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Accounting (in Eastern Europe) Hermitage Capital Management, an international investment firm owned by HSBC London, is suing PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers), the biggest among the big four accounting firms (Andersen, the fifth, is being cannibalized by its competitors). Hermitage also demands to have PwC's license suspended in Russia. All this fuss over allegedly shoddy audits of Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth with over $20 billion in annual sales and the world's largest reserves of natural gas. Hermitage runs a $600 million Russia fund which is invested in the shares of the allegedly misaudited giant. The accusations are serious. According to infuriated Hermitage, PwC falsified and distorted the 2000-1 audits by misrepresenting the sale of Gazprom's subsidiary, Purgaz, to Itera, a conveniently obscure entity. Other loss spinning transactions were also creatively tackled. Stoitransgaz - partly owned by former Gazprom managers and their relatives - landed more than $1 billion in lucrative Gazprom contracts. These shenanigans resulted in billions of dollars of losses and a depressed share price. AFP quotes William Browder, Hermitage's disgruntled CEO, as saying: "This is Russia's Enron". PwC threatened to counter-sue Hermitage over its "completely unfounded" allegations. But Browder's charges are supported by Boris Fyodorov, a former Russian minister of finance and a current Gazprom independent director. Fyodorov manages his own investment boutique, United Financial Group. Browder is a former Solomon Brothers investment banker. Other investment banks and brokerage firms - foreign and Russian - are supportive of his allegations. They won't and can't be fobbed. Fyodorov speculates that PwC turned a blind eye to many of Gazprom's shadier deals in order to keep the account. Gazprom shareholders will decide in June whether to retain it as an auditor or not. Browder is initiating a class action lawsuit in New York of Gazprom ADR holders against PwC. Even Russia's president concurs. A year ago, he muttered ominously about "enormous amounts of misspent money (in Gazprom)". He replaced Rem Vyakhirev, the oligarch that ran Gazprom, with his own protégé. Russia owns 38 percent of the company. Gazprom is just the latest in an inordinately long stream of companies with dubious methods. Avto VAZ bled itself white - under PwC's nose - shipping cars to dealers, without guarantees or advance payments. The penumbral dealers then vanished without a trace. Avto VAZ wrote off more than $1 billion in "uncollected bills" by late 1995. PwC did make a mild comment in the 1997 audit. But the first real warning appeared only three years later in the audit for the year 2000. Andrei Sharonov, deputy minister in the federal Ministry of Economics said, in an interview he granted "Business Week" last February: "Auditors have been working on behalf of management rather than shareholders." In a series of outlandish ads, published in Russian business dailies in late February, senior partners in the PwC Moscow office made this incredible statement: "(Audit) does not represent a review of each transaction, or a qualitative assessment of a company's performance." The New York Times quotes a former employee of Ernst&Young in Moscow as saying: "A big client is god. You do what they want and tell you to do. You can play straight-laced and try to be upright and protect your reputation with minor clients, but you can't do it with the big guys. If you lose that account, no matter how justified you are, that's the end of a career." PwC should know. When it mentioned suspicious heavily discounted sales of oil to Rosneft in a 1998 audit report, its client, Purneftegaz, replaced it with Arthur Andersen. The dubious deals dutifully vanished from the audit reports, though they continue apace. Andersen claims such transactions do not require disclosure under Russian law. How times change! Throughout the 1990's, Russia and its nascent private sector were subjected to self-righteous harangues from visiting Big Five accountants. The hectoring targeted the lack of good governance among Russia's corporations and public administration alike. Hordes of pampered speakers and consultants espoused transparent accounting, minority shareholders' rights, management accessibility and accountability and other noble goals. That was before Enron. The tables have turned. The Big Five - from disintegrating Andersen to KPMG - are being chastised and fined for negligent practices, flagrant conflicts of interests, misrepresentation, questionable ethics and worse. Their worldwide clout, moral authority, and professional standing have been considerably dented. America's GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) - once considered the undisputable benchmark of rectitude and disclosure - are now thought in need of urgent revision. The American issuer of accounting standards - FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) - is widely perceived to be an incestuous arrangement between the clubby members of a rapacious and unscrupulous profession. Many American scholars even suggest to adopt the hitherto much-derided alternative - the International Accounting Standards (IAS) recently implemented through much of central and eastern Europe. Russia's Federal Commission for the Securities Market (FCSM) convened a conclave of Western and domestic auditing firms. The theme was how to spot and neutralize bad auditors. With barely concealed and gleeful schadenfreude, the Russians said that the Enron scandal undermined their confidence in Western accountants and the GAAP. The Institute of Corporate Law and Corporate Governance (ICLG), having studied the statements of a few major Russian firms, concluded that there are indications of financial problems, "not mentioned by (mostly Western) auditors". They may have a point. Most of the banks that collapsed ignominiously in 1998 received glowing audits signed by Western auditors, often one of the Big Five. The Russian Investor Protection Association (IPA) and Institute of Professional Auditors (IPAR) embarked on a survey of Russian investors, enterprises, auditors, and state officials - and what they think about the quality of the audit services they are getting. Many Russian managers - as avaricious and venal as ever - now can justify hiring malleable and puny local auditors instead of big international or domestic ones. Surgutneftegaz - with $2 billion net profit last year and on-going dispute with its shareholders about dividends - wants to sack "Rosexperitza", a respectable Russian accountancy, and hire "Aval", a little known accounting outfit. Aval does not even make it to the list of 200 largest accounting firms in Russia, according to Renaissance Capital, an investment bank. Other Russian managers are genuinely alarmed by the vertiginous decline in the reputation of the global accounting firms and by the inherent conflict of interest between consulting and audit jobs performed by the same entity. Sviazinvest, a holding and telecom company, hired Accenture on top of - some say instead of - Andersen Consulting. A decade of achievements in fostering transparency, better corporate governance, and more realistic accounting in central and eastern Europe - may well evaporate in the wake of Enron and other scandals. The forces of reaction and corruption in these nether lands - greedy managers, venal bureaucrats, and anti-reformists - all seized the opportunity to reverse what was hitherto considered an irreversible trend towards Western standards. This, in turn, is likely to deter investors and retard the progress towards a more efficient market economy. The Big Six accounting firms were among the first to establish a presence in Russia. Together with major league consultancies, such as Baker-McKinsey, they coached Russian entrepreneurs and managers in the ways of the West. They introduced investors to Russia when it was still considered a frontier land. They promoted Russian enterprises abroad and nursed the first, precarious, joint ventures between paranoid Russians and disdainful Westerners. Companies like Ernst&Young are at the forefront of the fight to include independent directors in the boards of Russian firms, invariably stuffed with relatives and cronies. Together with IPA, Ernst&Young recently established the National Association of Independent Directors (NAID). It is intended to "assist Russian companies to increase their efficiency through introduction of best independent directors' practices." But even these - often missionary - pioneers were blinded by the spoils of a "free for all", "winner takes all", and "might is right" environment. They geared the accounts of their clients - by minimizing their profits - towards tax avoidance and the abolition of dividends. Quoting unnamed former employees of the audit firms, "The New York Times" described how "... the auditors often chose to play by Russian rules, and in doing so sacrificed the transparency that investors were counting on them to ensure." Afghanistan, Economy of I. The Poppy Fields Conspiracy theorists in the Balkan have long speculated on the true nature of the Albanian uprising in Macedonia. According to them, Afghanistan was about to flood Europe with cheap opium through the traditional Balkan routes. The KLA - denounced by the State Department as late as 1998 as a drug trafficking organization - was, in the current insurrection, in its new guise as the NLA, simply establishing a lawless beachhead in Macedonia, went the rumours. The Taliban were known to stock c. 3000 tonnes of raw opium. The Afghanis - Arab fighters against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan - another 2000 tonnes (their fee for providing military and security services to the Taliban). Even at the current, depressed, prices, this would fetch well over 2 billion US dollars in next door Pakistan. It also represents 5 years of total European consumption and a (current) street level value in excess of 100 billion US dollars. The Taliban intends to offload this quantity in the next few months and to convert it to weapons. Destabilizing the societies of the West is another