Exports

Here’s an interesting and quick item to check out on a Friday. This map gives an attractive, at-a-glace look at some of the world’s key natural resources, organized by country. A couple of things to note that are East Asia-related: China leads more categories (at least on this map) than any other country, including wheat, cotton, gold and rice. Thailand and Indonesia also are represented, as leaders in rubber production.

Click map to view large.

It's usually worth noting the source of the data used for these types of graphics. The sources named are the CIA World Factbook, the USDA World Crop Supply Assessment and the British Geological Survey's World Mineral Statistics.

(Hat tip: Datavisualization and Webdesigner Depot)

The crisis certainly hit China hard, but the spillover to banks has been minimal thus far. Photo courtesy of randylane under a Creative Commons license.

The story of the current financial crisis is well-known now and much has been written.  Indeed, we’re now at the point where many observers are indicating that the crisis is now at an end.  It would seem that the immediate financial sector impacts are leveling off, but in many countries the economic recovery will likely take a long time.  However, a number of emerging markets have come out of the crisis in relatively stable shape.  China is the most prominent example.  In fact, one might say that China is having a “good crisis” in certain ways as it has lifted its prominence – it is the one large country seen as leading the world out of this global crisis.  The same applies for China’s financial system given that many of its banks are now the largest in the world and (at least on the surface) posting strong performance. 

When China’s government started to work on and implement its massive stimulus program in November last year in light of a rapid deterioration of the world economy, economists working on China had to work out what it all meant for China’s growth, the composition of growth, and the rest of the world.

Many foreign observers doubted that the stimulus would be effective enough to boost domestic demand in the first place. But even among those with higher expectations in this regard—like we at the World Bank—many wondered what the stimulus would mean for the rest of the world.

Usually, when one country grows much faster than other countries, we expect imports into that country to rise much faster than exports (or, fall much less). However, in the case of China, exports had for quite some time been outgrowing imports by a large margin and many were skeptical that this would change even as economic conditions were changing in a pronounced way.

I apologize for the lack of recent posts, but I have been traveling in the region and then getting over a cold, so I’m finally back in action.  One of the stops during the trip last month was to Jakarta to participate in our internal Economist’s Forum.  This forum was very interesting and included sessions with the Indonesian Minister of Finance, as well as the Minister of Trade.  The session that I participated in was focused on the implications of the current global economic crisis and the impacts on East Asian financial sectors.  This was a good opportunity to consolidate our own thoughts on the subject and to lay out the basic issues as we see them today (I’ve attached the presentation, which comes with the required caveat that these are not official World Bank views, but instead my personal views). 

This presentation starts by running through what we know, what we can expect to know and how we know what we know, and why it is so hard to know anything in the area of corporate and financial sectors.  We then move into how we see the crisis coming to Asia, the impact on corporations, the spillover to the financial sector, the policy responses to the crisis to date, and finally what the World Bank is doing.  We begin by admitting that it is difficult to do accurate corporate and financial sector analysis for a wide range of reasons, ranging from problems with reporting and disclosure to weaknesses in regulatory standards and financial supervision practices.  Despite this constraint, we can see some general regional trends...