The whole blog is worth reading, but Marginal Revolution points to their most recent post, providing an interactive map of India shaded by % Households that do not own durable goods (any).

Around 18% of households in India don’t own any of the assets listed on the census form – that means no phone, no TV or radio, and no bicycles or other vehicles of any kind. The map below colour-codes districts according to the proportion of such households in each districts. Lighter-coloured districts are ‘better off’ – fewer such households exist in those areas. Darker-coloured districts are ones with the highest proportion of such ‘asset-less’ households.

As a point of comparison with our measure (18% households across India), the official poverty rate in the country in 2009-10 was around 30%. So another way to think of our measure is as one which covers the ‘poor among the poor’.

Doctors at a military hospital in Beijing had warned Xia’s family that he would die without the blood needed for a lifesaving operation. But the hospital had no blood to spare, forcing the family out of desperation to shop for blood on the street.

The patient’s sister, Xia Guoqing, said they turned to one of the many criminals who roam Beijing hospitals, the local Red Cross of China Blood Center and even city streets offering bags of blood.

The family paid more than 10,000 yuan, she said, and doctors performed the operation.

More at Caixin.

After Obama’s fairly thorough re-election on Tuesday, there has been a predictable amount of talk about the future of the Republican party and the Republican coalition. The most salient point made was that because of demographic trends – in Florida in particular – Republicans will have to turn away from the nativist wing of the party and begin appealing to Mexican-Americans.

It took about three days for that to happen. From Wonkbook:

Game change? Hannity, Murdoch and Boehner come out for immigration reform

Demographics are partially to blame for the Republicans’ major disadvantage in the Electoral College. ”The problem for Republicans is that in [red states], and others like Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, they are now winning by such large margins there that their vote is distributed inefficiently in terms of the Electoral College…By contrast, a large number of electorally critical states — both traditional swing states like Iowa and Pennsylvania and newer ones like Colorado and Nevada — have been Democratic-leaning in the past two elections…The Republican Party will have four years to adapt to the new reality. Republican gains among Hispanic voters could push Colorado and Nevada back toward the tipping point, for example.” Nate Silver in The New York Times.

Boehner is ‘confident’ of a deal on immigration. ”Fresh off an election in which Hispanic voters largely sided with Democrats, Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that he was ‘confident’ Congress and the White House could come up with a comprehensive immigration solution. Immigration reform is ‘an important issue that I think ought to be dealt with,’ Mr. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said in an interview with Diane Sawyer on ‘ABC World News.’ ‘This issue has been around far too long,’ he said, ‘and while I believe it’s important for us to secure our borders and to enforce our laws, I think a comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I’m confident that the president, myself, others, can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.’” Jennifer Steinhauer in The New York Times.

@jonathanweisman: I watched immigration bills die in Senate twice under a hail of verbal gunfire from conservative talk radio. Will talkers follo Hannity?

And Sean Hannity said he’s changed his mind on immigration. ”Fox News’ Sean Hannity told his radio listeners Thursday that he’s ‘evolved’ on immigration and thinks undocumented immigrants without criminal records should have a ‘pathway to citizenship.’ Noting that Hispanic voters overwhelmingly backed President Obama in Tuesday’s election (as the white vote declined), Hannity said that the Republican party could only compete for Latino voters if they took immigration off the table…Hannity is a pundit, not a politician, but for such a high-profile conservative it’s a notable shift. A pathway to citizenship for all law-abiding undocumented immigrants goes beyond the DREAM Act opposed by most Republicans.” Rachel Weiner in The Washington Post.

@rupertmurdoch: Must have sweeping, generous immigration reform,make existing law- abiding Hispanics welcome. Most are hard working family people.

There’s a fairly sizable portion of the national Republican party that is for immigration reform. But as George W. Bush found out, the problem is dealing with local representatives. Republican redistricting efforts have often explicitly aimed at decreasing the minority population of Republican districts, which can mute or even reverse the impact of the growing hispanic population. No matter how well the national party sells immigration reform, they’ll beating against a well tried and tested electoral strategy.

This Chinese language article about Foxconn’s hiring in it’s Zhengzhou plant in the lead-up to the iPhone five is rather epic.

On September 12th, the day Apple released the iPhone 5, there were more than 2 million orders for the phone. In fact, from August, the number of production bases Foxconn in China has received from Apple iPhone5 production tasks. The Zhengzhou factory has a daily production capacity of 200,000 phone. To ensure maximum production capacity, Foxconn Zhengzhou needed to recruit 200,000 workers, they recruited 50,000 people in September alone. 

When Foxconn invested in Zhengzhou it was promised access to a number of preferential policies, including the help of the Henan Provincial Government to recruit new employees. In a meeting on August 4 this year the province agreed to help recruit 200,000 workers for foxconn. Recruitment stations were set up all over the city, fees for medical checks were waived, and the government offered a Rmb500 subsidy to workers that stayed at the factory for three months.

When Foxconn initially settled in Zhengzhou, the employees’ basic salary was 1,350 yuan, on April 1 this year it rose to 1,550 yuan. On August 1, [Foxconn CEO Terry] Gou personally announced that the starting starting salary would be raised to 1,800 yuan per month, equal to Shenzhen and Chengdu.

There’s a lot more in there, with particularly interesting content about urbanization. The factory only opened in 2010, and city infrastructure is still adapting..

By 2020, the Zhengzhou Airport area [where foxconn is based] will reach a total population of 750,000. In the future it could reach 1.5 million. Numerous local shops have closed due to the rising cost of rent, while others are under development. Henan Kang Park, one project currently under development, will cover 100,000 square metres, with shopping facilities targeted to Foxconn employee’s income levels.