welcome side effect. It is ironic that the Taliban collaboration with the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODCCP) culminated this year in the virtual eradication of all opium poppies in Afghanistan. Only 18 months ago, Afghan opium production (c. 4600 tonnes a year) accounted for 70% of world consumption (in the form of heroin). The shift (partly forced on the Taliban by an unusual climate) from poppies to cereals (that started in 1997) was thus completed successfully. II. Agriculture Afghanistan is not a monolithic entity. It is a mountainous and desert territory (c. 251,000 sq. miles in size, less than 10% of it cultivated). Administratively and politically, it is reminiscent of Somalia. The Taliban government - now recognized only by Pakistan - rules the majority of the country as a series of tribal fiefdoms. The country - ruined by a decade of warfare between majority Pushtuns and minority Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north - lacks all institutions, or infrastructure. In an economy of subsistence agriculture and trading, millions (up to one third of a population of 27 million) have been internally displaced or rendered refugees. One third of all farms have been vacated. Close to 70% of all villages are demolished. Unemployment - in a mostly unskilled workforce of 11 million - may well exceed 50%. Poverty is rampant, food scarce, population growth unsustainable. The traditional social safety net - the family - has unraveled, leading to widespread and recurrent famine and malnutrition. The mainstays of grazing and cattle herding have been hampered by mines and deforestation. The Taliban regime has been good to the economy. It restored the semblance of law and order. Agricultural production recovered to pre-Soviet invasion (1978) levels. Friendly Pakistan provided 80% of the shortfall in grain (international aid agencies provided the rest). The number of heads of livestock - the only form of savings in devastated Afghanistan - increased. Many refugees came back. Urban workers - mostly rural labourers displaced by war - fared worse, though. As industries and services vanished and army recruitment stabilized with the Taliban's victories, salaries decreased by up to 40% while inflation picked up (to an annual average of 20-25%, as reflected in the devaluation of the currency and in the price of bread). More than 50% of the average $1 a day wage of the casual, unskilled, worker, are spent on bread alone! But this discrepancy between a recovering agricultural sector and the dilapidated and depleted cities led to reverse migration back to the villages. In the long term it was a healthy trend. Paradoxically, the collapse of the central state led to the emergence of a thriving and vibrant private sector engaged in both legal and criminal activities. Foreign exchange dealing is conducted in thousands of small, privately owned, exchange offices. Rich Afghani traders have invested heavily in small scale and home industries (mainly in textiles and agri-business). III. Trade In some respects, Afghanistan is an extension of Pakistan economically and, until recently, ideologically. Food prices in Afghanistan, for instance - the only reliable indicator of inflation - closely follow Pakistan's. The Afghan currency (there are two - one issued by the Taliban and another issued by the deposed government in Faizabad) is closely linked to Pakistan's currency, though unofficially so. The regions closest to Pakistan (Herat, Jalalabad, Kandahar) - where cross border trading, drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, illegal immigration (to Western Europe), and white slavery are brisk - are far more prosperous than the northern, war-torn, ones (Badakhshan, Bamyan). The Taliban uses economic sanctions in its on-going war against the Northern Alliance. In 1998-9, it has blockaded the populous provinces of Parwan and Kapisa. Another increasingly important trade partner is Turkmenistan. It supplies Afghanistan with petrol, diesel, LNG, and jet fuel (thus reducing Afghani dependence on hostile Iranian supplies). Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, its two other neighbours, are considered by the Taliban to be enemies. This enmity results in much higher costs of transportation which price out many Afghan products. With Pakistan, Afghanistan has an agreement (the Afghan Transit Trade) which provides the latter with access to the sea. Afghanistan imports consumer goods and durables through this duty free corridor (and promptly re-exports them illegally to Pakistan). Pakistani authorities periodically react by unilaterally dropping duty free items off the ATT list. The Afghans proceed to import the banned items (many of them manufactured in Pakistan's archrival, India) via the Gulf states, Russia, Ukraine (another important drug route) and into Pakistan. IV. The Future The current conflict can be a blessing in disguise. Western aid and investment can help resuscitate the Soviet era mining (Copper, Zinc) operations and finally tap Afghanistan's vast reserves of oil and natural gas. With a GDP per capita of less than $800, there is room for massive growth. Yet, such bright prospects are dimmed by inter-ethnic rivalry, a moribund social system, decades of war and natural disaster (such as the draught in 1998-9), and intense meddling and manipulation by near and far. One thing is certain: opium production is likely to increase dramatically. And Western users will be treated to ever cheaper heroin and Hasish. Agent-Principal Problem In the catechism of capitalism, shares represent the part-ownership of an economic enterprise, usually a firm. The value of shares is determined by the replacement value of the assets of the firm, including intangibles such as goodwill. The price of the share is determined by transactions among arm's length buyers and sellers in an efficient and liquid market. The price reflects expectations regarding the future value of the firm and the stock's future stream of income - i.e., dividends. Alas, none of these oft-recited dogmas bears any resemblance to reality. Shares rarely represent ownership. The float - the number of shares available to the public - is frequently marginal. Shareholders meet once a year to vent and disperse. Boards of directors are appointed by management - as are auditors. Shareholders are not represented in any decision making process - small or big. The dismal truth is that shares reify the expectation to find future buyers at a higher price and thus incur capital gains. In the Ponzi scheme known as the stock exchange, this expectation is proportional to liquidity - new suckers - and volatility. Thus, the price of any given stock reflects merely the consensus as to how easy it would be to offload one's holdings and at what price. Another myth has to do with the role of managers. They are supposed to generate higher returns to shareholders by increasing the value of the firm's assets and, therefore, of the firm. If they fail to do so, goes the moral tale, they are booted out mercilessly. This is one manifestation of the "Principal-Agent Problem". It is defined thus by the Oxford Dictionary of Economics: "The problem of how a person A can motivate person B to act for A's benefit rather than following (his) self-interest." The obvious answer is that A can never motivate B not to follow B's self-interest - never mind what the incentives are. That economists pretend otherwise - in "optimal contracting theory" - just serves to demonstrate how divorced economics is from human psychology and, thus, from reality. Managers will always rob blind the companies they run. They will always manipulate boards to collude in their shenanigans. They will always bribe auditors to bend the rules. In other words, they will always act in their self-interest. In their defense, they can say that the damage from such actions to each shareholder is minuscule while the benefits to the manager are enormous. In other words, this is the rational, self-interested, thing to do. But why do shareholders cooperate with such corporate brigandage? In an important Chicago Law Review article whose preprint was posted to the Web a few weeks ago - titled "Managerial Power and Rent Extraction in the Design of Executive Compensation" - the authors demonstrate how the typical stock option granted to managers as part of their remuneration rewards mediocrity rather than encourages excellence. But everything falls into place if we realize that shareholders and managers are allied against the firm - not pitted against each other. The paramount interest of both shareholders and managers is to increase the value of the stock - regardless of the true value of the firm. Both are concerned with the performance of the share - rather than the performance of the firm. Both are preoccupied with boosting the share's price - rather than the company's business. Hence the inflationary executive pay packets. Shareholders hire stock manipulators - euphemistically known as "managers" - to generate expectations regarding the future prices of their shares. These snake oil salesmen and snake charmers - the corporate executives - are allowed by shareholders to loot the company providing they generate consistent capital gains to their masters by provoking persistent interest and excitement around the business. Shareholders, in other words, do not behave as owners of the firm - they behave as free-riders. The Principal-Agent Problem arises in other social interactions and is equally misunderstood there. Consider taxpayers and their government. Contrary to conservative lore, the former want the government to tax them providing they share in the spoils. They tolerate corruption in high places, cronyism, nepotism, inaptitude and worse - on condition that the government and the legislature redistribute the wealth they confiscate. Such redistribution often comes in the form of pork barrel projects and benefits to the middle-class. This is why the tax burden and the government's share of GDP have been soaring inexorably with the consent of the citizenry. People adore government spending precisely because it is inefficient and distorts the proper allocation of economic resources. The vast majority of people are rent-seekers. Witness the mass demonstrations that erupt whenever governments try to slash expenditures, privatize, and eliminate their gaping deficits. This is one reason the IMF with its austerity measures is universally unpopular. Employers and employees, producers and consumers - these are all instances of the Principal-Agent Problem. Economists would do well to discard their models and go back to basics. They could start by asking: Why do shareholders acquiesce with executive malfeasance as long as share prices are rising? Why do citizens protest against a smaller government - even though it means lower taxes? Could it mean that the interests of shareholders and managers are identical? Does it imply that people prefer tax-and-spend governments and pork barrel politics to the Thatcherite alternative? Nothing happens by accident or by coercion. Shareholders aided and abetted the current crop of corporate executives enthusiastically. They knew well what was happening. They may not have been aware of the exact nature and extent of the rot - but they witnessed approvingly the public relations antics, insider trading, stock option resetting , unwinding, and unloading, share price manipulation, opaque transactions, and outlandish pay packages. Investors remained mum throughout the corruption of corporate America. It is time for the hangover.
