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Read an article or two on Britain’s vote to end its membership with the European Union (Brexit). Please provide the article(s) URL...

How do you view Brexit’s economic impact on Britain, the EU, and the future of the world economy?

What do you believe are the key factors, related to Brexit, which will impact economic growth?

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Yusra AneesLv10
28 Sep 2019
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Related questions

Russian case study:

Russia has long been a preeminent global producer and supplier of gas, but the recent evolution of global market dynamics has begun to erode this status. Now, it finds itself at a crossroads that could determine its fate in this evolving market. Faced with the US shale gas revolution, competition from global LNG suppliers and new pipeline projects, an uncertain demand outlook in Russia’s once captive European market, and slow penetration of high growth Asian markets, Russia may no longer be able to thrive at status quo and must take decisive steps to devise a strategy that addresses these challenges and ensures its continued role as a leading global gas producer and exporter. Russia undoubtedly has made some early progress on this front by making forays into liberalizing its gas export market, facilitating the rise of a handful of non-Gazprom producers, and pursuing options that begin to shift its strategic focus to Asian consumers. However, given Russia’s heavy budget dependency on oil and gas revenues, coupled with the recent introduction of tax breaks to incentivize new high-cost resource development, the country’s success in expanding gas production and capturing key export market share will depend first and foremost on sustained high oil prices to support government spending. The current system allows Russia to muddle through, but a more drastic price shock could have significant, detrimental knock-on effects for Russia’s gas sector (five years ago the budget could balance at $50-55/bbl oil while breakeven prices were $117/bbl in 2012 and expected to remain at over $100 through the end of the decade).

Over time, Russia will have to introduce still more reforms from additional tax incentives to greater contract pricing flexibility and increased access for foreign investors if it hopes to remain a dominant global gas player. Russia’s market position will become more difficult and uncertain post-2017 as competition rises from global LNG and unconventional producers. Russia’s gas modernization efforts to date do not appear adequate to brace the industry for this uncertainty, and Russia’s position increasingly will come under pressure absent more comprehensive reform of the domestic gas sector, additional tax incentives to expedite the development of key projects, and reconsideration of pricing mechanisms in contracts.

Arguably the greatest challenge to the Russian gas market in the future is the abundance of new gas suppliers and export options coming online over the next decade that will provide significant new volumes of gas at competitive prices, which could undermine Russia’s current supplier relationships. At the center of this gas glut is the US shale revolution and the prospects for USLNG exports, which have had an immediate impact on Russia’s market share and pricing. First, the abundance of new US shale-derived gas supplies has resulted in Russia losing the US market as a potential customer for exports from its Arctic LNG projects. In addition, Russia has been negatively impacted by flows of cheap LNG into the European market since 2008–2009, which has triggered a series of pricing renegotiations between Gazprom and its main European customers.

Russia has faced myriad challenges in its core European market: the reputational impact of its dispute with Ukraine, the Eurozone crisis causing a decline in gas demand, growing gas competition, and change in the EU regulatory framework. These changing dynamics have triggered an ongoing antitrust investigation on the grounds that Gazprom restricts European buyers’ rights to sell gas to one another and unfairly raises costs by linking prices to oil. The investigations have heightened tensions between Russia and the European Union.

EU policymakers are eager to diversify away from Russia, but the opportunity to do so is limited until Europe experiences far more rapid demand recovery. In the interim, poor economic performance, the availability of cheap coal, environmental regulations, and promotion of renewable technologies have taken their toll on European gas demand. While Gazprom has begun to experience some demand recovery in Europe and ongoing production challenges at Statoil’s Troll field in Norway have leant some near-term support to volumes of Russian gas exports to Europe, overall European demand remains weaker than in pre-crisis years, and the outlook is still uncertain.

In September 2012, the European Union launched an investigation into anti-competitive Gazprom practices. Russia, which feeds 26 percent of European gas consumption, did what it said it never would and, motivated by a combination of weaker demand and arbitration, rewrote long-term contracts to include a new price formula for certain European buyers. This move came at the expense of several billion dollars in budget revenue at a time when Russia’s overall economic growth has slowed and the country has had to introduce considerable tax breaks to incentivize development of more difficult hydrocarbon plays.

