Lawmakers on the National Assembly’s Special Committee on Budget and Accounts have shown that all the talk in political circles about a new politics was nothing more than lip service.According to reports, they handled the 2013 budget bill in the same old and lousy way as before. They did not make even a modicum of effort to cast away old practices and establish new ones.In the first place, they turned the process of deliberating on the budget proposal into a series of back-door deals on allocati

PARIS ― Are non-Europeans much less pessimistic about Europe than Europeans themselves? Could distance be a prerequisite for a more balanced view of the continent’s predicament?In an interview a few months ago, Wang Hongzhang, the chairman of China Construction Bank, indirectly expressed his subdued enthusiasm for Europe. Quoting the Chinese proverb, “A starved camel is still bigger than a horse,” he went on to say that Europe’s economies are much stronger than many people believe. And, without

MUNICH ― The European Central Bank has managed to calm the markets with its promise of unlimited purchases of eurozone government bonds, because it effectively assured bondholders that the taxpayers and pensioners of the eurozone’s still-sound economies would, if necessary, shoulder the repayment burden. Although the ECB left open how this would be carried out, its commitment whetted investors’ appetite, reduced interest-rate spreads in the eurozone, and made it possible to reduce the funding of

Over the last three decades, Communist China’s leaders have lifted more than 600 million of their citizens out of poverty ― and built one of the world’s most unequal societies. Those two outcomes didn’t have to go hand in hand. They are the result of a conscious decision by the former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and some of his closest associates ― the so-called Eight Immortals ― to safeguard the primacy of the Communist Party by putting their families in charge of opening up China’s economy.

It is not an enviable task, picking the top three bad ideas from our government in a year when they have given us so many to choose from. But The China Post would like to bid the year farewell by remembering the worst while hoping for the best for 2013.While risking being unoriginal and repetitive, we give the top spot to the undisputed king of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot ideas. The decisions to hike power prices by as much as a third and oil prices by some NT$3 in one go around early 2012 are ba

At this juncture, with the kind of leaders we see in place in China, Japan and South Korea, the outlook for Asia in 2013 does not look so good. For the first time, leadership changes in those three countries came almost simultaneously. Each of the new heads of state wants to establish a trademark leadership role in Asia. To do so, they cannot display any weakness or be considered soft. To promote themselves in their own countries and on the world stage, they might have to do things that normally

The only thing in sync as new leaders take office in Northeast Asia is the coincidental timing of the events. But with regard to the old and complex issues dogging the region, their arrival portends more uncertainty rather than a unified approach to problem-solving.Conservative Park Geun-hye’s election as South Korean president completes the set of transitions in this important zone that also places new faces at the helm in China and Japan.Xi Jinping, who takes over as president of an increasing

Women’s rights have been in the forefront of international concern over the last few weeks.Making the biggest headlines were the massive demonstrations in New Delhi and other cities in India provoked by the brutal gang-rape by six men of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a moving bus in the Indian capital. The crime, which saw the victim suffer extremely serious wounds in her genitals and intestines, proved to be the trigger for the release of popular anger that had built up over the years

Most of us acknowledge that some of our most cherished beliefs are based on faith, not facts. Even so, it takes a lot to dislodge those beliefs. When we are confronted by contrary evidence, we may dig in even more deeply. Consider a cautionary tale, exotic to be sure, but helping to explain why evidence-challenged thinking persists in a lot of areas, including politics and business. Harold Camping, a Christian radio talk-show host, predicted that the world was going to end on May 21, 2011, with

WASHINGTON ― Who will have the world’s hardest job in 2013? There are many candidates for that role, but my nominee would be Vice Premier Wang Qishan, who has just been given the near-impossible assignment of combating corruption in China. China-watchers see Wang as a crucial player in the new Chinese government headed by Xi Jinping. It will fall to Wang, as the new head of the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline, to crack the whip and stop the thievery before it devours China. W

We could be nearing a golden hour in U.S. foreign policy, that rare moment when a newly reelected president theoretically has the experience and clout to make good things happen. As President Barack Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev last March before an unanticipated open microphone, “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.” We can think of many places more deserving of presidential flexibility than Russia, which is in such a state of pugnacious isolationi

OXFORD ― Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, recently said of the unfinished agenda for global financial-sector reform: “To start, we need concrete progress with the too-important-to-fail conundrum. We need a global-level discussion of the pros and cons of direct restrictions on business models.” Five years on from the start of the crisis, with the publication of the Liikanen report on European Union banking reform, that debate has finally begun.The Liikanen p

NEW YORK ― The crime seems incomprehensible. A 23-year-old physiotherapy student is dead, 12 days after having been raped for more than an hour by six men in a bus traveling on main roads in the Indian capital. Her internal injuries from the iron rod that her attackers used were so severe that doctors had to remove her intestines in their effort to save her life.Indians, it seems, have had enough. Dozens of large and increasingly angry demonstrations have been held to demand that the government

President-elect Park Geun-hye is grappling with a task that has been blown out of proportion in terms of importance ― appointing members of the presidential transition team. By now she should have started to receive briefings from members of the transition committee on the conduct of the affairs of the central government. Yet she is still not ready to unveil the full lineup. On New Year’s Eve, Kim Yong-joon, the former Constitutional Court chief who was named to lead the transition team, said hi

Lawmakers have begun to drop tax bombs to bankroll the welfare pledges of President-elect Park Geun-hye. They passed the budget bill for 2013 early Tuesday morning together with a set of measures aimed at increasing tax revenue.This year’s budget was finally set at 342 trillion won, down 500 billion won from the administration’s original proposal submitted last September. Nevertheless, legislators approved bills that would increase the tax burden on rich people as shortfalls are expected in tax

Ever since the invention of the wheel in Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C., technological innovation has been improving our lives. Because new devices and processes help us produce more (output) with less (labor input), prices fall, real wages rise and we are all better off. If there is a free lunch in this world, it’s productivity growth. There is even an economic school of thought, known as real business cycle theory, which views technology shocks as the main driver of the business cycle: not the c

In a few weeks, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will be reinaugurated with great fanfare in Washington. Soon after that, in Beijing, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang will ascend to the presidency and premiership of China. (China’s premier is the second-highest office but unlike the American vice president is more like the country’s chief operating officer, with the president as chief executive officer.) If our political leaders would play their cards right, the concomitant inaugurat

I keep hearing that the billionaires and big corporations that poured all that money into the 2012 election learned their lesson. They lost their shirts and won’t do it again. So we don’t need campaign finance reform.Baloney.It’s true their political investments didn’t exactly pay off this time around.Republican operative Karl Rove’s two giant political funds ― American Crossroads (a super PAC) and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (a so-called nonprofit “social welfare organization” that

The Blue House will have a new tenant in February. President-elect Park Geun-hye, a conservative, won last month’s election against her liberal rival, Moon Jae-in. The close election proved that Koreans are politically divided, but united in their expectations as both candidates touted pretty much the same social and economic policies, but with differing emphasis and perspectives.One unifying theme of the campaign was the take on the future of chaebol, Korea’s family-owned conglomerates that con

NEWPORT BEACH ― In a four-day period in mid-December, three seemingly unrelated developments suggested that modern central banking is in the midst of an historic change. The implications go well beyond academia and policy circles. To the extent that this shift gains momentum ― which appears likely ― it will affect economic performance, the functioning of markets, and asset-price valuations.The three developments began on Dec. 12 in the United States, where the Federal Reserve, led by Ben Bernank