domingo, 29 de mayo de 2022
lunes, 16 de mayo de 2022
lunes, 11 de abril de 2022
Will Putin Kill the Global Economy? (Paul Krugman)
The New
York Times. OPINION. PAUL KRUGMAN
Will Putin
Kill the Global Economy?
March 31,
2022
Economic
commentators always reach for historical analogies, and with good reason. For
example, those who had studied past banking crises had a much better grasp of
what was happening in 2008 than those who hadn’t. But there’s always the
question of which analogy to choose.
Right now,
many people are harking back to the stagflation of the 1970s. I’ve argued at
some length that this is a bad parallel; our current inflation looks very
different from what we saw in 1979-80, and probably much easier to end.
There are,
however, good reasons to worry that we’re seeing an economic replay of 1914 —
the year that ended what some economists call the first wave of globalization,
a vast expansion of world trade made possible by railroads, steamships and
telegraph cables.
In his 1919
book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” John Maynard Keynes — who would
later teach us how to understand depressions — lamented what he saw, correctly,
as the end of an era, “an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of
man.” On the eve of World War I, he wrote, an inhabitant of London could easily
order “the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might
see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.”
But it was
not to last, thanks to “the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism,
of racial and cultural rivalries.” Sound familiar?
Keynes was
right to see World War I as the end of an era for the global economy. To take
one clearly relevant example, in 1913 the Russian empire was a huge wheat
exporter; it would be three generations before some of the former republics of
the Soviet Union resumed that role. And the second wave of globalization, with
its world-spanning supply chains made possible by containerization and
telecommunications, didn’t really get going until around 1990.
So are we
about to see a second deglobalization? The answer, probably, is yes. And while
there were important downsides to globalization as we knew it, there will be
even starker consequences if, as I and many others fear, we see a significant
rollback in world trade.
Why is
world trade taking a hit? Vladimir Putin’s botched war of conquest has, of
course, meant an end to wheat exports from Ukraine, and it probably cut off
much of Russia’s sales, too. It’s not entirely clear how sharply Russia’s
exports of oil and natural gas have been reduced; Europe has been reluctant to
impose sanctions on imports of products on which, fecklessly, it allowed itself
to become dependent, but the European Union is moving to end that dependence.
Wait,
there’s more. You mightn’t have expected Putin’s war to have much of an effect
on auto production. But modern cars include a lot of wiring, including a
specialized part called a wire harness — and many of Europe’s wire harnesses,
it turns out, are made in Ukraine. (In case you’re wondering, most U.S. wire
harnesses are made in Mexico.)
Still,
Russia’s decision to turn itself into an international pariah probably wouldn’t
by itself be enough to drastically reduce world trade — as China, which plays a
key role in many supply chains, could if it decided to turn inward.
But while
Russia’s assault on Ukraine hasn’t inspired China to invade anyone (yet?),
there are troubles on that front, too.
Most
immediately, China’s Covid response, which was highly successful in the
pandemic’s initial stages, is becoming an increasing source of economic
disruption. The Chinese government still insists on using homegrown vaccines
that don’t work very well, and it’s still responding to outbreaks with
draconian lockdowns, which are causing problems not just for China but also for
the rest of the world.
Beyond
that, what Putin has taught us is that countries run by strongmen who surround
themselves with yes-men aren’t reliable business partners. A Chinese
confrontation with the West, economic or military, would be wildly irrational —
but so was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Tellingly, the Ukraine war appears to
have led to large-scale capital flight from … China.
So if
you’re a business leader right now, surely you’re wondering whether it’s smart
to stake your company’s future on the assumption that you’ll keep being able to
buy what you need from authoritarian regimes. Bringing production back to
nations that believe in the rule of law may raise your costs by a few percent,
but the price may be worth it for the stability it buys.
If we are
about to see a partial retreat from globalization, will that be a bad thing?
Wealthy, advanced economies will end up only slightly poorer than they would
have been otherwise; Britain managed to keep growing despite the decline in
world trade after 1913. But I’m worried about the impact on nations that have
made progress in recent decades but would be desperately poor without access to
world markets — nations like Bangladesh, whose economic achievements have
depended crucially on its garment exports.
Unfortunately,
we’re relearning the lessons of World War I: The benefits of globalization are
always at risk from the threat of war and the whims of dictators. To make the
world durably richer, we need to make it safer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/opinion/putin-global-economy.amp.html
martes, 29 de marzo de 2022
miércoles, 2 de marzo de 2022
Russians and Ukrainians (The Economist)
Andrei
Zorin, a professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, explains how
national mythologies foment conflict
Russians
see Ukrainians as brothers. But families sometimes break apart
Feb 22nd
2022 (The Economist)
Political
leaders tend to believe that they take their own decisions. In fact, they
are often dragged into action by the course of events, and enslaved by popular
mythology that they themselves have promoted. With conflict looming between
Russia and Ukraine, it is therefore important to understand the history of the
two countries’ relationship. Fundamental differences exist between their
historical mythologies, and between how they view themselves and each other.