Now, as Russia races against the clock to seize additional Asian market share and redirect volumes to these high-growth markets ahead of its competitors (namely LNG from incumbents like Australia and Qatar as well as new participants from North America and East Africa and pipeline gas suppliers like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan), its strategy is to employ both pipeline and LNG export options to tap into as much additional Asian market capacity as possible. But Russia faces a challenge on the implementation front. LNG projects have faced delays and even indefinite postponement in the case of Shtokman, and Russia has been unable to close on the Power of Siberia pipeline due to its challenges securing a pricing agreement with China. Other options include direct pipeline options to Japan and Korea, but these proposals also face political and security risks that could delay or prevent realization of these plans. Putin gradually has pivoted to Asia, both politically and economically, and Russia hopes to expand energy and trade ties not just with China, but also more broadly with Asia. However, the impact of changes in energy markets could subtly alter the relationship between Russia and China in ways that also could escalate tensions in the bilateral ties. While Russia sees China as a key partner in constraining US prerogatives, China sees Russia mostly as a source of energy and natural resource supply and a great power in decline.

Gas exports remain one of Russia’s most effective political weapons. But the power Russia wields through its gas sector also comes at a tremendous cost. Gazprom’s relative stranglehold over the domestic and export market until relatively recently has hindered entry of foreign investors who could bring capital and technical expertise and limited sources of Russian budget revenue. On the export side, Russia’s disregard for disruptions and the impact on customers further down the line in Western Europe has driven a wedge in the Russian-European gas relationship and compelled Europe to look into alternative supply sources from abroad as well as to its own un-conventionals potential to displace Russian supply over the next decade. Despite widespread bans on fracking in Europe, even the partial development of European shale resources or a growth in LNG imports could force further contract pricing revisions on Gazprom, underscoring the increasingly brittle state of Russia’s traditional gas sector development model.

The Russian budget is nearly 50 percent dependent on oil and gas revenues, and while the dependence is far greater on the oil sector, the recent push by oil companies into more challenging plays, including tight oil and the Arctic, has required significant tax concessions from the government. By default, heavier burden has been transferred to the gas industry and expressed in the form of MET hikes to prevent a significant blow to budget revenues.

Case Study 1

What is the Russian political climate? How it is going to impact its LNG exports?(50 words)

How the government policies are hindering development of the LNG industries? ?(50 words)

If you were an investor would you invest in Russian LNG? ?(100 words)

Question 1

  1. In 2003, the ________ ruled that U.S. tariffs on steel imported from the EU were unfair and allowed the EU to issue retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products.
       
    World Trade Organization
       
    United Nations
       
    European Central Bank
       
    International Human Rights Commission

Question 2

  1. The idea of the U.S.-Canadian Free-Trade Agreement that ________ barriers to trade including tariffs and quotas between the United States and Canada by 1998 was to increase the amount that the United States exports to Canada and the amount that the United States imports from Canada.
       
    increased all
       
    removed some
       
    removed all
       
    increased some

Question 3

  1. According to the theory of comparative advantage, a country should specialize and ________ goods with ________ opportunity cost.
       
    import; the lowest
       
    import; negative
       
    export; the lowest
       
    export; the highest

Question 4

  1. A quota is a restriction on imports.
    True
    False

    Question 5

    1. If Holland decreases subsidies to its tulip growers, the price of tulips in the United States will rise.
      True
      False

    Question 6

    1. According to comparative advantage, trade between two countries allows ________ of the trading countries to use its resources most efficiently.
         
      only the smaller
         
      only the larger
         
      neither
         
      each

    Question 7

    1. ________ U.S. president(s) who has/have held office since GATT was signed has argued for free-trade policies, yet each one has used his powers to protect various sectors of the economy.
         
      Only one
         
      No
         
      Every
         
      Only 3

    Question 8

    1. In 1991, the European Union began the process of forming the
         
      largest free-trade zone in the world.
         
      only continental military force in the world.
         
      first international trade agreement in the world.
         
      first unified currency in the world.

      1. Question 9

        1. The Smoot-Hawley tariff set off an international trade war in the
             
          1930s.
             
          1950s.
             
          1970s.
             
          1990s.



          Please help me with these questions Thank you.

After reading the February 19th, 2009 Economist article, "Turning their backs on the world," do you believe it is wise for world governments to shy away from globalization during a period of economic crisis?

Globalisation

Turning their backs on the world

Feb 19th 2009 From The Economist print edition

The integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

THE economic meltdown has popularised a new term: deglobalisation. Some critics of capitalism seem happy about it—like Walden Bello, a Philippine economist, who can perhaps claim to have coined the word with his book, "Deglobalisation, Ideas for a New World Economy". Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, is among those who fear the results will be bad.

