I recently wrote about sweatshops and suggested that there was a conflict between the “social responsibility” policies of large retailers and the pressure they put on their suppliers to cut prices. It seems I am not the only one who thinks this may be a problem, as this report in The Guardian points out. Using…

Earlier this week I noticed this story about how the currency peg is making it more attractive to invest in equities or property. Then another piece yesterday, worrying that the Hong Kong Dollar is falling in value and that this may cause interest rates to rise and slow down the economy. We need to get…

Simon notes an interesting blog that I have seen before but don’t read regularly, Asian Labour News.  It’s put together by Stephen Frost, who is a Research Fellow at the Southeast Asia Research Centre, part of the City University of Hong Kong, and it is described as “an online database of news about workers in Southeast Asia and…

This week’s Economist has an updated “Big Mac Index”. This attempts to use the price of a Big Mac to determine whether currencies are valued correctly. It also gives you an idea where you might not want to go on holiday with children (assuming they like going to McDonalds). This summer we went on holiday…

There’s an excellent article in this week’s Business Week called “The Folly Of Slapping Quotas On China” which sets out the argument against quotas. It is by Laura D’Andrea Tyson from the London Business School, and she argues that the United States benefits from cheap imports and the main losers are other countries that export…

Jake van der Kamp is back, and today he cautions against reading too much into the retail sales figures. It is a standard fallback for newspapers to print stories about economic statistics without caring whether they are significant or not. House prices are one favourite in Hong Kong, and retail sales are another. Recently we…

An interesting piece about the irony of the USA getting upset with China for being too good at capitalism.