Well, the U.S. State Department used to encourage foreign investment vigorously. That’s how you got your United Fruits and then the Marine Corps bogged down in Central America and the Caribbean. China’s already starting to learn this lesson as developing countries default on pie-in-the-sky infrastructure projects and withdraw from BRI. The only question is whether anyone’s had the intestinal fortitude to tell Xi yet. I don’t know if I’m a full blown Zeihanist yet, but the party’s over Party.
If the family get to TO, they should check out Project Hope. Its run by a couple of former Aghan Refugees who are now TO police officers and who started the charity to help recent refugees get settled.
Sep 24, 2023·edited Sep 24, 2023Liked by Claire Berlinski
So much... (2): Dreyer on Chinese ODI, soft power &c...
"Most American companies don’t tend to see Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sumatra as places they’d like to invest money in. But opportunity beckons for Chinese companies seeking markets outside their nation’s borders and finding countries with rapidly growing populations and GDPs."
Well...
As ever, a bit frustrating getting hold of good data - the (rightly valued) UN dataset from UNCTAD is very broad on foreign inbound/outbound investment but doesn't break it out bilaterally. The IMF does (for a narrower set of countries - see CDIS at https://data.imf.org/?sk=40313609-F037-48C1-84B1-E1F1CE54D6D5)
So let's take a look at their "I/ODI - Top five counterpart economies" for 2021 (most recent):
>Pakistan - top inbound, UK with 20%, China 2nd on 15%; Switzerland, Netherlands, UAE
>Bangladesh - top inbound, US with 20%, UK 11, Netherlands, Singapore, P.R.China 5th on 7%
>Indonesia - top inbound, Singapore with 27%, US 12, Japan, Netherlands, P.R.China 5th on 6%.
Dreyer may have access to finer grained data on public/private split; but with the easily explained colonial/commonwealth exception of Pakistan, IMF data don't seem to stack up with his thesis - even allowing for the US economy still being a bit larger than China's.
I'd also emphasize that these questions are always comparative. US state and private institutions may have better access than their PRC counterparts to OECD economies/sectors that better match their risk appetites. They may get to Sumatra when they are done with Sardinia.
Perhaps an interesting aside on those 2021 ODI figures (with caveat that IMF must rely on member government submissions, and they don't cover large chunks of Africa & Central Asia at all) -- there are only a handful of target countries where China's ODI is ahead of all the G12 - even in Mongolia they trail the Netherlands, apparently - and only three where they were the top investor: Tajikistan, Cambodia - and Niger. Hmmm.
While those figures are the best we've got, I do think we have a terrible problem of really not knowing what's going on. China's statistical apparatus is a mess, for reasons far beyond the deliberate desire to mislead. It's just really, really hard to keep accurate records of the business activities of 1.4 million people, many of whom (in the emerging middle class) are new to modern bookkeeping. So is India's: I actually spent some time, a while ago, digging down on Indian statistics and found that not one single commonly-used figure about the Indian economy was stable. I don't even have confidence in estimates of India's population. (I wrote about this here: https://www.amazon.in/Screw-Beautiful-Forevers-Middle-Class-Community-ebook/dp/B01EC7GV7W) I can't imagine that estimates of China's population are significantly more robust.
I know, for sure, that Turkish economic statistics are nonsense. I have a suspicion that if I took a good look at Indonesian statistics, I'd find something similar. I don't know this firsthand; I'm just guessing, based on what I've been told about Indonesia by people I find generally reliable. If I'm right, it means that our understanding of about half the world's economic activity--at least--is an approximation, at best.
French statistics are fabulous, reliable, and granular. Probably most of the EU's are pretty good. I reckon the Anglosphere's statistics are robust, too. But for the rest of the world, I just don't know. I'm sure it varies wildly depending on the country. As I wrote earlier, I was pretty sure something was off with Senegal's economic statistics, and if those are no good, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the rest of Françafrique's aren't, either. Maybe all of Africa's are significantly off.
When assessing these questions, it's *always* worthwhile to look closely at every single number and ask where it came from, who calculated it, whether that person or body is independent or under some kind of political pressure, what methodology they used, and whether that methodology is not only generally sound, but sound in that context. (For example, opinion polling is generally worthless in authoritarian countries because no one is going to tell some stranger who calls them out of the blue whether they're satisfied or unsatisfied with the government.) And it's always worth seeing whether anyone else, independently, came up with the same or a similar number.
