Global News Journal

from MacroScope:

APEC’s robots stealing the show

A guide at the "Japanese Experience" exhibition talks to Miim, the Karaoke pal robot, on the sidelines of the APEC meetings in Yokohama, Japan on Nov. 10. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao

    Miim is one of the more popular delegates at the APEC meetings in Yokohama Japan. She sings. She dances. She tosses her shoulder length hair. She may not be able to spout an alphabet soup of APEC acronyms like the other Asia-Pacific delegates. But she's still pretty lively. For a robot.

    This week's meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum have been earnest and most comprehensive . Foreign and trade ministers issued a 20-page statement about all the things they talked about -- a giant free trade zone, protectionism, the Doha round, easing restrictions on businesses, simplifying customs procedures, promoting green industries, cooperating on health and security, you name it. They also have been, and pardon my French here, excruciatingly dull. So far, the meetings and their stupefying statements have been a testimonial to Japan's skill at stating the ambiguous. Call it the opaque meetings. Journalists from around the Pacific rim have been desperately trying to find news as the 21 APEC leaders gather for their annual pow-wow this weekend.

     The annual "silly shirts"  photo shoot, in which leaders don native attire for the class picture of their summit is usually good news fodder, but is going to be a  big let-down this year. The leaders are merely being asked to show up wearing "smart casual" for the photo shoot on Saturday night, before they head inside for a Kabuki show.

   Which brings us back to Miim, the karaoke robot. She, er it, is one of 130 exhibits on display at  "Japan Experience", a government-sponsored exhibition in  the Pacific Yokohama convention center where the APEC meetings are taking place. The exhibit also features "personal mobility vehicles",  a cyborg suit named HAL that enables the wearer to lift really heavy stuff and perform heroically in disaster relief, a talking delivery robot, cute robotic seal pets for use in pediatric therapy, and much other cool stuff . 

    "Welcome to APEC Japan 2010," the anatomically correct Miim says. "This exhibition shows Japan's strengths and attractions. Please see, feel and touch advanced technology and initiatives of Japan."

from MacroScope:

Spend Save Man Woman

Far from being lauded as a virtue, China's high savings rate has been blamed for the economic imbalances underlying the global financial crisis. The criticism being that the Chinese spend too little and rely too much on exporting to Western consumers.

The IMF and World Bank have long called for Beijing to ramp up social spending so its citizens will feel less need to save for a rainy day and instead consume more.

But in their intriguingly named paper,  'A Sexually Unbalanced Model of Current Account Imbalances', New York-based researchers Du Qingyuan and Wei Shang-Jin suggest China's gender imbalance could also be a significant factor in the persistence of its high savings rate.

The pair argue that intensifying competition in the Chinese marriage market is causing men -- or indeed parents with sons -- to raise their savings rates to improve their relative allure among a shrinking pool of potential brides.

A draconian one-child policy, coupled with a traditional preference for male offspring and the availability of selective-sex abortion, has left the country of 1.3 billion facing its most serious demographic crisis.

An estimated 119 boys are born per 100 girls and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has warned that this could leave more than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age without spouses by 2020.

This anxiety over the worsening marriage prospects for men could explain why Chinese household savings as a share of disposable income has risen from 16 percent in 1990 to 30 percent in 2007.