Saturday, December 18, 2010

Lecture for a Chinese Delegation

I am going to give a talk to a Chinese delegation. I have to write up the talk in advance for the participants to have a translation to read.

Any comments would be appreciated.


http://michaelperelman.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/china.doc

6 comments:

John said...

America is ripe for a new business model that China can furnish. They are producing highly trained technical types faster than we and their educational system can target goals with far better accuracy. If China would do for American health care what McDonald's is doing for fast food in China the results would be spectacular. Imagine a global chain of health care clinics, replete with imaging, lab and rehab resources, that would put our so-called "urgent care" places to shame. And if they could find a way to dispense reasonably priced drugs at the place where they are prescribed instead of tossing sick patients to the market to find a pharmacy the business model would be revolutionary.

Just thinking out loud...

Jimbo said...

With all due respect, the previous comment misses the point about the Chinese model which has a distinctive "locust plague" nature, especially about natural resources, which is also China's major fundamental weakness.

China's fundamentals indicate enduring inflationary trends from a commodity standpoint. Their political economic model as everyone knows is very brittle. They face massive rural depopulation and social instability. Far from being a model, they actually teeter on the brink of social disintegration. Only the Chinese traditional culture holds them together and this may see them through but at much lower levels of economic growth than at present.

John said...

Please. I wasn't serious. The idea of a chain of Chinese clinics in America looked so much like a SNL skit I couldn't resist.
Besides, we already poach more than our share of trained medical people from all over the world. Without them most large American providers couldn't do business.
And anyone who thinks Big PhRMA would sit still for reasonably priced drugs dispensed directly by providers is living in a fool's paradise.

Daro said...

Make 'em laugh first up.

Don't include any references to ancient history. They'll see it as pandering.

juan said...

"Harmonious Civilization"

the 'harmony' of export dependence and reliance upon foreign direct investment which, even at long run record and near record levels, has proven unable to compensate for new entrants -- even moreso to the extent national/global competition drives the tech composition of FDI and pre-existing domestic/regional facilities to higher levels.

other hand, creation/perpetuation of large number of semi-proletarians, by reducing labor power's cost of reproduction, mitigates against higher wages and retards real market development, hence works in favor of an FDI-dependent/export-led development model and its internal tensions, which demand new emphasis on the countryside, perhaps an ending of the party state.

"By the end of March 2010, foreign companies had established nearly 690,000 enterprises in China with actual investments totaling over 1 trillion U.S. dollars.
...
"The Foreign Direct Investment Confidence Index survey jointly conducted by A.T. Kearney and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) on many large multi-national companies shows that China has once again become the world's most attractive foreign investment destination."
[China remains most attractive to foreign investments 14:34, April 21,2010, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90778/90861/6958556.html ]

"The nation has a real unemployment rate of about 22%, according to a human resources white paper released by the government in September.

Routinely, only urban areas are included in employment figures; these show 9.21 million registered jobless at the end of 2009, an urban unemployment rate of 4.3%.

However, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MoHRSS) paper shows that, of a total workforce of more than 1 billion, those employed amount to about 780 million.

"Employment pressures from the many surplus rural labourers are getting bigger and bigger," said MoHRSS spokesman Yi Chengji. Currently, about 100 million surplus rural workers need to be transferred to urban jobs..."
New measures to help boost jobs
http://www.kcs.com/newsletter/Oct10/RuralJobs.html

"China also witnessed a rapid reduction in labor force participation during the late 1990s (Giles, Park, and Cai, forthcoming). If many of these individuals are discouraged workers, the unemployment rate could underestimate the actual dislocation experienced by workers in urban China."
[John GILES, Albert PARK, Juwei ZHANG, What is China’s True Unemployment Rate?*, October 2004,
http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/members/albert.park/papers/unemployment.pdf ]

The End of the Peasant? New Rural Reconstruction in China; Alexander Day, 2008
http://alexanderday.net/wp-content/uploads/New-Rural-Reconstruction.pdf

juan said...

may also find this interesting:

"Our
major finding—that some categories of Chinese firms
have outperformed the foreign-invested enterprises—
is counterintuitive, and should prompt multinational
firms to rethink their own competitiveness in
anticipation of more fierce competition ahead within
China.
...
The conventional belief that domestic Chinese firms
are at a significant competitive disadvantage vis-a`-vis
multinational firms is widely held. This view has
intuitive appeal, and is supported by numerous cases in
the early days of economic reform and open-door
policy.
...
..POEs [Privately Owned], COEs Collectively Owned], and SHEs Shareholder Owned]—performed better than the
FIEs [Foreign Owned] to different extents.
...
Overall, there is no clear indication that
the FIEs performed better than most Chinese firms."

Performance of domestic and foreign-invested
enterprises in China

Journal of World Business 41 (2006) 261–274
http://www.gsm.pku.edu.cn/store/object/2006725234636xu_pan_wu_yim%20jwb%20doi.pdf


Harmonious will require communities' centered rural reconstruction,,,not so much infrastructural as cultural. The political, perhaps, on the order of a participatory left populism which could as well develop throughout urban China.

give the Organic Law of the Villagers Committees some tweeks, supply advertisments, decommission a few cadre and...within a few years...presto, China might become
what it claims to be.