AIDS The region which brought you the Black Death, communism and all-pervasive kleptocracy now presents: AIDS. The process of enlargement to the east may, unwittingly, open the European Union's doors to the two scourges of inordinately brutal organized crime and exceptionally lethal disease. As Newsweek noted, the threat is greater and nearer than any hysterically conjured act of terrorism. The effective measure of quarantining the HIV-positive inhabitants of the blighted region to prevent a calamity of medieval proportions is proscribed by the latest vintage of politically correct liberalism. The West can only help them improve detection and treatment. But this is a tall order. East European medicine harbors fantastic pretensions to west European standards of quality and service. But it is encumbered with African financing, German bureaucracy and Vietnamese infrastructure. Since the implosion of communism in 1989, deteriorating incomes, widespread unemployment and social disintegration plunged people into abject poverty, making it impossible to maintain a healthy lifestyle. A report published in September by the European regional office of the World Health Organization (WHO) pegs at 46 the percentage of the general population in the countries of the former communist bloc living on less than $4 a day - close to 170 million people. Crumbling and desperately underfunded healthcare systems, ridden by corruption and cronyism, ceased to provide even the appearance of rudimentary health services. The number of women who die at - ever rarer - childbirth skyrocketed. Transition has trimmed Russian life expectancy by well over a decade to 59, lower than in India. People lead brutish and nasty lives only to expire in their prime, often inebriated. In the republics of former Yugoslavia, respiratory and digestive tract diseases run amok. Stress and pollution conspire to reap a grim harvest throughout the wastelands of eastern Europe. The rate of Tuberculosis in Romania exceeds that of sub-Saharan Africa. UNAIDS and WHO have just published their AIDS Epidemic Update. It states unequivocally: "In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the number of people living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus - HIV - in 2002 stood at 1.2 million. HIV/AIDS is expanding rapidly in the Baltic States, the Russian Federation and several Central Asian republics." The figures are grossly understated - and distorting. The epidemic in eastern Europe and central Asia - virtually on the European Union's doorstep - is accelerating and its growth rate has surpassed sub-Saharan Africa's. One fifth of all people in this region infected by HIV contracted the virus in the preceding 12 months. UNAIDS says: "The unfortunate distinction of having the world’s fastest-growing HIV/AIDS epidemic still belongs to Eastern Europe and Central Asia." In the past eight years, AIDS has been suddenly "discovered" in 30 large Russian cities and in 86 of its 89 regions. Four fifth of all infections in the Commonwealth of Independent States - the debris left by the collapse of the USSR - are among people younger than 29. By July this year, new HIV cases surged to 200,000 - up from 11,000 in December 1998. In St. Petersburg, their numbers multiplied a staggering 250-fold since 1996 to 10,000 new instances diagnosed in 2001. Most of these cases are attributed to intravenous drug use. But, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 400 infected women gave birth in a single hospital in St. Petersburg in the first nine months of 2002 - compared to 149 throughout last year. About one third of the neonates test HIV-positive within 24 months. The disease has broken loose. How misleading even these dire data are is revealed by an in-depth study of a single city in Russia, Togliatti. Fully 56 percent of all drug users proved to be HIV-positive, most of them infected in the last 2 years. Three quarters of them were unaware of their predicament. One quarter of all prostitutes did not require their customers to use condoms. Two fifths of all "female sex workers" then proceeded to have unsafe intercourse with their mates, husbands, or partners. Studies conducted in Donetsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg found that one seventh of all prostitutes are already infected. An evidently shocked compiler of the results states: "The study lends further credence to concerns that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Russian cities could be considerably more severe than the already-high official statistics indicate." The region's governments claim that 1 percent of the population of countries in transition - still a hefty 4 million people - use drugs. But this, too, is a wild underestimate. UNAIDS itself cites a study that concluded that "among Moscow secondary-school students ... 4% had injected drugs". Quoted in Pravda.ru, The Director of the Federal Scientific Center for AIDS at Russia's Ministry of Health, Vadim Pokrovsky, warns that Russia is likely to follow the "African model" with up to an 80 percent infection rate in some parts. Kaliningrad, with a 4 percent prevalence of the syndrome, he muses, can serve as a blueprint for the short-term development of the AIDS epidemic in Russia. Or, take Uzbekistan. New infections registered in the first six months of 2002 surpassed the entire caseload of the previous decade. Following the war in Afghanistan, heroin routes have shifted to central Asia, spreading its abuse among the destitute and despondent populations of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In many of these countries and, to some extent, in Russia and Ukraine, some grades of heroine are cheaper than vodka. Ominously, reports the European enter for the Epidemiological Monitoring of AIDS, as HIV cases among drug users decline, they increase exponentially among heterosexuals. This, for instance, is the case in Belarus and Ukraine. The prevalence of HIV among all Ukrainians is 1 percent. Even relative prosperity and good governance can no longer stem the tide. Estonia's infection rate is 50 percent higher than Russia's, even if the AIDS cesspool that is the exclave of Kaliningrad is included in the statistics. Latvia is not far behind. One of every seven prisoners in Lithuania has fallen prey to the virus. All three countries will accede to the European Union in 2004. Pursuant to an agreement signed recently between Russia and the EU, Kaliningrad's denizens will travel to all European destinations unencumbered by a visa regime. Very little is done to confront the looming plague. One third of young women in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan never heard of AIDS. Over-crowded prisons provide no clean needles or condoms to their inmates. There are no early warning "sentinel" programs anywhere. Needle exchanges are unheard of. UNICEF warns, in its report titled "Social Monitor 2002", that HIV/AIDS imperils both future generations and the social order. The political class is unmoved. President Vladimir Putin never as much as mentions AIDS in his litany of speeches. Even Macedonia's western-minded and western-propped president, Boris Trajkovski, dealt with the subject for the first time only yesterday. Belarus did not bother to apply to the United Nation's Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria or to draw approved resources from the World Bank's anti-TB/HIV/AIDS project. In many backward, tribal countries - especially in the Balkan and in central Asia - the subjects of procreation, let alone contraception, are taboo. Vehicles belonging to Medecins du Monde, a French NGO running a pioneer needle exchange program in Russia, were torched. The Orthodox Church has strongly objected to cinema ads promoting safer sex. Sexual education is rare. Even when education is on offer - like last year's media campaign in Ukraine - it rarely mitigates or alters high-risk conduct. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the St. Petersburg AIDS Center carried out a survey of 2000 people who came to be tested there and were consequently exposed to AIDS prevention training. "Neither the men nor the women had changed their high-risk behavior", is the unsettling conclusion. Ignorance is compounded by a dismal level personal hygiene, not the least due to chronically malfunctioning water, sanitation and electricity grids and to the prohibitive costs of cleansing agents and medicines. Sexually transmitted diseases - the gateways to the virus - are rampant. Close to half a million new cases of syphilis are diagnosed annually only in Russia. The first step in confronting the epidemic is proper diagnosis and acknowledgement of the magnitude of the problem. Macedonia, with 2 million citizens, implausibly claims to harbor only 18 carriers and 5 AIDS patients. A national strategy to confront the syndrome is not due until June next year. Though AIDS medication is theoretically provided free of charge to all patients, the country's health insurance fund, looted by its management, is unable to afford to import them. In a year of buoyant tax revenues, the Russian government reduced spending on AIDS-related issues from $6 million to $5 million. By comparison, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) alone allocated $4 million to Russia's HIV/AIDS activities last year. Another $1.5 were given to Ukraine. Russia blocked last year a $150 million World Bank loan for the treatment of tuberculosis and AIDS. Money is a cardinal issue, though. Christof Ruehl, the World Bank's chief economist in Russia and Murray Feshbach, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, put the number of infected people in the Russian Federation at 1-1.2 million. Even this figure - five times the official guesstimate - may be irrationally exuberant. A report by the US National Intelligence Council forecasts 5-8 million HIV-positives in Russia by the end of the decade. Already one third of conscripts are deemed unfit for service due to HIV and hepatitis. Medicines are scarce. Only 100 of St. Petersburg's 17,000 registered HIV carriers receive retroviral care of any kind. Most of them will die if not given access to free treatment. Yet, even a locally manufactured, generic version, of an annual dose of the least potent antiretroviral cocktail would cost hundreds of dollars - about half a year's wages. At market prices, free medicines for all AIDS sufferers in this vast country would amount to as much as four fifths of the entire federal budget, says Ruehl. Some pharmaceutical multinationals - spearheaded by Merck - have offered the more impoverished countries of the region, such as Romania, AIDS prescriptions at 10 percent of the retail price in the United States. But this is still an unaffordable $1100 per year per patient. To this should be added the cost of repeated laboratory tests and antibiotics - c. $10,000 annually, according to the New York Times. The average monthly salary in Romania is $100, in Macedonia $160, in Ukraine $60. It is cheaper to die than to be treated for AIDS. Indeed, society would rather let the tainted expire. People diagnosed with AIDS in eastern Europe are superstitiously shunned, sacked from their jobs and mistreated by health and law enforcement authorities. Municipal bureaucracies scuttle even the little initiative shown by reluctant governments. These self-defeating attitudes have changed only in central Europe, notably in Poland where an outbreak of AIDS was contained successfully. And, thus, the bleak picture is unlikely to improve soon. UNAIDS, UNICEF and WHO publish country-specific "Epidemiological Factsheets on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections". The latest edition, released this year, is disheartening. Under-reporting, shoddy, intermittent testing, increasing transmission through heterosexual contact, a rising number of infected children. This is part of the dowry east Europe brings to its long-delayed marriage with a commitment-phobic European Union. Albania, Economy of Blessed with Chinese GDP growth rates (7-8% annually in each of the last 3 years) and German inflation (4%, down from 32% in 1997, mostly attributable to increases in energy and housing costs), it is easy to forget Albania's Somali recent past. In 1997, following the collapse of a series of politically-sanctioned pyramid schemes in which one third of the impoverished population lost its meager life savings, Albania imploded. The mob looted 700,000 guns from the armories of the army and the police and went on a rampage, in bloody scenes replete with warlords, crime, and 1500 dead. It took 5% of GDP to recapitalize Albania's tottering banks and overall GDP dropped by 7% that year. During the two preceding years, Albania has been the IMF's poster boy (as it is again nowadays). Since October 1991, the World Bank has approved 43 projects in the country, committed close to $570 million and disbursed two thirds of its commitments. This, excluding $100 million after the 1999 Kosovo crisis and $50 million for agricultural development. The European Investment Bank (EIB), the EBRD, the EU, and the Stability Pact have committed billions to the region for infrastructure, crime fighting, and institution building projects. Albania stood to benefit from this infusion and from a future Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU (similar to Macedonia's and Croatia's). Yet, as Chris Patten (the Commissioner in charge of aid) himself admitted to "The Economist": "The EU'S capacity for making political promises is more impressive than our past record of delivering financial assistance". The aid was bungled and mired in pernicious bureaucratic infighting. The EU's delegation in Tirana was recently implicated in "serious financial irregularities". The economic picture (if notoriously unreliable official statistics are to be trusted) has been mixed ever since. The budget deficit hovers around 9% (similar to Macedonia's, Albania's war ravaged neighbor). The (very soft and very long term) external debt is at a nadir of 28% of GDP (though still 150% of exports) and foreign exchange reserves cover more than 4 months of imports. This is reflected in the (export averse) stable exchange rate of the lek. But the overall public debt is much higher (70%) and the domestic component may well be unsustainable. Money supply is still roaring (+12%), interest rates are punishingly high (8% p.a.) though in steep decline, and GDP per capita is less than $1000. It is still one of Europe's poorest countries (especially its rural north). Most of its GDP growth is in construction and trade. Health and education are decrepit and deteriorating. And people vote with their feet (emigrate in droves) and wallets (the economy is effectively dollarized). Privatization receipts which were supposed to amortize public debt did not materialize (though there were some notable successes in 2000, including the completion of the privatization of land and of the important mining sector). Negative sentiment towards emerging economies, Albania's proximity to the Kosovo and Macedonia killing fields, and global recession make this prospect even more elusive. Had it not been for the $500 million in remittances from 20% of the workforce who are employed in Greece and Italy - Albania would have been in dire straits. Money from Albanian drug dealers, immigrant smugglers, and other unsavory characters still filters in from Prague, Zurich, and the USA. These illicit - but economically crucial - funds may explain the government's foot dragging on the privatization of the omnipresent Savings Bank (83% of all deposits, no loans, owns 85% of all treasury bills, 2% net return on equity) and its reluctance to overhaul the moribund banking system and enact anti money laundering measures. It took crushing pressure by IFI's to force the government to hive off the Savings Bank's pension plan business into Albapost, the local Post Office. In the intervening years, Albania got its fiscal act together (though its tax base is still minimal) and made meaningful inroads into the informal economy (read: organized crime), not least by dramatically improving its hitherto venal and smuggler-infested customs service. A collateral registry has been introduced and much debated bankruptcy and mediation laws may be enacted next year. Everything, from the operations of the Central Bank to the executive branches is being revamped. Those who remained in Albania are much more invigorated than they have been in a long time. But the problems are structural. Albania is among the few countries in our post-modern world which rely on agriculture (55%) rather than industry (24%), or services (21%). Only 40% of the population live in cities and female illiteracy is still at 24%. Tourism (especially of the archeological kind) is promising. But there are less than 6 computers and 40 phones per 1000 citizens and less than 40% of the roads are paved (Albanians were forbidden to own private cars until 1985). FDI amounts to a measly $50 million a year and aid per capita has tripled to c. $160 since 1997. Pervasive electricity shortages (despite budget draining subsidies of imported energy) hamper economic activity. Albania was rated 100th (out of 174) in the UNDP's Human Development Index and 90th (out of 175) in UNICEF's Report on the State of the World's Children (under-five mortality). Its neighbors ranked 55-73. The isolationist legacy of the demented and paranoid Enver Hoxha is only partly to blame. Mismanagement, corruption, the criminalization of society, and tribalism are equally at fault in post-Communist Albania. Everyone takes bribes - not surprising when a senior Minister earns less than $1000 a month (ten times the average salary). A well developed, though fast eroded, social (extended family, village, tribe) safety net ensures that only 20% of the population are under the official poverty line. But these extended ties are one of the reasons for local unemployment (almost 20% of the workforce) - immigrant workers (mostly family members) constitute more than 25% of those employed. With a youthful (32) Prime Minister (Ilir Meta, overwhelmingly re-elected this year) who is an economist by profession, Albania is reaching out to its neighbours. As early as 1992 it joined the improbable (and hitherto ineffective) Black Sea Economic Cooperation Pact (with Greece, Turkey and ... Azerbaijan and Armenia!) - which currently lobbies for the re-opening of the Danube River. Albanian cheap exports are competitive only if transported via river. Albania signed recently a series of bilateral agreements with Montenegro regarding transportation on the Bojana river and the Skadar Lake, use of harbors, the extension of railways and roads, and the regulation of aviation rights. Despite the fact that Macedonia is (abnormally for geographical neighbors) not an important trading partner, Albania has responded positively to all the Macedonian initiatives for economic and political integration of the region. It is here, in regional collaboration and synergy, that Albania's future rests. Should the region deteriorate once