Having the UN's best guess is better than nothing, but in many places it is just that--a best guess. (And during my brief time working for the UNDP in Laos I learned that it's not always a guess made by competent people, and it's not always a guess made in good faith.)
I've written about all of these issues in more detail, if you're curious:
On crime statistics and their discontents: https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-dark-figure-of-british-crime (While I stand by everything I wrote about the difficulty of gathering these statistics, I no longer discount the idea of "hysteria." I wrote that before I watched the explosion of fake news we've seen in the past decade and saw that yes, people *are* willing to believe outlandish stories that are completely contrary to the evidence of their own five senses.)
I find this a fascinating issue. It's impossible to make good policy without good statistics. It's impossible to understand the world without good statistics. But many of the statistics to which we appeal, when we study the world, simply aren't reliable.
Thanks, lots there, nearly all to agree with (though not the extravagant conclusions of the London crime piece).
It occured to me: this is really about professional (vs. political) institutions, local, national or supra-national, which are supremely important for so many reasons, of which Dependable Data is just one. And for good reason there's little the new Leninists (Caesars in CGese?) hate or attack more than independent institutions...
And then I read (most of) the Corruption Kills piece. And...it was all about institutions ;)
I do think there's another story about how strong, mature institutions complacently exposed themselves to Leninization. ("A Sickening Consensus", forthcoming -- Editions Kropotkin)
I no longer agree with the conclusions of the crime piece either, so we're on the same page. But I don't think it's all about institutions. That's a big part of it--and some anti-corruption organizations, as I wrote, measure corruption using "institutions" as a proxy. But I don't think it's sufficient. It doesn't explain the variance *within* institutions, or from person to person. Culture is a major determinant of corruption. So is character. So is the belief that "everyone does it"--which, though I have no evidence for it, could even mean that in some cases, the publication of the CPI could be counterproductive: I can easily imagine some low-level but honest bureaucrat in a highly corrupt country contemplating his country's low ranking and concluding he's been a fool.
It is, as I wrote, difficult to study, because absolutely no one is forthright about being corrupt.
Intriguing for several reasons: someone *is* taking it seriously; they found a way to get some independent validation (night time lighting); and the paper also points out there is institutional leverage, as the IMF set up a special transparency regime (SDDS) they invite members to sign up for, which mandates quite rigorous methodological disclosure - and this has a measurable effect in the analysis. Turkey joined years ago.
Of course institutions work in a social & cultural context, there's lots of nuances, and corruption in general is a very cultural phenomenon; but I'd still bank on (specific) institutional factors driving most *statistical* corruption (which I think was where we started.) Leaves lots of classic development questions about where improvements start from...
But I can see a slightly brighter technocratic future in which countries can choose to opt into highly transparent, automated, real-time & non-repudiable submission systems, or accept the book-cookers' stigma. (While blockchain remains entirely irrelevant, of course!)
Thanks. In fact I think it's a bad piece tbh - no idea what his credentials are, but it reads like impressionistic speculation rather than an argument - quotation, anecdote, supposition. He gets the date of the Bandung conference right, but I can't find anyone who agrees the US had a near half-share of global GDP in 1955. And for that matter, who is Berggruen?
Sep 24, 2023Liked by Claire Berlinski, Rachel motte
So much here... so to start, as a new joiner I did precisely nothing to help Mujib and family but I'm glad now to be part of the community that did. All the best to you Mujib, and godspeed to Canada!
I have, and thank you for it! I just wonder if the lesson has gotten through to the CCP, yet. "But we built them roads! They're not allowed to be angry!"
Well, the U.S. State Department used to encourage foreign investment vigorously. That’s how you got your United Fruits and then the Marine Corps bogged down in Central America and the Caribbean. China’s already starting to learn this lesson as developing countries default on pie-in-the-sky infrastructure projects and withdraw from BRI. The only question is whether anyone’s had the intestinal fortitude to tell Xi yet. I don’t know if I’m a full blown Zeihanist yet, but the party’s over Party.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02SBoUKjgKxxbrMrzqoBWNYyQpiWkxPBSUJRodXuPraevheHJ81VifuA6SLvTyWNWtl&id=100076327083911&mibextid=qC1gEa
Claire,
If the family get to TO, they should check out Project Hope. Its run by a couple of former Aghan Refugees who are now TO police officers and who started the charity to help recent refugees get settled.
