Economist, Feb 14, 2015 (II)

choi

(1) Vietnam’s migrant labourers | Going to Debt Mountain; Working abroad is no bargain.
www.economist.com/news/asia/2164 ... going-debt-mountain

the first three paragraphs:

"BROKERS’ billboards outside Tan Lieu, a poor rural community in northern Vietnam, advertise ‘Labour Export’—jobs abroad. Vietnam’s youthful population of 90m adds up to 1.5m each year to the growing work pool. But economic growth, at 6%, is not fast enough to keep all of them employed. Dreaming of fortune, young Vietnamese are pouring overseas as maids, builders and factory workers.

"Than Thi Hang is a daughter of Tan Lieu farmers. She flew to Taiwan when she was 18. Assembling mobile phones on 12- and 16-hour graveyard shifts was “easier than farming”, she says. Yet to finance the trip, her family borrowed close to $5,000 to pay a labour broker. Ms Hang spent more than a year nervously working off her debts.

"Once, Vietnamese sought to work in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Today the prime destinations are Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia and South Korea. Since 2005 the number of Vietnamese working abroad on labour contracts has nearly doubled, to about 500,000. The $1.6 billion that migrants send home each year helps a bit to bridge a yawning wealth-gap between rich and poor provinces. Official migration channels are surely safer than illegal ones that facilitate the movement of sex workers across Vietnam’s northern border to China.

Note: There is no need to read the rest.

choi

(2) Free exchange | Guaranteed Profits; Price-match guarantees prevent rather than provoke price wars.

two consecutive paragraphs:

“The problem is that price-match guarantees can blunt the logic of competition. Suppose a car dealership worries about a rival undercutting its prices and stealing customers. Even if the dealership can respond by cutting its prices too, it might lose sales in the interim. A price-match guarantee offers a pre-emptive defence. By promising to match any discounts, the dealership can persuade its customers that they need not shop around: they will always pay the lowest price available.

“As a result, cutting prices no longer wins the competitor new business; buyers stay loyal and invoke the guarantee instead of switching. All that price cuts achieve for the competitor is the erosion of profits on existing sales. It will probably conclude that prices—and margins—are better left high. The result is ‘tacit collusion:’ the maintenance of high prices, without any explicit communication between firms. Consumers end up suffering due to a guarantee that at first glance seems good for them.

Note: There is no need to read the rest.

choi

(4) Obituary | Germany’s Liberator; Richard von Weizsäcker, first president of his reunited country, died on January 31st, aged 94
www.economist.com/news/obituary/ ... is-reunited-country

Note:
(a) Richard von Weizsäcker
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Weizs%C3%A4cker
(1920-2015; party: Christian Democratic Union (CDU; same as Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel); president of a United Germany 1990-1994, president of West Germany 1984-1990; a member of the noted Weizsäcker family)  
(b) “In the 1970s he [Richard] naturally supported Ostpolitik, the policy of rapprochement with all the eastern countries; it did not matter that the idea came from Willy Brandt’s rival Social Democrats.”   

Ostpolitik
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostpolitik
(Created by “Egon Bahr [1922- ], who proposed ‘change through rapprochement’ in a 1963 speech, the policies were implemented beginning with Willy Brandt [1913-1992], fourth Chancellor of the FRG from 1969 to 1974”--both of SDP)
(c) “Conventional wisdom viewed that division as permanent. But he insisted that the German question remained open as long as the Brandenburg Gate remained closed.”

German question
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Question
(d) “Perhaps the sweetest moment occurred just after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. The president rushed to Berlin and approached the wall at Potsdamer Platz, in no-man’s-land. East German soldiers were breaching the wall to make a border crossing. As the West German president walked towards them, an East German officer snapped to attention and barked: ‘No unusual developments here, Mr President.’”

Potsdamer Platz
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdamer_Platz
(in the centre of Berlin; named after the city of Potsdam, some 25 km (16 mi) to the south west; it was totally laid waste during World War II and then left desolate during the Cold War era when the Berlin Wall bisected its former location)
(e) German English dictionary
* Ost (noun masculine): “the east”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ost
* Politik (noun feminine; [together with ‘politics’ in English] from [Middle] French politique[, from Latin politicus--ultimately from Ancient Greek polítēs citizen): "politics"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Politik
* Potsdamer (n): "a native or resident of Potsdam"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Potsdamer
* Platz (noun masculine): “square”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Platz