But is globalisation really ending? The world’s economies are certainly slowing fast. And the speed and scale of this recession are raising doubts about the assumptions that had underpinned the drive to integrate world markets. At the end of 2008 the IMF said the world economy would grow 2.2% in 2009, less than half the rate in 2007. Now it thinks growth will be just 0.5% this year, the lowest for 60 years. Even that may be optimistic; in the last quarter of 2008, some economies shrank at annualised rates of over 10%.

Nobody ever said globalisation had ended economic ups and downs, but this feels different: prima facie evidence of big problems at least, and possibly of the failure of globalisation to deliver many of its advertised benefits, especially to the poor. True, economic slowdown is not the same as deglobalisation. And the slowdown has yet to affect one thing. For years, poor countries have been growing faster than rich ones; so far, they still are. The gap between real GDP growth in emerging markets and in rich countries widened from nothing in 1991 to about five points in 2007—

and, says the IMF, it will stay at 5.3 points in 2008 and 2009. Helping poorer countries catch up has long been among the benefits touted for globalisation.

And yet the process is going into reverse. Globalisation means the global integration of the movement of goods, capital and jobs. Each of these processes is now in trouble. World trade has plunged. As recently as the first half of 2008, boosted by rising commodity prices and a falling dollar, trade was growing at an annualised 20% in dollar terms. In the second half of 2008, as commodities sagged and the dollar rose, growth slowed fast; by September, says the IMF, it was in reverse. In December, says the International Air Transport Association, air-cargo traffic (responsible for over a third of the value of the world’s traded goods) was down 23% on December 2007—almost double the fall in the year up to the end of September 2001, a result affected by the 9/11 terror attacks.

The downturn has been sharpest in countries that opened up most to world trade, especially East Asia’s tigers. Singapore’s exports are 186% of GDP; its economy shrank at an annualised rate of 17% in the last three months of 2008. Taiwan’s exports are over 60% of GDP; and its economy may fall as much as 11% this year. The downturn has also hurt rich countries that specialise in staid old-fashioned manufacturing—supposedly a safer activity than the reckless delusions of finance. On average, says the IMF, rich countries will contract 2% this year. But Germany and Japan, big exporters of capital goods, cars and electronics, will do worse, their economies shrinking by 2.5% and 2.6% respectively. In the last quarter their economies contracted alarmingly, falling at an annualised rate of 8% in Germany and by 13%—the worst since 1974—in Japan.

Small countries which went into businesses that grew in globalisation’s wake, like tourism, are also suffering. The World Tourism Organisation says international tourist arrivals fell 1% in the second half of 2008, which may not sound bad, but compares with growth of more than 5% a year for the previous four years. In the Caribbean, visitors may fall by a third this season; in some islands hotels are half empty, flights are being cancelled and national budgets, reliant on tourism, are strained.

In contrast, the biggest emerging markets are doing less badly so far. In India, where exports are around 15% of GDP, the government recently said growth in the year to April 2009 would be 7.1%; most forecasters put growth for the 2009 calendar year lower, but still about 5%. In Brazil the economy has been harder hit by falling commodity prices and declining exports. Most economists still think output grew a bit in the year to the fourth quarter, and put growth for 2009 at 1.5% to 2%. China was still growing by 6.8% in the year to the fourth quarter, though like Brazil it is probably stagnating. Chinese exports fell 18% and imports 43% in the year to January. All three countries have large domestic markets and relatively stable banking systems, which have not been liberalised.

The gap between toothless tigers and friskier BICs (ie, BRICs minus Russia, a special case because of oil) raises questions not so much about globalisation as a whole—after all, Brazil, India and China have been beneficiaries—as about particular aspects. Can one be too dependent on trade? How far should one liberalise banking? Is there a trade-off between taking advantage of good times and providing shock absorbers for bad ones?

Emerging markets’ trade problems have been worsened by shifts in capital flows, globalisation’s second big plank. According to the World Bank, net private debt and equity flows to developing countries will fall from $1 trillion in 2007 to $530 billion in 2009, or from 7.7% to 3% of those countries’ GDPs. The Institute for International Finance sees an even steeper fall; it says that this year banks will extract more from emerging markets in debt repayments than they inject in new loans. Bond markets in those countries collapsed in the last quarter of 2008, doing less than $5 billion of business; in the second quarter, they had issued about $50 billion of bonds.

As with trade, financial deglobalisation is hitting countries in a variety of ways. In this case, East Asia has been less affected because most countries there are net creditors. But eastern Europe and Russia have been hammered because local banks went on a foreign-borrowing binge, foreign banks piled into their markets (and piled out again) and because some countries lacked insurance policies against tough times. Although many big emerging markets have built up foreign-exchange reserves and cut their external debts, in eastern Europe reserves have been flat, external debts have risen and current- account deficits have grown considerably in the past decade. In these countries, the reversal of globalisation has exacerbated problems that were building up anyway.

