LII - Real GDP Growth 2012

    This post is a summary of two reports published at http://www.imf.org/,One on May 2013, with the title of "Regional Economic Reports." Another on April 2013, with the title of "World Economic Outlook." Also in this post, two others summaries. "Brazil hits the wall," published at http://www.forbes.com, on December,27,2012. And "Brazil`s GDP: slower and ever slower," published at http://www.ft.com/, on December,31,2012.

            Growth in Latin America is set to pick up to about 3.5% in 2013, broadly in line with potential. The region continues to benefit from favorable external financing conditions and relatively high commodity prices, but these tailwinds are unlikely to last forever. The key challenges for policymakers today are preserving macroeconomic stability, and building strong foundations for sustained growth in the future. More prudent fiscal policy would help ease pressure on capacity constraints, mitigate the widening of current account deficits, and prepare to deal with adverse external shocks. Exchange rate flexibility and prudential measures should continue to be used to discourage speculative capital flows. Sustaining strong output growth will require structural reforms to raise productivity growth.

               Brazil has had a tough two years, this last one in particular has been rough. A crime wave swept in São Paulo. Then there is this: the economy is underperforming everyone`s standard. Brazil, a country that wants to be the country of the future, with all the amenities and a stable economy, has seen its confidence dwindle. Inflation is on the rise again. The economy has gone from 5% growth to under 1% growth in the two years period. Interest rates are lower than they have ever been, but have done very little good, companies are not investing. Per capita income has dropped to its lowest level in years, roughly $ 11,670, a 9% drop. Brazilians are growing deeper in debt. Personal debt now accounts for 44.5% of median family income. It is also the tenth straight monthly increase, and the highest level of all time. The good news is that, the brazilian labor market remains strong.

                 Economist surveyed by brazil`s central bank have revised their forecasts for 2013. Economic growth in 2012 was less than 1%, they reckon. That is less than a quarter of what Guido Mantega, finance minister hoped for when the year started. The survey also has seen consumer price inflation creeping up, to 5.7% in 2012, from 5.4% four weeks ago. Nor is there much cheer for 2013. Predictions are unchanged from last week, inflation is seen almost a full point above the target, while GDP growth is down, from 3.7% four weeks ago to 3.3%.

                            REAL   GDP  GROWTH  2012

    Latin America countries                           Others  countries

         Panama   10.7%                                 Mongolia   12.3%

         Peru       6.2%                                   Angola     8.4%       

         Chile      5.6%                                   China      7.8%

         Venezuela    5.5%                                India      4.0%

         Bolivia      5.2%                                 Australia    3.6%

         Nicaragua   5.2%                               Russia      3.4%

         Costa Rica    5.1%                             U.S.A.      2.2%

         Ecuador       4.8%                              Japan       2.0%

         Colombia    4.0%                               Canada      1.8%

         Mexico     3.9%                                Germany      0.9%

         Uruguay     3.9%                                  U.K.       0.2%

         Argentina    1.9%                               France        0.0%

         Brazil     0.9%                                  Spain        -1.4%

         Paraguay   -1.2%                               Italy         -2.3%

                                                                 Portugal       -3.2%

LI - The Educational Value of an Election Year

         This post is a summary of two articles. The first one, with the title above and published at http://www.c2educate.com/, on October 2012, written by Ashley Zahn. The second, "The Country that Stopped Reading." Published at http://global.nytimes.com/, on March 5th,2013.Written by David Toscana.

           Education policy has gotten little play in this year`s election season and we were more than a little disappointed. Luckly, education did enjoy a moment in the spotlight during the presidential debate of tuesday, but only because of a creative twist on a question about gun control. When asked about gun violence, Obama deftly changed the topic of discussion. Rather than addressing a pointed question about his lack of gun control policies, Obama argued that initiatives intended to improve education would do far more to limit gun violence than would a new weapon ban. It is vital that education become a greater issue in our elections. Across the country, our schools and our students are in trouble. We are in the middle in most international educational rankings. We are facing a globalized world in which our economic well-being is dependent on our ability to produce skilled workers. And the only way to produce these workers is by improving the quality of our public schools. The question is: how can we make education more important to our leaders? In the short term, the answer is by voting for those candidates who demonstrate concern for the quality of education. In the long term, educating our children about their civic responsabilities. Part of the reason that politics have become so centered on flash and sound bites rather than on substantive discourse is because so many people choose not to vote. If we can succeed in raising a generation of future voters who will actively take part in our elections, we might also succeed in making sure that the issues that really matter, like education, are brought to the foreground. But beyond teaching the impact that voting can make and the basic outlines of the constitution, most schools do little to encourage activism or civic engagement. We can not depend on our schools to help themselves by teaching young people how to change the world. Teaching civic duty and the community involvement has to start at home. By teaching your children to pay attention to the world around them, and to take part in changing the things that need to improve, we can create a better future. And it is never too early to start.

