World of opinion
On managing China’s economy: With its per capita gross domestic product rising to about $4,500, China is at a critical point if it is to avoid the middle income trap and push living standards closer to those of rich economies.
Robust economic growth in 2010 has allowed China much of the wherewithal to underpin an encouraging rise in average income levels.
But if the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) is to become a cornerstone for sustainable and inclusive development in the coming decades, Chinese policymakers should seize the current momentum of sound income growth to enrich people as fast and fairly as possible.
By narrowly outpacing the country’s 10.3-percent GDP growth, Chinese farmers have gained themselves a bigger slice of the growing national wealth. Policymakers should build on this favorable trend of income growth to aggressively tilt the distribution of national wealth in favor of domestic consumers, especially those with less income. …
But such a change is certainly far from enough to make a substantial dent in the country’s widening urban-rural income gap. Farmers still earn one-third the income of urban residents on average.
However, it does signal a crucial shift in the distribution of the country’s growing national wealth in favor of the poor. Small as it is, without such incremental improvements in income distribution, China’s efforts to boost domestic consumption into a leading growth engine would be to no avail. …
After three decades of sizzling economic growth, it is time for China to transform its economic model toward fairer, more consumer-led growth.
China Daily, Beijing
On Sen. Joe Lieberman:
U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut recently announced that he would not be running for a fifth term in 2012.
Some Jews on the Left will be happy to see him go. … Particularly discomfiting for Jewish liberals who see a high wall of separation between church and state as the best guarantor of Jews’ place in American society, has been Lieberman’s consistent call to give religious groups more of a role in the public square. …
Then there is Lieberman’s hawkish foreign policy.
Unlike the vast majority of U.S. Jews, he supported toppling Saddam Hussein by launching a war. …
Lieberman provided the crucial 60th vote for President Barack Obama’s health care reform. …
Since 1988, when he was first voted into the Senate, Lieberman has managed to strike a unique balance between two very Jewish sensibilities: a compassionate regard for protecting the weak at home, with a hawkish realism abroad. …
To bring together these two Jewish ideals, Lieberman succeeded in rising above a partisan politics that encourages conformity and towing the party line, and discourages independent thinking. In the process he paid a heavy political price, but retained his integrity and provided a role model for future politicians. He will be sorely missed.
The Jerusalem Post
On British economy:
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, David Cameron outlined Britain’s plans for growth, while exhorting the European Union to strip away its enterprise-killing regulations. … Even on the top of a Swiss mountain he must have been able to hear the triumphant calls of “told you so” from those commentators who believe that the Coalition’s deficit reduction strategy is leading Britain back into recession.
We are told that the British economy shrank by 0.5 percent in the last quarter of 2010. Even if this Office for National Statistics figure is revised upwards, it is a setback for the government – and a gift to economists and politicians who opposed the brave cuts in state spending announced in George Osborne’s spending review. Their message: stop belt-tightening or face a double-dip recession … Does the 0.5 percent fall in output point to a double-dip recession? No, it does not…. Moreover, economies recovering from recession often suffer from temporary setbacks. …
Cameron finds himself fighting a war on many fronts. But, despite the scale of the challenge he faces, we must not pay too much attention to the crowing of the doom-mongers. Many of the head-shaking economic pundits never wanted the size of the state to shrink in the first place. Their arguments are based on political preference as much as economics: they are opposed to the Coalition’s public service reforms and long for a return to the days of Gordon Brown’s ever-expanding state. They employ dense economic jargon, and some of their criticisms are intelligent, but fundamentally they believe in a model of society that the Government has decisively rejected. …
The Telegraph, London