So much... (2): Dreyer on Chinese ODI, soft power &c...
"Most American companies don’t tend to see Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sumatra as places they’d like to invest money in. But opportunity beckons for Chinese companies seeking markets outside their nation’s borders and finding countries with rapidly growing populations and GDPs."
Well...
As ever, a bit frustrating getting hold of good data - the (rightly valued) UN dataset from UNCTAD is very broad on foreign inbound/outbound investment but doesn't break it out bilaterally. The IMF does (for a narrower set of countries - see CDIS at https://data.imf.org/?sk=40313609-F037-48C1-84B1-E1F1CE54D6D5)
So let's take a look at their "I/ODI - Top five counterpart economies" for 2021 (most recent):
>Pakistan - top inbound, UK with 20%, China 2nd on 15%; Switzerland, Netherlands, UAE
>Bangladesh - top inbound, US with 20%, UK 11, Netherlands, Singapore, P.R.China 5th on 7%
>Indonesia - top inbound, Singapore with 27%, US 12, Japan, Netherlands, P.R.China 5th on 6%.
Dreyer may have access to finer grained data on public/private split; but with the easily explained colonial/commonwealth exception of Pakistan, IMF data don't seem to stack up with his thesis - even allowing for the US economy still being a bit larger than China's.
I'd also emphasize that these questions are always comparative. US state and private institutions may have better access than their PRC counterparts to OECD economies/sectors that better match their risk appetites. They may get to Sumatra when they are done with Sardinia.
Thank you very much for this. The numbers put paid to his argument.
Perhaps an interesting aside on those 2021 ODI figures (with caveat that IMF must rely on member government submissions, and they don't cover large chunks of Africa & Central Asia at all) -- there are only a handful of target countries where China's ODI is ahead of all the G12 - even in Mongolia they trail the Netherlands, apparently - and only three where they were the top investor: Tajikistan, Cambodia - and Niger. Hmmm.
While those figures are the best we've got, I do think we have a terrible problem of really not knowing what's going on. China's statistical apparatus is a mess, for reasons far beyond the deliberate desire to mislead. It's just really, really hard to keep accurate records of the business activities of 1.4 million people, many of whom (in the emerging middle class) are new to modern bookkeeping. So is India's: I actually spent some time, a while ago, digging down on Indian statistics and found that not one single commonly-used figure about the Indian economy was stable. I don't even have confidence in estimates of India's population. (I wrote about this here: https://www.amazon.in/Screw-Beautiful-Forevers-Middle-Class-Community-ebook/dp/B01EC7GV7W) I can't imagine that estimates of China's population are significantly more robust.
I know, for sure, that Turkish economic statistics are nonsense. I have a suspicion that if I took a good look at Indonesian statistics, I'd find something similar. I don't know this firsthand; I'm just guessing, based on what I've been told about Indonesia by people I find generally reliable. If I'm right, it means that our understanding of about half the world's economic activity--at least--is an approximation, at best.
French statistics are fabulous, reliable, and granular. Probably most of the EU's are pretty good. I reckon the Anglosphere's statistics are robust, too. But for the rest of the world, I just don't know. I'm sure it varies wildly depending on the country. As I wrote earlier, I was pretty sure something was off with Senegal's economic statistics, and if those are no good, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the rest of Françafrique's aren't, either. Maybe all of Africa's are significantly off.
When assessing these questions, it's *always* worthwhile to look closely at every single number and ask where it came from, who calculated it, whether that person or body is independent or under some kind of political pressure, what methodology they used, and whether that methodology is not only generally sound, but sound in that context. (For example, opinion polling is generally worthless in authoritarian countries because no one is going to tell some stranger who calls them out of the blue whether they're satisfied or unsatisfied with the government.) And it's always worth seeing whether anyone else, independently, came up with the same or a similar number.