          Years ago, schools was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline and study. Teachers were respected figures. Nowadays more children attend schools than ever before, but they learn much less. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a UNESCO assessment of reading habits a few years ago. Despite recent gains in industrial development, Mexico is floundering and faltering socially, politically and economically because so many of its citizens do not read. When I spoke at a recent event for promoting reading for an audience of 300 teens who likes to read? I asked. Only one hand went up. I asked them to tell me why they did not like reading. The result was predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to articulate a sentence, express an idea. With no intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. This is not about better funding. Mexico spends more than 5% of its GDP on education, about the same as the U.S. And it is not about pedagogical theories. It needs to make students read. But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that book give people expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people learned more than a training of dish washer.

       

L - World Press Freedom Day 2013

   This post is a summary of one article published at http://www.un.org/, on May 3, 2013, with the title above. And a report published at http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index, on may 2013 with the title of: " 2013 World Press Freedom Index: Dashed Hopes After Spring."

   United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said, " a fundamental right on its own, freedom of expression also provides the conditions for protecting and promoting all other human rights. But its exercise does not happen automatically, it requires a safe environment for dialogue, where all can speak freely and openly, without fear or reprisal."

    The world press freedom day was proclaimed by the U.N. general assembly in December 1993. Since then, May 3, the anniversary of the declaration of Windhoek is celebrated worldwide. It is an opportunity to:

_ Celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom.

_ Assess the state of press freedom throughout the world.

_ Defend the media from attacks on their independence.

_ Pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty.

     There is a growing awareness that ensuring freedom of expression must also necessarily extend to safety online, and securing a free and open internet as the precondition for it. The digitalization of the media reinforces the global trend of freelancing by further expanding journalism beyond the ranks of employees and media institutions. Included in the supply of news today are citizens reporters and individuals bloggers, it is in society`s interests that they receive the same protection as professional journalists. Digitalization also means that more and more information is transmitted and stored online. Journalists have had their computer confiscated and hacking. Journalists increasingly need to know how to protect data.

   On average, in past years, only about one-in-ten cases of crimes against journalists and social media producers has led to a conviction. This level of impunity is not just bad in principle in terms of flouting the rule of law, in terms of which every state has a duty to protect its citizens. On even greater concern, because of the visibility involved, impunity for attacks on journalists in particular sends a signal to the wider public to keep quiet about corruption and human rights violations. The result is a self-censorship across a society and an erosion of public faith in the judicial system. In this way, impunity also feeds a vicious cycle.

   This year`s press freedom index is a better reflection of the attitudes  of governments towards media freedom in the medium or long term. The same three countries that headed the index last year hold the top positions again.( Finland, Netherlands and Norway ). At the other end of the index, the same three countries as ever, occupy the last three places in the index. ( Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea ).

     In the Americas, just as the emergence of major protest movements ( and ensuring crackdowns ) had a big impact on the rankings of certain countries in 2011, so a decline in the protests has logically had an impact a year later. Chile, for example, rose 20 places to 60th in the index after the previous year`s student protests. For similar reasons, the U.S. rose 15 places to 32nd, recovering a ranking more appropriate to the "country of the First Amendment." The clearest new trends are to be seen in the south. Brazil fell again, this time 9 places to 108th, after falling 41 places in 2011. Its media landscape is also badly distorted. The regional media are exposed to attacks, physical violence against their personnel, and there is also court censorship orders, which also target the blogosphere. Despite a high level of physical violence against journalists, Peru rose 10 places to 105th, now topping Brazil, itself one place above Bolivia 109th, where several media were the targets of spectacular arson or dynamite attacks and both national and local polarization are having an impact.                                                                                                            

Government, Geography, and Growth

    This post is a summary of a book review essay, published at http://www.foreignaffairs.com, on October 2012. And was written by Jeffrey D. Sachs, professor at Columbia University and adviser to U.N. Author of "The Price of Civilization"(2011). The title is above.

        According to the economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson, economic development hinges on a single factor: a country`s political institutions, more specifically, as they explain in their new book, "Why Nations Fail," it depend on the existence of "inclusive" political institutions, defined as pluralistic systems that protect individual rights.

        The broad hypothesis of "Why Nations Fail" is that government that protect property rights and represent their people preside over economic development. Their causal logic runs something like this: economic development depend on new inventions, and inventions need to be researched, developed, and widely distributed. Those activities happen only when inventors can expect to reap the economic benefits of their work. The profit motive also diffusion. Western readers will take comfort in the idea that democracy and prosperity go hand in hand and that authoritarian countries are bound to either democratize or run out of economic steam.

