Surprisingly, I would say, Bucharest is the least expensive European city in 103rd place in the 2005 worldwide cost of living survey released a couple of days ago by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

Mercer’s survey covers 144 cities across six continents and measures the comparative cost of over 200 items in each location, including housing, transport, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment. It is the world’s most comprehensive cost of living survey and is used to help multinational companies and governments determine compensation allowances for their expatriate employees.

Tokyo remains the world’s most expensive city, followed by Osaka, according to the study. London moves down one position in the rankings to take third place, followed by Moscow which also drops a place this year. Asuncion in Paraguay is the least expensive city in the survey. New York remains the most expensive city in North America, at 13th position in the rankings .

Center for Global Development released the 2005 Commitment to Development Index. The Index reminds the world that reducing poverty in developing countries is about far more than giving money.

Now in its third year, the CDI ranks 21 of the richest nations trying to give us the big picture on their performance in each of the following policy areas:

• aid
• trade
• investment
• migration
• security
• environment
• technology policies

View the rankings in charts, learn what the Index rewards and penalizes, compare country report cards, and post comments or suggestions. Or see an interactive (flash) version here.

Via World Bank’s Private Sector Development Blog.

Technorati tag: Commitment to Development Index

Interesting speech held by Rupert Murdoch in front of American Society of Newspaper Editors on present and future trends in media, especially the printed media. Here are some excerpts:

a recent report by the Carnegie Corporation about young people’s changing habits of news consumption and what they mean for the future of the news industry.

According to this report, and I quote, “There’s a dramatic revolution taking place in the news business today, and it isn’t about TV anchor changes, scandals at storied newspapers or embedded reporters.” The future course of news, says the study’s author, Merrill Brown, is being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.

they want the option to go out and get more information, or to seek a contrary point of view. And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community – to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet the people who think about the world in similar or different ways.

Technorati tags: Murdoch, Media Future

London will host the 2012 Summer Games, members of the International Olympic Committee have decided.

After Moscow, New York and Madrid were eliminated in the first three rounds, London beat its cross-Channel opponent on the fourth ballot of the International Olympic Committee vote — capping the most glamorous and hotly contested bid race in Olympic history.

London, which last held the games in 1948, centers its bid on the massive urban renewal of a dilapidated area of East London. It’s the fourth bid from Britain after failed attempts by Birmingham for the 1992 Olympics and Manchester for 1996 and 2000.

Official website of the candidate: London 2012

Technorati tag: Olympics

There’s a site upgrade ongoing at the moment, as I switched from the old, text-based, CuteNews to the newer, MySQL based Drupal.

First reason for this change, was the (well obvious) the lack of database back-end of CuteNews, but also the lack of support from the host especially in what was related to mod_rewrite (and some more friendlier URL’s) and to impossibility of hosting a way simplier system as WordPress :(.

During the upgrade, the un-compliant Internet Explorer browser, may act strange, so just blame Microsoft for it or switch to any other browser. Also, some of the links may not act properly which shouldn’t be a reason to worry either.

Any suggestions or feedback are welcome.

Meanwhile do not forget to update your RSS feeds with the new one:  https://www.danielneamu.ro/?q=blog/feed

Well, I know politics gets ugly if needed, but the point is not the goal of US politics agenda, which is or rather should be to the benefit of US tax-payer. It’s rather about the way it’s done and the fact that US itself is trying to impose a different standard pretending it’s holding on to a single one. After all, US politics instated so many dictatorships in the name of democracy and freedom.

Securing cheap and relatively stable oil resources it’s quite a dream now that the oil price is at it’s all time high, stability in Iraq is rather a dream and the costs of war on terror exceeded by far any initial estimate.

Keeping the discussion strictly to economics, let’s not forget that the U.S. deficit in the broadest measure of international trade surged to an all-time high last year ($665.9bn), increasing a potential threat to the economy as the country sank deeper into debt to Japan, China and other nations. All that despite the fact that the falling dollar was supposed to close our trade gap by increasing the attractiveness of goods made in the US to both domestic and foreign consumers.

The current account deficit represents the amount of financing the United States needs to cover its international accounts, and thus covers all aspects of foreign trade, from goods and services to investment flows among countries.

Foreigners have been happy to sell cars, computers and clothing to Americans and accept dollars in exchange. That money then is invested in the U.S. stock market, corporate bonds and Treasury securities.

Analysts worry the deficits are so high that foreigners could at some point lose their appetite for dollar-denominated investments. That could lead to a rush for the exits, plunging the value of the dollar and stock prices while causing interest rates to soar.

The higher interest rates would act as a drag on the U.S. economy. They would force up borrowing costs, for example, for home mortgages, auto loans and the investment spending that businesses need to expand.

“We can’t keep running current account deficits at these levels. It means we are borrowing nearly 6 percent of our GDP from the rest of the world, and the gap is growing,” said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York.

It’s true that US Economy is still high, as compared with all others, but it seems that it’s oil based strategy has no future in the long term, and long is not that long enough;).

US government couldn’t care less what the rest of the world thinks, chosing Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war, as the U.S. nominee to head the World Bank.

By tradition, the Europeans name the head of the International Monetary Fund, and the Americans pick the boss of the World Bank. This arrangement worked well for some time, but five years ago America blocked the Europeans’ choice to run the IMF, Caio Koch-Weser, and the job eventually went to Horst Köhler (who has since become Germany’s president).

Will the Europeans now try to block the controversial Mr Wolfowitz? Reuters news agency reported on Wednesday March 16th, the day the nomination was announced, that Mr Wolfowitz’s name had already been unofficially floated among members of the Bank’s board, and rejected. The reaction to his nomination in Europe ranged from mildly positive to hostile. As Germany’s development minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, put it: “Enthusiasm in old Europe is rather limited.? But there may be little the Europeans can do to stop Mr Wolfowitz taking the Bank’s reins, as America is its biggest shareholder and the second-biggest, Japan, has backed Mr Bush’s man.

As such, on Thursday, the Chair of the Development Committee of the European Parliament, Louisa Morgantini, has written on behalf of her Committee calling on European governments “to open up the process to accept other candidates“.

Mr Wolfowitz, who is currently America’s deputy secretary of defence, has had several stints in US government, including in the administration of George Bush senior. At a press conference on Wednesday, the president described his nominee as “a compassionate, decent man“? and a “skilled diplomat”?.

John Cavanagh, director of the liberal Institute for Policy Studies here, compiled a sarcastic list of Mr. Wolfowitz’s qualifications, first among them that he would follow in the footsteps of Mr. McNamara, “who also helped kill tens of thousands of people in a poor country most Americans couldn’t find on a map before getting the job.”

Well, this “skilled diplomat” was among prominent members of the administration who engaged in a campaign two years ago to assure Americans that the financial costs of invading Iraq would be slight. These assurances were delivered against expert advice.

“There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be US taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people,” Mr Wolfowitz told a House of Representatives hearing on March 27 2003.

“On a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50bn and $100bn over the course of the next two or three years,” he said. “We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

In the two years since the invasion, Iraq’s oil revenues have totalled $25bn, despite soaring world prices. The cost of the war and reconstruction has exceeded $200bn so far.

If approved by the bank’s board, Wolfowitz would assume command of an institution that lends about $20 billion a year to developing nations and often plays an enormously influential role in shaping their policies because of the conditions it sets for aid.

Sources:

http://www.worldbankpresident.org/

Washington Post

Economist

Financial Times