People in emerging markets have mixed feelings about financial liberalisation and may not regret its reversal. But foreign direct investment (FDI) is different. Most people welcome new factories and new jobs. FDI is also one of the commonest routes by which skills and technology are transferred from rich to poor countries.

This, too, is falling. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) says worldwide FDI inflows shrank 21% in 2008 to $1.4 trillion. The World Association of Investment Promotion Agencies says FDI will contract by a further 12-15% this year.

In contrast to trade, the investment impact of the global downturn has so far been hardest on the countries where the woes began: rich ones. They have seen FDI falls of one-third on average and by half or more in Britain, Italy and Germany. Finland and Ireland have seen net outflows. FDI flows to developing countries were still growing in 2008, albeit by only 4%, after a rise of 21% in 2007. Flows to big South American countries were up by about a fifth; those to India more than doubled, though they may ebb as GDP falters.

The third of the three main aspects of globalisation—jobs—is following the other two, with a lag. The International Labour Organisation forecasts that unemployment worldwide will rise by around 30m above 2007’s level in 2009. Most of that rise will be the result of recession, not deglobalisation, but some will be attributable to the fall in trade (exporting companies will lay off workers) and some to declining investment (if expansion plans are cut, new jobs will not be created).

Deglobalisation will have a dire impact on migrants. In the past decade, more people have been moving voluntarily than ever before; now, some are going home. Those who provided labour for the housing boom in America (notably Latinos), Ireland (Poles) and China (rural Chinese going to cities on the eastern seaboard) have been among the first to be laid off. In Spain newly jobless builders are competing with migrants there for jobs picking fruit.

This will surely have an effect on the flow of remittances from rich countries to poor ones, although it has so far (see article) been quite resilient. In any case, economies that absorbed large numbers of foreign workers may take fewer. Some of the millions of South Asians who work in the Gulf, or the young Africans who flock to South Africa, or the Central Asians who work in Russia, may have to stay at home.

Yet for all the economic pain, the social and political fallout from deglobalisation has not yet been severe. Protests may still come. Or maybe national governments are absorbing most of the ire. In December, Greece saw riots after a police bullet killed a teenager. In France, unions brought over 1m people onto the streets for a one-day strike, and a riot in Latvia over economic policy ended in more than 100 arrests. But only in Britain, where workers have picketed refineries and power stations over the hiring of foreigners, has protest had a very anti-global tone.

This lag may be explained by residual support for globalisation, especially in emerging markets. A poll in 2007 by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that majorities in 47 countries saw international trade as good for them; majorities in 41 out of 46 welcomed multinational firms; in 39 out of 47, most felt better off with a free market. In more than half the countries where changes could be tracked, support for free markets was rising.

When consensus wobbles

But is that still true? Last summer, on the eve of the meltdown, European Union pollsters reported that two-thirds of EU citizens saw globalisation as profitable only for large firms, not citizens. In 2002, according to the Pew poll, 78% of Americans thought foreign trade helped the country; by 2007 it was only 59%. A CNN poll in July 2008 showed that, for the first time, a small majority of Americans saw trade as a threat, not an opportunity.

Of the few worldwide polls to have been completed since then, one by Edelman for the World Economic Forum found that 62% of respondents in 20 countries said they trusted companies less or a lot less now. Manifestly, popular opinion backs more state regulation.

So far, this has mostly taken the form of pouring public money into banks and selected industries, notably cars. Last week Barack Obama set out plans for another vast bank rescue, and the French government promised €6 billion ($7.8 billion) in preferential loans to Renault and Peugeot-Citroën in return for pledges that no car factories would be closed in France.

There has been somewhat less evidence of trade protectionism. India has raised some steel tariffs. The EU has reintroduced export subsidies for some dairy products. Russia has raised import duties on vehicles. But there has also been movement the other way. The American Senate softened the "Buy America" provisions of the stimulus bill. Mexico said that by 2012 it would cut tariffs on thousands of kinds of manufacture. And some countries have sought a safe harbour, rather than embracing pure nationalism. East Europeans are even keener on the shelter of the euro; Iceland has applied to the EU; the Irish are more likely than they were to vote for the EU’s Lisbon treaty.

Despite the downturn, the nations of the world have not shunned globalisation. It has been protected by the belief of firms in the efficiency of global supply chains. But like any chain, these are only as strong as their weakest link. A danger point will come if firms decide that this way of organising production has had its day.

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