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Trade Fact of the Week | September 1, 2010
The Indus River floods have displaced 20 million people.
World Health Organization epidemiological reports suggest that in the absence of sustained support for relocation, medicine and drinking water, consequences in coming months can include cholera from untreated water, malaria and dengue fever spread by mosquitoes, malnutrition, and perhaps governance breakdowns.
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DLC | Trade Fact of the Week | August 25, 2010
Tariff Bill for Back-to-School Shoppers -- About $4 Billion
The National Retail Federation predicts that parents will spend about $55 billion, or $606.40 per family, on back-to-school supplies this year. Trade policy is a larger part of this bite than most realize: roughly $40 from each family goes to tariffs.
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Trade Fact of the Week | August 18, 2010
A quarter of the world's people speak English.
Mandarin (more accurately Putonghua) has the most native speakers at over 800 million, with English, Hindi-Urdu and Spanish all between 300 million and 400 million. Counting non-native speakers, though, English easily outdistances the field, with 1.5 billion (or more) readers, speakers and listeners.
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Trade Fact of the Week | August 11, 2010
Childhood HIV rates are starting to fall.
Improving education, testing, wider access to anti-retroviral drugs for patients, and a special focus on care for during pregnancy, have caused transmission to newborns and therefore mortality rates to drop.
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Trade Fact of the Week | August 4, 2010
Container traffic is reviving, slowly.
Container arrivals peaked in at 18.5 million in 2007, then plunged to 14.6 million in 2009, and are now reviving.
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Trade Fact of the Week | July 28, 2010
American military spending is 43 percent of the world total.
America's share of world military spending has risen from 37 percent of global military spending in 2000 to 43 percent in 2009. China's share has grown as well, from about 3 percent to 7 percent of global spending, while those of Europe and Japan have dropped.
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Trade Fact of the Week | July 21, 2010
The Kyoto Protocol's emissions targets will probably be met.
The Kyoto Protocol called on the 40 "Annex 1 countries" to cut their carbon emissions by 5.2 percent, from a rich-country base of 1990's 15.2 billion tons in 1990 to 14.36 billion tons by 2012. The first estimate of 2009 emissions, done by the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and Environment, finds them within the Kyoto boundaries at 13.7 billion tons.
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Trade Fact of the Week | July 14, 2010
The world's top 50 economies: 44 countries, six firms.
The six largest firms on Fortune's Global 500 list for 2010 - Walmart Stores, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Toyota and Japan Post -- combined last year for a dollar-value revenue of $2.34 trillion, about the same total (though calculated by different means)as the United Kingdom's $2.22 trillion GDP.
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Trade Fact of the Week | July 7, 2010
The WTO has handled 410 disputes since 1995.
The largest WTO case of all is the battle between the United States and the European Union over aircraft subsidies. Six years after it began, the WTO's decision last week leaves American government lawyers and plane-designers very pleased.
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Trade Fact of the Week | June 30, 2010
The last decade abroad: poverty rates down, democracy frustrated.
The idealist looks back on the last ten years with mixed emotions: a pretty good decade for the poor; a frustrating, or even bad, decade for liberty and democracy.
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Trade Fact of the Week | June 23, 2010
Royalty and license payments to Americans: $100 billion in 2010?
Between 2003 and 2008, one of our largest 'export' jumps came from invention and innovation, in the form of money earned abroad through royalties and licensing fees for use of American-held patents, trademarks and copyrights.
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Trade Fact of the Week | June 16, 2010
Child labor rates fell by 30 million in the last decade.
The ILO's May report estimates that between 2000 and 2008, child labor among 5-14 year olds dropped from 186 million to 153 million, and that the number of 5-14 year old children in hazardous work fell by more than half, from 111 million to 53 million.
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Trade Fact of the Week | June 9, 2010
In 1980 there were 150 million European children. Now there are 110 million.
In 1950, boys, girls and young teens made up a third of the world's people and outnumbered grandparents by about five to one. Now children are a quarter of world population. As mid-century approaches, children will be down to one in five, and -- for the first time in human history -- old and young will be at par.
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Trade Fact of the Week | June 1, 2010
Longest working years: Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong.
In general, Europe's work-years are short, Asia's long, and the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America place in middle.
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Trade Fact of the Week | May 26, 2010
Foreign aid nearly tripled in the last decade.
The wealthy world's $136 billion aid total for 2009 was nearly triple the $54 billion recorded for 2000. But though governments may feel they have been generous, the world's working poor outdo them by far.
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Trade Fact of the Week | May 19, 2010
U.S. exports are up 17 percent this year.
A good start, but one we need to keep up for 19 more quarters to meet the president's goal of doubling exports in five years. DLC's Idea Lab therefore says that with the big challenges of the administration's first year met, it is time for a more ambitious trade policy.
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DLC | Trade Fact of the Week | May 12, 2010
43 percent of world software is pirated.
Pushed by business public education efforts and U.S. government campaigns for trade-agreement enforcement, especially against large "end-user" pirates in government agencies, software piracy rates have been falling steadily for years.
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Trade Fact of the Week | May 5, 2010
108 of the world's 202 new nuclear power plants are going up in Asia.
America's last new nuclear power plant went on-line in 1996; the next generation is underway after a long hiatus, with construction underway on a plant in Georgia. But 108 of the 202 nuclear plants now planned or under construction are in Asia, with 57 in China alone and 24 more in India. Korea will add 12, Japan 14, and ASEAN members eight.
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Trade Fact of the Week | April 28, 2010
U.S. net national debt in 2010: 66 percent of GDP.
Relative to GDP, America's budget gap is near but not at the top. The Economist magazine forecasts this year's U.S. deficit at 11.1 percent of GDP. The British and Spanish governments have borrowed a bit more; France, Japan and Germany a bit less. Big developing countries have borrowed least, with Mexico the most conservative of the top 20 countries.
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Trade Fact of the Week | April 21, 2010
The U.S.-Israel FTA: signed 25 years ago tomorrow.
America's $3.7 billion aid to Israel in 1984 was slightly less than the two countries' $4 billion in merchandise trade, with services adding perhaps $1 billion more. Today's $40 billion trade relationship is 20 times the size of the aid program.
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