more into mayhem and worse, Albania would be amongst the first and foremost to suffer. Hence its surprisingly conciliatory stance in the recent crisis in Macedonia. It seems that Albanian politicians have wisely decided to move from a "Great Albania" to a prosperous one. Albania, often accused in the past of harboring unemployed mujaheedin and al-Qaida cells, has offered to contribute 70-75 fighters to Bush's anti-Iraqi "coalition of the willing". Earlier this month, it co-signed the US-Adriatic Charter, enshrining closer cooperation with America, Croatia and Macedonia. Albania, on the seam between the European Union and wilder territories, is in the frontline. Last week, it turned away at the border a notorious Albanian "troublemaker", now a Swiss resident, Albanian Liberation Army head Gafurr Adili. The British plan to transform it into a centre for asylum seekers - most of them Iraqis - while their claims are being processed. Italy asked Albania on Wednesday to fend off war refugees likely to try to cross over to Western Europe from the Balkan country's coast. Yet, Albania is far from being an American satellite, the way Macedonia is. Defying American pressures, it is promoting a free trade agreement with Kosovo, the erstwhile Yugoslav province, now populated almost entirely by Kosovars of Albanian origin. Albanian and Iranian officials on state visit to Tirana last month called for closer economic, trade and international collaboration. An agreement on double taxation was subsequently signed. Albania inked and ratified the statute of the International Criminal Court, much-opposed by the USA. Albania's economy is no less conflicted. Is it really Europe's poorest, 52 percent agricultural, failed state - or a role model of economic revival and geopolitical responsibility, as some multilaterals would have it? Tales of horror and lachrymosity abound. According to the CIA's 2002 Factbook, one third of the population is under the poverty line and official unemployment is 17 percent. The Irish charity Cradle has recently collected $90,000 in food and hygiene products from children in 19 primary schools in Waterford to be shipped to the destitute state. People inhabit shanty towns precariously constructed over toxic dumps - such as the one in Porto Romana, south of Albania's second city, Durres. The United Nations pegged the cleanup costs of this single site at $10 million. A million Albanians fled their homeland to Greece, Italy, Switzerland and Central Europe. Legislation to protect property rights and facilitate commerce is lacking, the courts are compromised, law enforcement agencies irreparably rotten. Add to this, says the International Crisis Group in a report it released last week, "weak infrastructure, old technology, the fiscal burden (income taxes, value added tax and customs duties), weak implementation of legislation and insufficient financial services for the private sector" - and the following observations of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) make sense: "Albania receives relatively low levels of FDI flows, even compared to other countries of the Central and Eastern Europe region. Such flows increased quite substantially in recent years however, from a US$ 60 million average in 1993-1999 to US$ 143 million in 2000 and about US$ 200 million in 2001. The 2000 increase in FDI flows has led to an increase in the share of such flows in gross fixed capital formation, from 7% in 1999 to about 20% in 2000. Still, the share of FDI inflows in gross fixed capital formation registered between 1994 and 2000 was 15% on average, far below its 42% peak level in 1993." But the true situation - accounting for the enormous informal economy, much of it illicit - is substantially different. The International Monetary Fund provided, two weeks ago, a more balanced view, following the conclusion of an Article IV consultation with the authorities: "Sound financial policies and market reforms during most of the 1990s have fostered growth and macroeconomic stability. Nonetheless, poverty remains pervasive, and the sustainability of growth is dependent on the expansion of tradables, in particular industry and mining. However, investment in these sectors is hindered by a deficient business climate including administrative barriers and electricity shortages." Though annual economic growth has dwindled from a historic average of 7 percent to 4.7 percent last year, import demand was buttressed by rising foreign investment and $1 billion in private remittances. This, of course, led to a widening trade deficit in both 2001 and 2002 - though the exchange rate is eerily stable. Tax collection is still sporadic but the fiscal deficit has remained restrained, though high, at 8.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2001 and about 7.5 percent the year after. Total public debt declined to c. 64 percent of GDP from about 72 percent at end-2000, mainly due to generous debt forgiveness by the West. The trade deficit is an alarming 24 percent of GDP, the current account deficit at almost one tenth of Albania's puny $4.6 billion product. International reserves are at a healthy 5 months of imports, the outcome of unilateral transfers, especially aid, remittances and debt. Inflation peaked at 7 percent in early 2002 despite some tightening of monetary policy. It has since subsided. The repo rate, though, soared since mid-2001 from 6.5 to 8 percent. But to no avail: currency in circulation continued its vertiginous climb due to sizable panicky deposit withdrawals from the largest two banks early last year. Deposits have been recovering but lackadaisically. The IMF chastises Albania's government: "Structural reforms have slowed since mid-2001, with delays in privatization and, since mid-2002, slippage in electricity sector reform. Political changes, together with the weakened global market, hindered the planned mid-2002 sale of the Savings Bank and Albtelekom. While the authorities have made significant progress in reforming the ailing energy sector, drought has caused severe electricity shortages in recent years. Moreover recent slippage in meeting targets for bill collection and losses could prolong the crisis." Albania's economic Renaissance is evident even in the moribund energy sector. According to Balkan Times, the country's Power and Industry Ministry is poised to approve a $257 million project in the oil sector - on top of $350 million invested in the past 12 years. The country may well become an oil producer - though this will do little to ameliorate its chronic power shortages and blackouts. The Patos-Marinez well has proven to be surprisingly bountiful. Another $85 million will be invested by the World Bank in a combined-cycle (thermal and fuel) power station at a six-hectare greenfield site north of Vlore adjacent to an offshore oil tanker terminal. Nor are signs of revival confined to oil. In an ironic reversal of roles, Air Albania dished out c. $3 million on a plane it bought from the bankrupt Australian carrier, Ansett. The recent introduction of a deposit insurance scheme restored some confidence in the banking system. Though only one in ten has a bank account - more than 12 foreign financial institutions opened shop in this country of 3.5 million people. Construction of everything - from hotels to apartment blocks - is booming, driven by laundered funds from thriving drugs, trafficking and smuggling operations. Albania is one of the fastest growing mobile telephony markets in the world and its transport infrastructure has improved dramatically. Bank supervision was strengthened, anti money laundering measures introduced, arrears with foreign creditors were largely regularized and an anti-corruption program implemented (by the venal and crime-infested Socialists, thunder the no less tainted opposition). The European Union intends to sign a Stabilization and Association Agreement with Tirana next month. How can such disparate visions - of penury and resurgence - be reconciled? As the International Crisis Group has noted, Albania may be making progress economically - but not so socially. It is still politically volatile, permeated by corruption and crime, centered around the capital at the expense of other under-developed regions. Religious intolerance is growing - the general secretary of the Muslim community was assassinated two months ago. The environment is hopelessly dilapidated, poverty is rampant, destabilizing small weapons ubiquitous and some minorities - notably the Roma - ill-treated. Albania's neighborhood is equally disheartening. Post-Djindjic Serbia is under an increasingly onerous "emergency" military regime. Montenegro is secessionist. Bloody tensions inside Macedonia between ethnic groups and political camps are mounting. Kosovo is restless. The European Union preoccupied. the United States wants out of the benighted Balkans. Relations with both Greece and Italy are strained. Albania cannot alter its geographical destiny - but it can reform itself. Its leadership makes all the right noises and, occasionally, the proper moves. But it is a far cry from the fervor of true converts, such as Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, or even Serbia. Unless Albanians take their own future seriously - no one else will. Analysis, Technical and Fundamental The authors of a paper published by NBER on March 2000 and titled "The Foundations of Technical Analysis" - Andrew Lo, Harry Mamaysky, and Jiang Wang - claim that: "Technical analysis, also known as 'charting', has been part of financial practice for many decades, but this discipline has not received the same level of academic scrutiny and acceptance as more traditional approaches such as fundamental analysis. One of the main obstacles is the highly subjective nature of technical analysis - the presence of geometric shapes in historical price charts is often in the eyes of the beholder. In this paper we offer a systematic and automatic approach to technical pattern recognition ... and apply the method to a large number of US stocks from 1962 to 1996..." And the conclusion: " ... Over the 31-year sample period, several technical indicators do provide incremental information and may have some practical value." These hopeful