Índia
Interessante dado do Economist de 17 de setembro de 2005: "All of this bodes ill for another important issue in Indo-Iranian relations: a planned $4 billion project to pipe Iranian gas through Pakistan to India. It is a visionary scheme, seen by many as offering the hope not just of greater energy security for India and Pakistan, but of giving all three countries a huge economic stake in regional peace and stability. But it looks as if its abandonment may turn out to be part of the price America demands for its friendship."
Índia, Paquistão e Irã - três países de complicadas relações e altos investimentos nucleares - planejam um gasoduto para tornar a região energeticamente independente. Estados Unidos se mostram contra o projeto. Enquanto isso, americanos tentam dissuadir indianos de cooperarem com o Irã em projetos nucleares.
Telecoms
"It is now no longer a question of whether VOIP will wipe out traditional telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so. People in the industry are already talking about the day, perhaps only five years away, when telephony will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive to buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services. VOIP, in short, is completely reshaping the telecoms landscape. And that is why so many people have been making such a fuss over Skype--a small company, yes, but one that symbolises a massive shift for a trillion-dollar industry." (Economist, 17 de setembro)
O Economist diz que o Skype e a tecnologia VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) vão acabar com a telefonia de longa distância. O indicativo disso é que o eBay pagou U$ 2,6 bilhões pela aquisição da Skype, uma empresa com lucros de apenas U$ 60 milhões.
Japão
Um bom resumo da economia interna japonesa no Economist (17 de setembro):
"Beginning in the 1970s, high spending on public works turned politics into a pork-barrel affair. In the 1990s, when the economy stumbled, the chosen solution was a great burst of Keynesian public spending, which prevented a slump but also gave a big boost to a corrupt and cartelised construction industry, poured concrete over much of the country's natural beauty and kept the political pork-barrel brimming over. In 1998, as fears grew about the national debt, that spending began to be slashed. The question was how far to go. Mr Koizumi's rise to power, in 2001, reflected the views of those who thought it should go further: that the era of pork-barrel politics was over; that the state institutions that facilitated it must be reformed or privatised; and that the public sector had to be trimmed and revamped in preparation for the inevitable increases in health-care and pensions costs resulting from the shrinking and ageing of Japan's population."
O ministro Junichiro Koizumi, do secular Partido Liberal Democrata, foi reeleito com um impressionante blefe político. Na última década, o Japão vem se afastando de políticas keynesianas, usadas para diminuir o impacto da estagnação econômica, que já dura 15 anos. A tarefa de Koizumi, segundo o Economist, é continuar o programa de cortes governamentais (o gasto público japonês é maior que o americano, mas menor do que o Europeu) e de privatizações, para dar estabilidade ao mercado privado. Saúde e pensões são os alvos de Koizumi.