 

Evan Osnos has a post up about the “Kung Fu Panda problem,” namely, why is it that China is so bad at marketing it’s local culture. His conclusions are political.

In China, culture and the arts develop under the watchful eye of the government, and anything too hip or interesting gets either shut down or bought up. In Korea, by contrast, artists and entertainers thrive in a space that is highly commercialized but also pretty much free of the heavy hand of the state.

This is all in reference to the satirical music video “Gangnam style,” which is pretty amazing. You should probably watch it (again) right away.

Done? Good. Now watch this nearly equally amazing music video.

Did you see it? The PSY guy might do a slightly better horsey dance than Jay Chou, but Jay Chou was riding a pink horse, and he was doing it 2007. So that’s pretty awesome.

Jay Chou is Taiwanese but he is still primarily making music (and hilariously campy music videos) for people living in Mainland China, and he moves fairly fluidly through the media markets of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China. He’s kind of a figurehead of what one might call a Greater China media market, which theoretically encompasses 1.4 billion people (or whatever percentage of those purchase media). It’s a market that South Korean K-Pop singers care about considerably more than the American media market, and to an extent are also influenced by.

Chinese comedy is also known for the popularity absurdist satire, with the catch that, it’s very vebal and a lot of the jokes are untranslatable. The 2006 film Crazy Stone made a 900% return on investment in its initial run, with jokes that played off the differences between Chongqing, Hunan and Hong Kong slang.

None of this is to question k-pop’s superiority in the realm of dancingness, it’s more to say that it’s a bad idea to judge a country’s cultural product by what’s popular in America.

From the New York Times (Via Marginal Revolution):

That is because Mr. Oesch, 60, who cares for a herd of 44 Red Holstein and Jersey dairy cows, is helping to test a device that implants sensors in cows to let farmers know when they are in heat. When that is the case, the device sends an SMS to the farmer’s phone. The Swiss do not settle for half measures: the SMS can be in any one of Switzerland’s three main languages — German, French and Italian — plus English or Spanish.

The Effect of Labor Mobility Restrictions on Human Capital Accumulation in China, Yao Pan

I find the human capital decreased sharply, as measured by high school enrollment and dropout rates, when the mobility restriction is removed. This finding indicates considerable indirect returns to education stemming from the Hukou system in the presence of education-based selective migration, over and above the usual direct pecuniary returns. These results reveal the important role of the Hukou system on encouraging educational investment in China.

Relaxing Hukou – Increased Labor Mobility and China’s Economic Geography

We find that increased labor mobility will lead to more pronounced core-periphery outcomes. Interestingly, these agglomerations are not necessarily along the coastal regions. Given the increased importance of China’s internal market, firms agglomerate in the populous heartland of China. China’s internal demand will be the most important determinant of its future economic geography.

Labor Mobility: Implications for Asset Pricing, Andres Donagelo

I construct an empirical measure of labor mobility consistent with the model and document an economically significant cross-sectional relation between labor mobility, operating leverage, and expected returns. I find that firms in highly mobile industries earn returns 5.3% higher than those in less mobile industries.

Three stories that everyone should be keeping their eye on.

1. Latin American export growth has started to outpace China. Analysts are arguing that this is going to be a persistant trend.

2. Net migration from Mexico to the US is shrinking.

3. Much of this is an auto industry story, and is competing with booming demand for automobiles in Asia, and the related increase in automotive R&D in China, South Korea and elsewhere in the region.

A few points to be made on prices in China, related to Scott Sumner (2) and Christopher Balding’s online argument. (I more or less completely agree with Sumner here).

1. Balding admits that Beijing is mostly expensive when you’re talking about luxuries, and tries to make that more relevant by specifying light luxuries like meat, milk and eggs. I’ve always found the uproar over meat prices really questionable, because… well… this is a graph of Chinese meat consumption trends.

It doesn’t really seem like people are being priced out of the market here.  Meat consumption is a relatively new thing in Chinese diets, and it is being heavily subsidized by the state, if anything I would argue it is underpriced.

2. On the real estate front. First of all, Balding mis-cites his statistics. Beijing’s per-captia disposable income is US$5,171 NOT per capita GDP, which in 2011 was between US$12,477 and US$14,034 (depending which population statistics you use). Beijing is also half the size of Belgium, including areas like the Chaoyang district, which has disposable income levels around Rmb38,000 a year (annualizing 1H 2012 stats), and the Fengtai district which has disposable income levels of Rmb 24,835 (2011). Real estate sales are mostly occurring in the urban area of Beijing – which is a lot more urbanized than Waltham Massachusetts, and a lot richer than the overall disposable income statistics.

Update: Rereading Balding’s post, I noticed that he took disposable income numbers (which is different from income), called it per-capita GDP, and compared it to Waltham, MA’s Household income numbers. Waltham’s individual income is US$31,585. The average income in Beijing was US$8,812, which it should again be accented was averaged over a municipality half the size of Belgium.

Beijing is also a first-tier city, most building is being done in second, third and fourth tier cities.

Anecdotally speaking, the second housing controls went into place in China, I couldn’t find a new apartment for less than 50% more than my previous rent, and that was after significant haggling. If overstock were such a big issue, I wouldn’t expect prices to rise nearly so fast.

3. That said, there has clearly been significant misallocation of capital. China has traditionally been prone to asset bubbles, because of poor savings options and the need to hold hard assets as collateral. Despite these purchases a significant portion of China’s urban population is living in inadequate housing. The question is whether the government can either restructure the market, or push a forced intervention (guess which one they’ll try) to allow apartments to be built for lower-income residents.

For all the talk of excess capacity in China, there is an awful lot of demand that is not being met.