Who knew Hungary has an entire shopping centre devoted to Chinese-owned businesses? Der Standard reports on the “Asia Centre” in the 16th district of Budapest, home to a community that has made Hungary the biggest entrepot for Chinese goods in central Europe. Last year, $4bn of Chinese exports entered Hungary, of which two-thirds was re-exported. [...]

Well just in case the Iranian situation wasn’t difficult enough in and of itself (or here), there are always some around who will seek to take short-term benefit from the temporary embarassment of others. So this week, as June delivery oil prices spiked up around the 74 dollar a barrel mark, it became just [...]

This is a kind of bits-and-bobs post without a lot of coherence, as I am trying to make sense of something which is hard to make sense of, so anyone with more specialist knowledge, please chip-in.
Now I think what we have here is a highly complex situation, and if individual actors behave strangely in a [...]

An intereresting piece in the FT today about 3g standards and China. Basically there are three competing technologies: the European-backed WCDMA and US-supported CDMA-2000 standards, and the Chinese TD-SCDMA technology. There is a wikipedia entry on TD-SCDMA. Basically the Chinese system doesn’t imply the payment of license and patent fees (what a surprise) and it [...]

This is news. Bloomberg covers the story. China apparently may need 1,790 planes new planes by 2023 Airbus estimate, and it makes sense to, well, make them in China.
Toulouse-based Airbus, which is trailing Boeing in new orders this year, may win an order for as many as 150 planes valued at $9 billion, said people [...]

This is definitely about to become the new ‘meme’ about China. Actually it is reasonably valid. China’s ‘demographic shocks’ which come principally from the great famine produced at the time of the cultural revolution, and then from the subsequent one-child policy, are undoubtedly going to have significant consequences. Today UK Tory front bench spokesman on [...]

That’s the dilemna posed by the latest paper from Laurence Kotlikoff Hans Fehr and Sabine Jokisch: Will China Eat Our Lunch or Take Us to Dinner. Simulating the transition paths of economies in the U.S., EU, Japan, and China the paper develops a dynamic, life-cycle, general equilibrium model to study their interdependent demographic, [...]

Global Voices has a story (Hat Tip Financial Times and Simon World) about how China dissident Shi Tao has more than a little cause to be angry with Yahoo. Reporters Sans Frontiers, on analysing the text of the verdict in Shi Tao’s case (he was sentenced to 10 years in April for “divulging state [...]

In a post back in May about the bloody repression in Uzbekistan I noted that Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin was suggesting that US troops should be withdrawn immediately (I didn’t agree if you read the post). Well he seems to have got his way, and the reasoning behind the Uzbekistan parliament decision is of [...]

The latest EU25 trade data from Eurostat highlight the competitive challenge some European companies face from the fast-growing Chinese economy:
Imports from China in the first four months of this year, at ?45.3bn ($54.5bn, ?31.5bn), were 19 per cent higher than the same period a year before. Imports from the US remained almost flat [...]