Somewhere out there!

Nicholas Lardy talks about the link between Yuan and China’s Trade Surplus in Parsing China’s Trade Surplus. Included are interesting statistics on imports vs export and foreign company trade figures in China.

What’s driving China’s trade surplus?
The big driver isn’t on the export side but on the import side. Export growth fell a bit, but import growth was barely half what it was in 2004, so there has been this ballooning of the trade surplus.

Based on the data available so far, it looks like the biggest decline in imports is in machinery and equipment. Parts and components that go into export processing are still growing at 25% to 30% annually. But machinery and equipment is running at about a third the rate of 2004 — that’s to say at 10% rather than the 30%-plus growth seen in 2004. So what we’re seeing in 2005 was some slowing in the pace of domestic investment.

And a lot of those goods are produced by Western multinationals exporting from China, right?
About 55% of all exports are from foreign-owned companies or joint ventures. That share has been growing about 1 or 2 percentage points annually in recent years but may be stabilizing now. It looks like foreign capital coming into China in 2005 is going to be down slightly — the first time in many years that it will have fallen. That may mean the share of foreign-produced goods won’t grow as fast as it has in the past.

But even if you take out all the foreign-owned exporters, Chinese domestic companies have been growing their exports. Their share has been declining, but many companies are exporting more and more. And a lot of people don’t recognize that about half of all the goods produced by foreign companies in China are sold in China. The auto sector is the best example — 95% of the autos sold there are made by foreign companies or JVs.

How much would a further revaluation of the Yuan affect the situation?
I’ve been in the camp that has said the Chinese currency is undervalued and that the adjustment last July was far too modest. But even if China were to revalue its currency significantly, it would continue to have a trade surplus with the U.S. The fact is, most of the goods that are produced in China used to be made somewhere else. If you look at the overall U.S. trade deficit, Asia’s share has been declining.

Nice summary by Matt Vance of Getting Things Done. Link originally from No time to read?

Technorati Tags: books, gtd, review

Another interest post from Broobles, which I’ll have to follow up later, is 15 Essential Tools – “The Broobles Pack” his version of the Google Pack. Other than Great News, these two  SyncBackSE and Copernic Desktop Search look worth investing.

Technorati Tags: windows, software, collection

After trying several feed readers been using Sharp RSS Reader for quite a while. Today, after added the Simple Tags plugin I checked the plugin author’s blog. I note this post about Moving from RSS Bandit to GreatNews.

After just a few minutes with Great News from Curio Studio, I can give it my “this is the Shiznit!” label. With features like: Full page reading, custom labels, and a sane ompl import tool it greats full marks.

Of all the readers I’ve tried this is the only one that gets out my way and presents the news from feeds the way it feels it should be read. It does some smart stuff, like ignoring archiving (to disk) options, instead added buttons so the user can quickly archive to the hive mind (to web). The only extra I can see myself want now is some sort of bayesian, this is interesting button.
I’m uninstall Sharp Reader now.

Technorati Tags: rss, reader, GreatNews, shiznit

Just added the Simple Tags plugin for WordPress. Perfect simply little plugin that just works

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Back in the polite surfeit calm land of the Brit, I can contemplate the smoky dens of eating and a constant need to argue; just a little bit.

A vegetarian travelling in the modern era usually discovers the most difficult thing is finding a place to eat where the meal beast is not as common as wheat and people don’t have trouble understanding the exact mean of “I eat no meat” (wo bu chi rou). Yes, that means no fish. While in snow-bound Central Europe this time, instead the most difficult thing was the combination of central heating and smoking. Pretty soon just the smell of heat was sufficient to create the feeling of being surrounded by several tables of smokers in a small oily room.

Maybe the essential oil of smoke had embedded itself into my nose hairs.

The best value though, was finding comfort in the joys of my new snow jacket, while discovering the four borders on the midnight bus between Zagreb and Vienna. I guess with the European borders about to move, low-traffic night time is a great time to practice border control computer skills.

Doesn’t help much with sleep though.

Final word on ADSL in Croatia, seems that being owned by Germans and having a monopoly means that only Siemens modems work for DSL in Zagreb. Shame they don’t tell you that at the computer store when you are buying a Netgear Wireless ADSL Router. Instead after several days of trying, phoning, asking and tinkering, you then find a second hand Siemens SE515 that just works.

Maybe New Zealand Telecom isn’t so bad after all.

Got to go for the cakes though!

Technorati Tags: travel, humor, life, zagreb, central-europe

Whiles reading an article about the new Macbook last night I discovered this cool product: Aspoke custom notebook skins. Here is a cool example. These things are bound to make excellent gifts.

Visiting relatives who cook little cakes is very dangerous at this time of year. So I’ve backtracked five kilos. Maybe I can blame it on a summer/winter weight thing, travelling from summer in NZ to winter in the UK with the accompanying system stock. Regardless its time to follow a plan, I need to find a better system which can deal with a lot of the travelling I’m doing at the moment. Combination of software and a good system. Here are few places to start:

• The Hacker’s Diet
• Losing weight with Gnuplot
• “After I bought my iPAQ, life at the gym became fun!”
• Ball Seating Research

Technorati Tags: cakes, diet, exercise, health

From dirtSimple, Grow your brain with by meditating. Dirt Simple is a pretty cool site, with interesting articles about Mind 1.99 beta.

Also from but she’s a geek, a classification of productivity archetypes in an article about the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Spy.

I’m traveling in Croatia at the moment, it was pretty snowy when I arrived. Unfortunately due to some personal stuff, we missed out on the mountain spa resort town, Bled. So its only traveling Croatia and Vienna this time.

Sve najbolje! All the best for the New Year.