Word: exportability
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...priority: restarting trade. Behind the stomach-churning drop in the world economy is a factor that governments have largely ignored: a slump in trade. The flow of imports and exports has actually contracted more dramatically than the world economy as a whole, because its lifeblood, private-sector trade finance, has dried up. This is fixable, since most governments have export-credit organizations dedicated to trade finance. Governments should instruct them to jump-start trade flows until private sector financiers return...
Today the tigers are being tripped up by this same lifeline. As consumer and industrial demand dries up in recession-racked Western countries, East Asia's export-led nations are proving to be highly vulnerable to a synchronized global slowdown. Among the tigers, overseas trade is shrinking with frightening speed: Taiwan's exports in January plunged 44% from the same month a year earlier, while Singapore's fell 35% and South Korea...
...only just begun," said economist Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. Ajay Chhibber, director of the Asia bureau at the United Nations Development Program in New York City, says the tigers can't expect to weather this recession by temporarily increasing government spending to boost growth until Western export markets recover. "The model where you stimulate and [then] go back to the old days is gone," he says...
Asian leaders and policymakers for years have recognized the need to reduce their dependence on exports. Now that need has become urgent. Export-led Asian countries must diversify their economies by promoting domestic consumption, expanding service sectors and strengthening and extending trade links beyond the U.S. and Europe. Some moves are already under way. Shortly after South Korean President Lee Myung Bak took office last year, he launched a program to improve the service sector by increasing financial aid to targeted businesses and reducing red tape. Singapore is making strides in attracting biotechnology and private-banking businesses to the city...
...Above all, Japan has to cope with the fact that the economic model on which it built both its postwar prosperity and social stability is broken. Japan's spectacularly successful export-oriented industries were responsible for creating the world's second largest economy, and their lifetime-employment policies, with generous benefits, obviated the need for a comprehensive social safety net of the sort familiar to Western Europeans. Then came the bubble. After financial markets were liberalized in the 1980s, Japan went on a debt-fueled binge that made modern Americans look as thrifty as Amish farmers. The stock market soared...