralmeida.org; http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com)

 [Objetivo: minireflexão; finalidade: importância da educação]

Refletindo sobre o cenário atual do Brasil, reafirmo minha velha crença na validade das ideias, dos valores e dos princípios, para a correção dos imensos desajustes do Brasil atual, que podem ser atribuídos a uma única causa: a mediocridade das nossas elites, sendo que as atuais são ineptas e corruptas. Chegamos a essa situação deplorável, de termos elites ineptas e corruptas no comando do país, por uma razão principal: nossas profundas deficiências educacionais, do pré-primário ao pós-doc.

Portanto, a tarefa máxima, a única, principal, prioritária, de qualquer governo, é a educação de qualidade. Se o próximo presidente puder escolher cinco prioridades de governo, eu já indico quais seriam as minhas cinco: 1) educação; 2) educação; 3) educação; 4) educação; e 5) educação.

Apenas a falta de educação explica que o povo brasileiro tenha permitido a deterioração de nossas instituições, que elites ineptas e corruptas tenham ascendido ao poder e passado a assaltar o país da forma como o fizeram, nos últimos 15 anos. 

A educação de qualidade é a única forma de o Brasil alçar-se da crise atual, da mediocridade da nossa política, e de alcançar uma nova etapa de seu processo de desenvolvimento.

Acredito poder participar desse processo, sendo um bom profissional e um bom mestre, em todas as minhas frentes de trabalho.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 24 de julho de 2018