        This tale sounds good, but it is simplistic. Although domestic politics can encourage or impede economic growth, so can many other factors, such as geopolitics, technological discoveries, and natural resources, to name a few. Acemoglu and Robinson`s simple narrative contains a number of conceptual shortcomings. For one, the authors incorrectly assume that authoritarian elites are hostile to economic progress. In fact, dictators have sometimes acted as agents of economic reforms, often because international threats forced their hands. After Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806, Prussia`s authoritarian rulers embarked on administrative and economic reforms in an effort to strengthen the state. The same impulse drove reforms behind Japan`s Meiji restoration in the late nineteenth century, and South Korea`s industrialization in the 1960s. China did not become the fastest-growing economy in history after 1980 thanks to domestic invention, it did so because it rapidly adopted technology that were created elsewhere. It has aimed, with great skill, to integrate its local production into global tech systems in the process. 

       The overarching effect of these analytic shortcomings is that when Acemoglu and Robinson purport to explain why nations fail to grow, they act like doctors trying to confront many illnesses. Whether a sick body or an underperforming economy, failure can arise for any number of reasons. Bad governance is indeed devastating, but so, too are geopolitical threats, adverse geography, debt crises, and cultural barriers.

       As for the future of development, Acemoglu and Robinson`s narrow focus on political institutions offers insufficient predictive help. Consider how ineffectual the theory would have been at foretelling the global winners and losers in economic development from 1980 to 2010. The authors tell a story many want to hear: that western democracy pays off not only politically but also economically, yet, economic life neither so straighforward nor so fair. Authoritarian regimes sometimes achieve rapid growth, and democracies sometimes languish. Author`s story sometimes is right: politics matters, and bad governance can kill development. Yet the key to understanding development is to remain open to the future complexity of the global processes of innovation and difusion and the myriad pathways through which politics, geography, economics, and culture can shape the flows of technology around the world.

     Hinge - depend entirely on

     Preside over - be in charge of a situation.

     Steam - force of movement

     Overarching - dealing with everything

     Languish - grow weak or feeble

     Myriad - very great number

Privacy Rights Activism in Latin America

      This post is a summary of an article published at https://www.eff.org/ in September 24,2012. And was written by Katitza Rodriguez and Renata Avila. The title is above.

          Throughout Latin America, new surveillance practices threaten to erode individuals` privacy, yet there is limited public awareness about the civil liberties implications of these rapid changes. Some countries are pursuing cybercrime policies that seek to increase law enforcement power without strong legal safeguards.

          For Latin America privacy advocates, all of this makes for an uphill battle. There are few NGOs working in the region specifically on privacy and surveillance, and the lack of it, is further complicated by a pervasive societal attitude that security trumps privacy. Despite the inherent difficulties, the privacy movement has been working tirelessly to shed light on overarching surveillance practice and to preserve civil liberties. Social media and blogs have made a huge impact in activism work in several countries.

         In Brazil, "Movimento Mega"(http://movimentomega.org.br/)is a grassroot movement responding to threats to internet rights. Recently fought an invasive cybercrime bill by advocating a civil rights framework for the internet that include safeguards for free expression and privacy. The Brazilian Institute of Consumer Protection (http://www.idec.org.br/)has also launched a similar campaign. Another important Brazilian NGO is Institute NUPEF, (http://nupef.org.br/)educates policymakers and civil society on internet rights, including privacy.

         There are also longstanding  human  rights  NGOs  who are  beginning to focus more in internet policy ( including privacy ). For instance, "Asosiación pro derechos humanos" has challenged illegal government surveillance in Peru during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori. Fujimori has been jailed for human rights violations after being tried for violating the secrecy of communication and other human rights abuses during his presidency. It marked the first time a elected former president was prosecuted at home for serious human rights violations, including the violation of privacy.

        Privacy activism in Latin America is on the rise, and several countries still lack strong civil society groups working in this area. Human rights NGOs in the region tend to prioritize traditional causes such as health, education, citizen security and ongoing battles surrounding forced disappearances and torture. While privately funded organizations work passionately on privacy related topics, privacy is not their sole priority.

       Unpaid volunteers are driving much of this activism, and the organizations struggle with limited resources. Despite these challenges and limited coverage of their efforts in the mainstream media, support for their campaigns has continued to grow.

      Trump - beat by saying something is better.

      Shed - accidentlly drop or spill.

      Secrecy - ability to keep a secret, privacy,seclusion.

      Grassroot - most basic level of an activity or organization.