inferences are supported by the work of other scholars, such as Paul Weller of the Finance Department of the university of Iowa. While he admits the limitations of technical analysis - it is a-theoretic and data intensive, pattern over-fitting can be a problem, its rules are often difficult to interpret, and the statistical testing is cumbersome - he insists that "trading rules are picking up patterns in the data not accounted for by standard statistical models" and that the excess returns thus generated are not simply a risk premium. Technical analysts have flourished and waned in line with the stock exchange bubble. They and their multi-colored charts regularly graced CNBC, the CNN and other market-driving channels. "The Economist" found that many successful fund managers have regularly resorted to technical analysis - including George Soros' Quantum Hedge fund and Fidelity's Magellan. Technical analysis may experience a revival now that corporate accounts - the fundament of fundamental analysis - have been rendered moot by seemingly inexhaustible scandals. The field is the progeny of Charles Dow of Dow Jones fame and the founder of the "Wall Street Journal". He devised a method to discern cyclical patterns in share prices. Other sages - such as Elliott - put forth complex "wave theories". Technical analysts now regularly employ dozens of geometric configurations in their divinations. Technical analysis is defined thus in "The Econometrics of Financial Markets", a 1997 textbook authored by John Campbell, Andrew Lo, and Craig MacKinlay: "An approach to investment management based on the belief that historical price series, trading volume, and other market statistics exhibit regularities - often ... in the form of geometric patterns ... that can be profitably exploited to extrapolate future price movements." A less fanciful definition may be the one offered by Edwards and Magee in "Technical Analysis of Stock Trends": "The science of recording, usually in graphic form, the actual history of trading (price changes, volume of transactions, etc.) in a certain stock or in 'the averages' and then deducing from that pictured history the probable future trend." Fundamental analysis is about the study of key statistics from the financial statements of firms as well as background information about the company's products, business plan, management, industry, the economy, and the marketplace. Economists, since the 1960's, sought to rebuff technical analysis. Markets, they say, are efficient and "walk" randomly. Prices reflect all the information known to market players - including all the information pertaining to the future. Technical analysis has often been compared to voodoo, alchemy, and astrology - for instance by Burton Malkiel in his seminal work, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street". The paradox is that technicians are more orthodox than the most devout academic. They adhere to the strong version of market efficiency. The market is so efficient, they say, that nothing can be gleaned from fundamental analysis. All fundamental insights, information, and analyses are already reflected in the price. This is why one can deduce future prices from past and present ones. Jack Schwager, sums it up in his book "Schwager on Futures: Technical Analysis", quoted by Stockcharts.com: "One way of viewing it is that markets may witness extended periods of random fluctuation, interspersed with shorter periods of nonrandom behavior. The goal of the chartist is to identify those periods (i.e. major trends)." Not so, retort the fundamentalists. The fair value of a security or a market can be derived from available information using mathematical models - but is rarely reflected in prices. This is the weak version of the market efficiency hypothesis. The mathematically convenient idealization of the efficient market, though, has been debunked in numerous studies. These are efficiently summarized in Craig McKinlay and Andrew Lo's tome "A Non-random Walk Down Wall Street" published in 1999. Not all markets are strongly efficient. Most of them sport weak or "semi-strong" efficiency. In some markets, a filter model - one that dictates the timing of sales and purchases - could prove useful. This is especially true when the equilibrium price of a share - or of the market as a whole - changes as a result of externalities. Substantive news, change in management, an oil shock, a terrorist attack, an accounting scandal, an FDA approval, a major contract, or a natural, or man-made disaster - all cause share prices and market indices to break the boundaries of the price band that they have occupied. Technical analysts identify these boundaries and trace breakthroughs and their outcomes in terms of prices. Technical analysis may be nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. The more devotees it has, the stronger it affects the shares or markets it analyses. Investors move in herds and are inclined to seek patterns in the often bewildering marketplace. As opposed to the assumptions underlying the classic theory of portfolio analysis - investors do remember past prices. They hesitate before they cross certain numerical thresholds. But this herd mentality is also the Achilles heel of technical analysis. If everyone were to follow its guidance - it would have been rendered useless. If everyone were to buy and sell at the same time - based on the same technical advice - price advantages would have been arbitraged away instantaneously. Technical analysis is about privileged information to the privileged few - though not too few, lest prices are not swayed. Studies cited in Edwin Elton and Martin Gruber's "Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis" and elsewhere show that a filter model - trading with technical analysis - is preferable to a "buy and hold" strategy but inferior to trading at random. Trading against recommendations issued by a technical analysis model and with them - yielded the same results. Fama-Blum discovered that the advantage proffered by such models is identical to transaction costs. The proponents of technical analysis claim that rather than forming investor psychology - it reflects their risk aversion at different price levels. Moreover, the borders between the two forms of analysis - technical and fundamental - are less sharply demarcated nowadays. "Fundamentalists" insert past prices and volume data in their models - and "technicians" incorporate arcana such as the dividend stream and past earnings in theirs. It is not clear why should fundamental analysis be considered superior to its technical alternative. If prices incorporate all the information known and reflect it - predicting future prices would be impossible regardless of the method employed. Conversely, if prices do not reflect all the information available, then surely investor psychology is as important a factor as the firm's - now oft-discredited - financial statements? Prices, after all, are the outcome of numerous interactions among market participants, their greed, fears, hopes, expectations, and risk aversion. Surely studying this emotional and cognitive landscape is as crucial as figuring the effects of cuts in interest rates or a change of CEO? Still, even if we accept the rigorous version of market efficiency - i.e., as Aswath Damodaran of the Stern Business School at NYU puts it, that market prices are "unbiased estimates of the true value of investments" - prices do react to new information - and, more importantly, to anticipated information. It takes them time to do so. Their reaction constitutes a trend and identifying this trend at its inception can generate excess yields. On this both fundamental and technical analysis are agreed. Moreover, markets often over-react: they undershoot or overshoot the "true and fair value". Fundamental analysis calls this oversold and overbought markets. The correction back to equilibrium prices sometimes takes years. A savvy trader can profit from such market failures and excesses. As quality information becomes ubiquitous and instantaneous, research issued by investment banks discredited, privileged access to information by analysts prohibited, derivatives proliferate, individual participation in the stock market increases, and transaction costs turn negligible - a major rethink of our antiquated financial models is called for. The maverick Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, summed up the lure of technical analysis in lyric terms in an interview he gave to Traders.com's "Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities", quoted by Arthur Hill in Stockcharts.com: "The more creativity you bring to the investment process, the more rewarding it will be. The only way to maintain ongoing success, however, is to constantly innovate. That's much the same in all endeavors. The only way to continue making money, to continue growing and keeping your profit margins healthy, is to constantly come up with new ideas." Anarchy (as Organizing Principle) The recent spate of accounting fraud scandals signals the end of an era. Disillusionment and disenchantment with American capitalism may yet lead to a tectonic ideological shift from laissez faire and self regulation to state intervention and regulation. This would be the reversal of a trend dating back to Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the USA. It would also cast some fundamental - and way more ancient - tenets of free-marketry in grave doubt. Markets are perceived as self-organizing, self-assembling, exchanges of information, goods, and services. