Economía

La entidad lanza un servicio que permite hacerse cliente con un selfie y una foto del DNI

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Varios expertos en Educación avanzan las claves del trabajo del futuro en un debate organizado por EL PAÍS y la Fundación Santillana

Not a model of philanthropy

CAPITALISM has clocked the ethical consumer. Shoe brands like TOMS and Skechers tease in customers by matching purchases with a donation of a pair of shoes to a child in need. So far, TOMS has handed out 60m pairs of shoes, letting fashion-conscious consumers feel good about boosting children’s health, access to education and confidence. But evidence suggests that shoppers’ warm glow is unjustified.

Handing out aid in kind gives plenty to worry about. It could suck life from local markets, and foster a culture of aid-dependency. Handing out goods rather than cash runs the risk of spending money on things people neither need nor want. To find out if its intervention had worked, TOMS, to its credit, asked a group of academics to investigate and gave them assurances that they could publish whatever they liked. In late 2012 they randomly picked which of 1,578 children across 18 rural communities in El Salvador would receive pairs of TOMS’ black-canvas, rubber-soled shoes. By comparing the places and children who received the shoes with ones that did not, they could work out how much these boots…Continue reading

AIR-CONDITIONING doesn’t feel like much of a luxury in parts of India, but the taxman begs to differ. Cooled restaurants are deemed posher. Their patrons are liable to additional taxes the unventilated masses do not bear. Luckily for sweat-prone diners there is a catch: the tax only applies to the service and not the food, so only part of the tab incurs the extra levy. In their wisdom, India’s bureaucrats once decided that 60% of a restaurant’s offering is food, and so air-conditioning triggers a service tax payable on just 40% of the bill.

Indirect taxation in India often seems the product of a micromanaging bureaucracy run amok. The result of combined taxes levied by its 29 states, union territories and the central government is that the same products in different regions, or different products in the same region, are taxed at different rates. This makes it difficult to trade between states. Tariffs are enforced by internal borders at which lorries languish for hours. It also distorts the economy in favour of goods and services taxed at lower rates (usually as a result of energetic lobbying). The agreement in August to subsume all manner of…Continue reading

Lin-Keynes is on the left

IT IS not quite Keynes-Hayek, but Lin-Zhang is a marvel in its own right. Perhaps the most famous debate in the history of economics was that between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek—a clash over the benefits and perils of government intervention that exploded in the 1930s and still reverberates today. It has echoed around Chinese lecture halls in recent months. Justin Lin, a former chief economist of the World Bank, who leans to Keynesian faith in public spending, has squared off against Zhang Weiying, a self-professed Hayekian who doubts bureaucrats can ever beat the free market.

Like their predecessors, Mr Lin and Mr Zhang have been sparring over two decades. And whereas Keynes and Hayek were down the road from each other (respectively, in Cambridge and London), the Chinese professors are now only a few paces apart, both at the prestigious Peking University. Their latest debate has been one of their fiercest, becoming a talking point for the domestic press, other academics and even officials.

At issue is one of the big questions facing China’s economy: does industrial policy…Continue reading

EUROPE has yet to produce a rival to Silicon Valley, but London’s “Silicon Roundabout” by Old Street station is closest. As a funding hub, the city’s venture-capital industry tends to attract more money than rivals in Berlin, Munich or Paris. And more venture capital is invested in Britain, relative to its GDP, than in any other big European economy. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union threatens this lead. Besides unknown risks, there is a prosaic worry: the most important backer of such firms is the European Investment Fund (EIF), an EU institution, whose mandate includes “fostering EU objectives”.

As the biggest investor in European venture funds, the EIF supplied almost a fifth of all commitments last year, with Britain, France and Germany the main recipients. It is also among the largest and earliest investors in any fund. For every pound it pumped into Britain in 2015, the EIF reckons it mobilised another four of private capital. Venture-capital managers debate the extent to which the EIF spurs private investment, but generally accept it is a linchpin of the industry. Nenad Marovac, of DN Capital, a technology…Continue reading

AS DONALD TRUMP sees it, America’s trade deficit is a sign of economic weakness, proof that lousy trade deals have sent production overseas. But Uncle Sam does not just import goods from the rest of the world and send nothing in return (though that would be a lucrative arrangement). Rather, the net inflow of goods is matched by a net outflow of stocks, bonds and other financial assets.

That makes America a debtor. In theory the interest and dividends paid to foreigners should chip away at national wealth in future. Since 1989 foreigners have owned more assets in America than Americans have owned overseas; in the jargon, the net international investment position (NIIP) has been negative. But America is an unusual borrower. For almost all of that time, it has received more income on its overseas investments than it has paid out to foreigners. This is strange: it is akin to someone’s savings earning more than enough interest to service his far bigger debts.

This contrast is getting starker (see chart). In recent years the NIIP has tumbled to -44% of GDP, the lowest since 1976, when the data begin. Yet net primary income—the…Continue reading