In a
televised address to the Russian nation on February 21st President Vladimir
Putin all but declared war on the Ukrainian government in Kyiv. To the
bewilderment of many observers, Mr Putin has recently become an amateur
historian and started writing essays about Russia’s past. His address drew on
the most important of those, published last summer, in which he insisted that
Russians and Ukrainians are of the same Slavic nation. This revived thinking
from before the revolution of 1917 which applied the term “Russian”
indiscriminately to Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians. It defined them
respectively as Velikorosy, Malorosy and Belorusy (Great,
Little and White Russians). The Soviet regime got rid of those titles, but
retained and enhanced the traditional notion of “brotherly” relations between
the countries, with Russians playing the role of elder brothers.
Today, when
Russia and Ukraine are on the brink of a major war, that idea of kinship may
seem preposterous. Yet few conflicts are as deep and irreconcilable as family
feuds. The omens are especially bad when one of the “brothers” believes in his
natural right to be in charge of the whole family and the other is
independent-minded and rebellious. Remember the Bible, where human history
begins with a fratricide.
The family
tensions between Russia and Ukraine are aggravated by a dispute over their
heritage. Russia’s understanding of history idealises Kyiv as “the mother of
all Russian cities”, and the source of Russia’s religion, culture, alphabet and
a network of dynastic and military connections. The huge statue of the Kievan
prince Vladimir, who baptised Old Rus, was erected in 2016 near the entrance to
the Kremlin. If this claim on Kyiv’s past were to be renounced, not only would
Russian history be shorter by at least a quarter of a millennium, but Russia
would also, more importantly, be deprived of its European identity.
Russia’s
historical narrative is to a large extent defined by miraculous transformations
that turn even the most humiliating defeats into apocalyptic triumphs. The
traditional stories of major Russian wars–be it against the Poles in the 17th
century, the Swedes in the 18th, the French in the 19th or the Germans in the
20th–all follow the same pattern. After initial defeats that put the country on
the brink of utter ruin, a strong leader mobilises the nation and imposes a
devastating defeat on the enemy.
Mr Putin
appears to be exploiting this tradition. Over the past 20 years his propaganda
has attempted to convince Russians that the collapse of the Soviet Union was
not their country’s liberation from communist dictatorship but “the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. And that this was caused by
dastardly Western intrigue. The implication is that this “catastrophe” should
once again be turned into a glorious victory. That process supposedly started
in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. The reunification of the broken Slavic
body, by bringing Belarus and Ukraine back under the protection of Great
Russia, as the Kremlin imagines it, would crown Mr Putin’s triumph.
The
Ukrainian identity could hardly be more different. It has been built in
contradistinction to that of “Moscals”, as Ukrainians once called their
northern neighbours. Whereas Russia’s historical narrative is built on the
notion of a powerful autocrat, Ukrainian political imagination is shaped by the
legacy of the Zaporozhskaya Sich. This Cossack military democracy
navigated between three major powers–Russia, Poland and Turkey–for over 200
years and managed to sustain its own independence until the alliance with
Moscow signed in 1654 by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky, the elected leader of
the Sich, gradually sucked Ukraine into Russia’s orbit.
For more
than three centuries Ukrainians made spectacular careers in Muscovy, the
Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, holding positions of ministers, church
metropolitans, governors, generals and cult figures. Even today many leading
Russian officials were born in Ukraine and carry distinctly Ukrainian surnames.
The price of such successes was the suppression of the original Ukrainian
national, cultural and linguistic specificity regarded in Russia as a sort of
stubborn and eccentric superstition.
But
nostalgia for that past independence was never fully extinguished. The ideal of
the Zaporozhskaya Sich lingered on. It was present even in the
hearts of communist apparatchiks, such as Leonid Kravchuk, the last leader of
Soviet Ukraine and the man who took it into independence in 1991.
Russia’s
leaders have never come to terms with the idea of Ukraine as a separate nation.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they saw its drift towards the West as
a betrayal of Russian-Ukrainian familial ties. And yet, however permanent such
sentiments may seem, they have changed in the past.
Consider
how Russian state and church propaganda accused the Poles of betraying the
brotherhood of Slavic Orthodox nations following Polish uprisings in the 19th
century. Russia accused the Poles of being seduced first by the Vatican and
then by revolutionary France. At the same time, for liberal Russians critical
of the authorities, Poland was the embodiment of the European world and thus a
subject of adoration.
Today
Poland is predominantly perceived in Russia as just another foreign country.
Ukraine has replaced Poland in Russia’s consciousness and similarly divided
Russian society. As with Poland in the 19th century, the jealous animosity that
many Russians experience today towards their unfaithful “brothers” in Kyiv can
be seen as the inchoate recognition of the Ukrainians as a separate nation.
History has
unlimited resources to teach its lessons even to the most stubborn students. I
am all but sure that the majority of Russians, and their leaders, will
eventually learn to accept Ukrainian independence. Alas, that prediction will
be of little comfort to those who have to bear the cost of their obstinacy
today. ■
Andrei
Zorin is a professor of Russian at the University of Oxford.
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