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is the sum of all the mechanisms whose interaction gives rise to the optimal allocation of economic resources. The market's great advantages over central planning are precisely its randomness and its lack of self-awareness. Market participants go about their egoistic business, trying to maximize their utility, oblivious of the interests and action of all, bar those they interact with directly. Somehow, out of the chaos and clamor, a structure emerges of order and efficiency unmatched. Man is incapable of intentionally producing better outcomes. Thus, any intervention and interference are deemed to be detrimental to the proper functioning of the economy. It is a minor step from this idealized worldview back to the Physiocrats, who preceded Adam Smith, and who propounded the doctrine of "laissez faire, laissez passer" - the hands-off battle cry. Theirs was a natural religion. The market, as an agglomeration of individuals, they thundered, was surely entitled to enjoy the rights and freedoms accorded to each and every person. John Stuart Mill weighed against the state's involvement in the economy in his influential and exquisitely-timed "Principles of Political Economy", published in 1848. Undaunted by mounting evidence of market failures - for instance to provide affordable and plentiful public goods - this flawed theory returned with a vengeance in the last two decades of the past century. Privatization, deregulation, and self-regulation became faddish buzzwords and part of a global consensus propagated by both commercial banks and multilateral lenders. As applied to the professions - to accountants, stock brokers, lawyers, bankers, insurers, and so on - self-regulation was premised on the belief in long-term self-preservation. Rational economic players and moral agents are supposed to maximize their utility in the long-run by observing the rules and regulations of a level playing field. This noble propensity seemed, alas, to have been tampered by avarice and narcissism and by the immature inability to postpone gratification. Self-regulation failed so spectacularly to conquer human nature that its demise gave rise to the most intrusive statal stratagems ever devised. In both the UK and the USA, the government is much more heavily and pervasively involved in the minutia of accountancy, stock dealing, and banking than it was only two years ago. But the ethos and myth of "order out of chaos" - with its proponents in the exact sciences as well - ran deeper than that. The very culture of commerce was thoroughly permeated and transformed. It is not surprising that the Internet - a chaotic network with an anarchic modus operandi - flourished at these times. The dotcom revolution was less about technology than about new ways of doing business - mixing umpteen irreconcilable ingredients, stirring well, and hoping for the best. No one, for instance, offered a linear revenue model of how to translate "eyeballs" - i.e., the number of visitors to a Web site - to money ("monetizing"). It was dogmatically held to be true that, miraculously, traffic - a chaotic phenomenon - will translate to profit - hitherto the outcome of painstaking labour. Privatization itself was such a leap of faith. State owned assets - including utilities and suppliers of public goods such as health and education - were transferred wholesale to the hands of profit maximizers. The implicit belief was that the price mechanism will provide the missing planning and regulation. In other words, higher prices were supposed to guarantee an uninterrupted service. Predictably, failure ensued - from electricity utilities in California to railway operators in Britain. The simultaneous crumbling of these urban legends - the liberating power of the Net, the self-regulating markets, the unbridled merits of privatization - inevitably gave rise to a backlash. The state has acquired monstrous proportions in the decades since the Second world War. It is about to grow further and to digest the few sectors hitherto left untouched. To say the least, these are not good news. But we libertarians - proponents of both individual freedom and individual responsibility - have brought it on ourselves by thwarting the work of that invisible regulator - the market. Arms Trade In a desperate bid to fend off sanctions, the Bosnian government banned yesterday all trade in arms and munitions. A local, Serb-owned company was documented by the State Department selling spare parts and maintenance for military aircraft to Iraq via Yugoslav shell companies. Heads rolled. In the Republika Srpska, the Serb component of the ramshackle Bosnian state, both the Defense Minister Slobodan Bilic and army Chief of Staff Novica Simic resigned. Another casualty was the general director of the Orao Aircraft Institute of Bijeljina - Milan Prica. On the Yugoslav side, Jugoimport chief Gen Jovan Cekovic and federal Deputy Defense Minister Ivan Djokic stood down. Bosnia's is only the latest in a series of embarrassing disclosures in practically every country of the former eastern bloc, including all the EU accession candidates. With the crumbling of the Warsaw pact and the economies of the region, millions of former military and secret service operators resorted to peddling weapons and martial expertise to rogue states, terrorist outfits, and organized crime. The confluence - and, lately, convergence - of these interests is threatening Europe's very stability. Last week, the Polish "Rzeczpospolita" accused the Military Information services (WSI) of illicit arms sales between 1992-6 through both private and state-run entities. The weapons were plundered from the Polish army and sold at half price to Croatia and Somalia, both under UN arms embargo. Deals were struck with the emerging international operations of the Russian mafia. Terrorist middlemen and Latvian state officials were involved. Breaching Poland's democratic veneer, the Polish Ministry of Defense threatened to sue the paper for disclosing state secrets. Police in Lodz is still investigating the alarming disappearance of 4 Arrow anti-aircraft missiles from a train transporting arms from a factory to the port of Gdansk, to be exported. The private security escort claim innocence. The Czech Military Intelligence Services (VZS) have long been embroiled in serial scandals. The Czech defense attaché to India, Miroslav Kvasnak, was recently fired for disobeying explicit orders from the minister of defense. According to Jane's, Kvasnak headed URNA - the elite anti-terrorist unit of the Czech National Police. He was sacked in 1995 for selling Semtex, the notorious Czech plastic explosive, as well as weapons and munitions to organized crime gangs. In late August, the Czechs arrested arms traffickers, members of an international ring, for selling Russian weapons - including, incredibly, tanks, fighter planes, naval vessels, long range rockets, and missile platforms - to Iraq. The operation has lasted 3 years and was conducted from Prague. According to the "Wall Street Journal", the Czech intelligence services halted the sale of $300 million worth of the Tamara radar systems to Iraq in 1997. Czech firms, such as Agroplast, a leading waste processing company, have often been openly accused of weapons smuggling. "The Guardian" tracked in February a delivery of missiles and guidance systems from the Czech Republic through Syria to Iraq. German go-betweens operate in the Baltic countries. In May a sale of more than two pounds of the radioactive element cesium-137 was thwarted in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The substance was sold to terrorist groups bent on producing a "dirty bomb", believe US officials quoted by "The Guardian". The Director of the CIA, John Deutsch, testified in Congress in 1996 about previous cases in Lithuania involving two tons of radioactive wolfram and 220 pounds of uranium-238. Still, the epicenters of the illicit trade in weapons are in the Balkan, in Russia, and in the republics of the former Soviet Union. Here, domestic firms intermesh with Western intermediaries, criminals, terrorists, and state officials to engender a pernicious, ubiquitous and malignant web of smuggling and corruption. According to the Center for Public Integrity and the Western media, over the last decade, renegade Russian army officers have sold weapons to every criminal and terrorist organization in the world - from the IRA to al-Qaida and to every failed state, from Liberia to Libya. They are protected by well-connected, bribe-paying, arms dealers and high-level functionaries in every branch of government. They launder the proceeds through Russian oil multinationals, Cypriot, Balkan, and Lebanese banks, and Asian, Swiss, Austrian, and British trading conglomerates - all obscurely owned and managed. The most serious breach of the united international front against Iraq may be the sale of the $100 million anti-stealth Ukrainian Kolchuga radar to the pariah state two years ago. Taped evidence suggests that president Leonid Kuchma himself instructed the General Director of the Ukrainian arms sales company, UkrSpetzExport, Valery Malev to conclude the deal. Malev died in a mysterious car accident on March 6, three days after his taped conversation with Kuchma surfaced. The Ukrainians insist that they were preempted by Russian dealers who sold a similar radar system to Iraq - but this is highly unlikely as the Russian system was still in development at the time. the American and British are currently conducting a high-profile investigation in Kyiv. In Russia, illegal arms are traded mainly by the Western Group of Forces in cahoots with private companies, both domestic and foreign. The Air Defense Army specializes in selling light arms. The army is the main source of weapons - plastic explosives, grenade launchers, munitions - of both Chechen rebels and Chechen criminals. Contrary to received opinion, volunteer-soldiers, not conscripts, control the arms trade. The state itself is involved in arms proliferation. Sales to China and Iran were long classified. From June, all sales of materiel enjoy "state secret" status. There is little the US can do. The Bush administration has imposed in May sanctions on Armenian and Moldovan companies, among others, for aiding and abetting Iran's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Armenian president, Robert Kocharian, indignantly denied knowledge of such transactions and vowed to get to the bottom of the American allegations. The Foreign Policy Research Institute, quoted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, described a "Department of Energy (DOE) initiative, underway since 1993, to improve 'material protection, control and accountability' at former Soviet nuclear enterprises. The program enjoys substantial bipartisan support in the United States and is considered the first line of defense against unwanted proliferation episodes." "As of February 2000, more than 8 years after the collapse of the USSR, new security systems had been installed at 113 buildings, most of them in Russia; however, these sites contained only 7 percent of the estimated 650 tons of weapons-usable material considered at risk for theft or diversion. DOE plans call for safeguarding 60 percent of the material by 2006 and the rest in 10 to 15 years or longer." Russian traders learned to circumvent official channels and work through Belarus. Major General Stsyapan Sukharenka, the first deputy chief of the Belarusian KGB, denied, in March, any criminal arms trading in his country. This vehement protest is gainsaid by the preponderance of Belarusian arms traders replete with fake end-user certificates in Croatia during the Yugoslav wars of secession (1992-5). Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Steven Pifer said that UN inspectors unearthed Belarusian artillery in Iraq in 1996. Iraqis are also being trained in Belarus to operate various advanced weapons systems. The secret services and armies of Ukraine, Russia, and even Romania use Belarus to mask the true origin of weapons sold in contravention of UN sanctions. Western arms manufacturers lobby their governments to enhance their sales. Legitimate Russian and Ukrainian sales are often thwarted by Western political arm-twisting. When Macedonia, in the throes of a civil war it was about to lose, purchased helicopter gunships from Ukraine, the American Embassy leaned on the government to annul the contracts and threatened to withhold aid and credits if it does not succumb. The duopoly, enjoyed by the USA and Russia, forces competitors to go underground and to seek rogue or felonious customers. Yugoslav scientists, employed by Jugoimport and other firms run by former army officers, are developing cruise missiles for Iraq, alleges the American administration. The accusation, though, is dubious as Iraq has no access to satellites to guide such missiles. Another Yugoslav firm, Brunner, constructed a Libyan rocket propellant manufacturing facility. In an interview to the "Washington Post", Yugoslavia's president Vojislav Kostunica brushed off the American complaints about, as he put it disdainfully, "overhauling older-generation aircraft engines". Such exploits are not unique to Yugoslavia or Bosnia. The Croat security services are notorious for their collusion in drug and arms trafficking, mainly via Hungary. Macedonian construction companies collaborate with manufacturers of heavy machinery and purveyors of missile technology in an effort to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi debts. Albanian crime gangs collude with weapon smugglers based in Montenegro and Kosovo. The Balkan - from Greece to Hungary - is teeming with these penumbral figures. Arms smuggling is a by-product of criminalized societies, destitution, and dysfunctional institutions. The prolonged period of failed transition in countries such as Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine has entrenched organized crime. It now permeates every legitimate economic sphere and every organ of the state. Whether this situation is reversible is the subject of heated debate. But it is the West which pays the price in increased crime rates and, probably in Iraq, in added fatalities once it launches war against that murderous regime. Asian Tigers The first reaction of economies in transition is a sharp decline in their production, mainly in industrial production. In the countries which attained independence with the demise of the British Empire (where the sun never set) - industrial production fell by 20% on average. Even this was because these countries continued to maintain economic ties with the "mother" (the United Kingdom). They also continued to trade among themselves, with the rest of the British Empire, through the Commonwealth mechanism. This was not the case when the second biggest empire of modern times collapsed, the Soviet empire. When the USSR and the Eastern Bloc disintegrated - the COMECON trading bloc was dismantled, never to be replaced by another. All the constituents of the former Eastern Bloc preferred to trade with the west rather than with one another. The Empire left in its wake mountains of trade debts, total lack of liquidity and money losing barter operations carried out in unrealistic prices. Thus, industrial production plunged in the newly established countries (CIS and the countries which were part of Former Yugoslavia) as well as in other former members of the Eastern Bloc by 40-60% over a period of 5 years. A slow recovery is discernible only in the last two years and industrial production is picking up at an annual rate of 2% (Estonia) to 8% (the Czech Republic) - depending on the country. This disastrous drop in the most important parameter of economic health was largely attributable to a few, cumulative factors:
But it seems that the worst is over and that the scene is fast changing. However sloppy or criminal the process of privatization, still hundreds of thousands of new capitalists were brewed and introduced, willy nilly, to the profit motive. The spectre of capital gains, made most of them (except the most hardened) discover marketing, advertising, design, export, trade financing, public offerings, strategic partnerships, concessions and business plans. Industries are much more focussed and market oriented. The new religion of capitalism, replete with entrepreneurship, free choice, personal profit and the invisible hand of the market has been successfully phased in. Both the domestic markets and international trade are recovering nicely. Consumption is growing and with it exports. The political level is withdrawing from the scene through more or less successful privatization or transformation schemes and appropriate legislation to minimize the role of the state in the economy. Some countries have opted to "skip" some of the industrial portion of the classic, evolutionary economic cycle - and go directly to investing in information and knowledge industries. They educate their workforce and retrain it accordingly. They invite multinationals - using a cocktail of tax incentives and direct grants and subsidies - to open back office operations (accounting, administration) and telemarketing operations in their countries. This calls for lower investment than in classic (or sunset) industries and has a high value added to the economy. But the single largest driving force behind economic recovery is foreign capital. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is pouring in and with it: new markets, technology transfers through joint ventures, new, attractive product mixes, new management, new ideas and new ownership - clear and decisive. So, industrial production is picking up and will continue to grow briskly in all countries in transition that have the peaceful conditions necessary for long term development. If Macedonia will follow the examples of the Baltic countries, of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, even Russia, Ireland, Egypt, Chile, Indonesia, Israel and the Philippines - it will double its industrial production within 10 years and redouble it again in 15 years. Israel, Ireland and … France and Japan (!) are examples of poor, agricultural countries, which made the transition to thriving industrial countries successfully. But was their secret? How come Hong Kong and Singapore are richer than Britain by some measures? Together with South Korea and Taiwan they have been growing at an average rate of 7.5% annually for the last 30 years. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, The Philippines have joined the "Asian Tigers" club. They all share some common features: a. Massive injections of labour (by massive immigration from rural areas to the cities, urbanization). Massive injections of capital and technology. The above injections were financed by an exceedingly high level of savings and investments (savings amount to 35% of GDP, on average).
Still, these countries started from a very low income base. It is common economic knowledge that low income countries always grow fast because they can increase their productivity simply by purchasing technology and management in the rich country. Purchasing technology is always much cheaper than developing it - while maintaining roughly the same economic benefits. Thus, Hong Kong grew by 9% in the 60s. This growth coefficient was reduced to 7.5% in the 80s and to 5% in the 90s. But China, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are likely to grow annually by 7-9% during the next decade. Not that these countries are exempt from problems. The process of maturation creates many of them. There is the dependence on export markets and volatile exchange rates (which determine the terms of trade). When the West reduced its consumption of microchips and the Dollar appreciated by 50% against the Japanese Yen - all the tigers suffered a decline in economic growth rates, current account deficits of 5-8% of their GDP, strikes (South Korea) and Stock Market crashes (Thailand, to name but one of many). In Singapore and in Hong Kong, the industrial production plummeted by 5% last year (1996). Years of easy money and cheap credits directed by the state at selected industries starved small businesses, created overinvestment and overcapacity in certain, state-supported, industries and destabilized the banking and the financial systems. It helped forge infrastructure bottlenecks and led to a shortage in skilled or educated manpower. In Thailand only 38% of those 14 years old attend school and in China, the situation is not much better. Finally, the financial markets proved to be too regulated, the government proved to be too bureaucratic, corruption proved to be too rampant (Indonesia, Japan, almost everybody else). There were too many old conglomerate-type mega - companies which prevented competition (e., the Chaebol in South Korea or the Zaibatsu in Japan). So, the emerging economies are looking to Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan to supply the ideal: truly flexible labour markets, no state involvement, lots of ni |