Having the UN's best guess is better than nothing, but in many places it is just that--a best guess. (And during my brief time working for the UNDP in Laos I learned that it's not always a guess made by competent people, and it's not always a guess made in good faith.)
I've written about all of these issues in more detail, if you're curious:
On the UN in Laos: https://www.berlinski.com/2016/09/14/vientiane-times-a-sojourn-among-the-development-workers/
On the Dark Figure of corruption: https://www.hoover.org/research/dark-figure-corruption
On crime statistics and their discontents: https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-dark-figure-of-british-crime (While I stand by everything I wrote about the difficulty of gathering these statistics, I no longer discount the idea of "hysteria." I wrote that before I watched the explosion of fake news we've seen in the past decade and saw that yes, people *are* willing to believe outlandish stories that are completely contrary to the evidence of their own five senses.)
On Turkish statistics: https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/corruption-kills?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fturkey%2520corruption&utm_medium=reader2
I find this a fascinating issue. It's impossible to make good policy without good statistics. It's impossible to understand the world without good statistics. But many of the statistics to which we appeal, when we study the world, simply aren't reliable.
Thanks, lots there, nearly all to agree with (though not the extravagant conclusions of the London crime piece).
It occured to me: this is really about professional (vs. political) institutions, local, national or supra-national, which are supremely important for so many reasons, of which Dependable Data is just one. And for good reason there's little the new Leninists (Caesars in CGese?) hate or attack more than independent institutions...
And then I read (most of) the Corruption Kills piece. And...it was all about institutions ;)
I do think there's another story about how strong, mature institutions complacently exposed themselves to Leninization. ("A Sickening Consensus", forthcoming -- Editions Kropotkin)
I no longer agree with the conclusions of the crime piece either, so we're on the same page. But I don't think it's all about institutions. That's a big part of it--and some anti-corruption organizations, as I wrote, measure corruption using "institutions" as a proxy. But I don't think it's sufficient. It doesn't explain the variance *within* institutions, or from person to person. Culture is a major determinant of corruption. So is character. So is the belief that "everyone does it"--which, though I have no evidence for it, could even mean that in some cases, the publication of the CPI could be counterproductive: I can easily imagine some low-level but honest bureaucrat in a highly corrupt country contemplating his country's low ranking and concluding he's been a fool.
It is, as I wrote, difficult to study, because absolutely no one is forthright about being corrupt.
But not impossible - I'd forgotten this very smart paper: "How Much Should We Trust the Dictator's GDP Growth Estimates?"
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/BFI_WP_2021-78.pdf.
Intriguing for several reasons: someone *is* taking it seriously; they found a way to get some independent validation (night time lighting); and the paper also points out there is institutional leverage, as the IMF set up a special transparency regime (SDDS) they invite members to sign up for, which mandates quite rigorous methodological disclosure - and this has a measurable effect in the analysis. Turkey joined years ago.
Of course institutions work in a social & cultural context, there's lots of nuances, and corruption in general is a very cultural phenomenon; but I'd still bank on (specific) institutional factors driving most *statistical* corruption (which I think was where we started.) Leaves lots of classic development questions about where improvements start from...
But I can see a slightly brighter technocratic future in which countries can choose to opt into highly transparent, automated, real-time & non-repudiable submission systems, or accept the book-cookers' stigma. (While blockchain remains entirely irrelevant, of course!)
Thanks. In fact I think it's a bad piece tbh - no idea what his credentials are, but it reads like impressionistic speculation rather than an argument - quotation, anecdote, supposition. He gets the date of the Bandung conference right, but I can't find anyone who agrees the US had a near half-share of global GDP in 1955. And for that matter, who is Berggruen?
You've persuaded me. Down with Dreyer!
So much here... so to start, as a new joiner I did precisely nothing to help Mujib and family but I'm glad now to be part of the community that did. All the best to you Mujib, and godspeed to Canada!
It seems to me that the West has a bad taste in its mouth from both state and corporate colonialism.
China has not developed a distaste for abusing the 3rd world yet, but if Balochistan is any indicator, they might.
Have you read what we've written about Balochistan?
I have, and thank you for it! I just wonder if the lesson has gotten through to the CCP, yet. "But we built them roads! They're not allowed to be angry!"