uncomfortable spotlight in davos:
The price of attendance isn't cheap: each CEO spends roughly $60,000 a year to attend. But once they have made it onto the invite list they can look forward to schmoozing with their peers in Davos and hobnobbing with celebrities.
(...) One of the world's best-known CEOs, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, admitted to fellow participants that he had become skeptical of the very notion of capitalism. He told the Wall Street Journal that he had seen the failings of capitalism first-hand on visits to places such as the South African slum of Soweto, and had discussed them with dozens of experts on disease and poverty.
(...) At one of the most widely attended events of the week, Gates called for a "creative capitalism" that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored. "We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well," Gates said. "I'm an optimist, but I'm an impatient optimist. The world is not getting better fast enough, and it's not getting better for everyone."

two articles on mozambique:
(first, in defense of the economic order:)
Mozambique is one of the world's poorest countries. It's also an African success story. Here, such things are relative. To the immediate west, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe misrules his country toward calamity. Nigeria, Ivory Coast and others are beset by civil conflict and corruption. But Mozambique, scarred by 16 years of civil war and Soviet-style economics, turned itself in the right direction on its own. Optimism, however guarded, and Africa do sometimes go together.
(...) But hyperinflation and a stagnant economy forced leaders of the neo-Marxist liberation movement, Frelimo, to shift their approach. Starting in the early 1990s, the ruling party cut subsidies, opened to outside investment, privatized firms nationalized after independence in 1975 and got a grip on borrowing and the budget. An independent central bank brought inflation into single digits. According to the World Economic Forum's competitiveness index, Mozambique has reformed more than any sub-Saharan African country.
(...) The payoff is the highest average growth rate, at 8% over the last decade, among the continent's non-oil exporters. GDP per capita is a still tiny $320, but that's compared with $178 in 1992. Since 1997, poverty rates decreased more in rural areas (from 71% to 55%) than in urban (62% to 52%), according to the World Bank. Child mortality has declined to 152 per 1,000 live births from 235. And primary-school enrollment has risen to 71% from 43%. Once a leading recipient of food aid, Mozambique now exports maize, with 5.6% average yearly growth in farming in the last 15 years. Banks, telecom and tourist firms, many from neighboring South Africa, have come in.
(...) But neighbors in similar straits haven't put in place Mozambique's fixes. Inflation in Zimbabwe is 1,700%; nearby Malawi and Zambia, their economies distorted by subsidies on commodities, are growing haphazardly. "You need political will" to get it right, says Mr. Baxter. "Starting from a low base" or "being a former colony" -- oft-heard excuses for Africa -- has little impact on economic performance. What matters, as regional dynamo Botswana also shows, is governance.
(...) Erratic "Uncle Bob," as his deferential neighbors call Zimbabwe's 83-year-old Robert Mugabe, is a useful reminder that local politicians pose the gravest threat to Africa's future.
(...) In the meantime, having done the so-called first generation of market reforms, the government is dragging its feet on legalizing land ownership, fighting corruption and loosening a restrictive labor code to bring in more investment. "Now they're stuck," says Mr. Lima. "There is a strong socialist background here. If we want to perform, we need to be different."
(second, in response:)
(...) Africa observers often single out a storyline from one country - sometimes it's cheery, sometimes not - in order to apply lessons to the whole continent. But I'm having trouble seeing what Kaminski and others see.
(...) Kaminski's paean to private enterprise leaves me particularly cold. Because Mozambique's development is heavily concentrated in the southern capital, the vast majority of the country sees few of the benefits of growth. And much of the economic improvement over the last 15 years can simply be chalked up to the peace dividend. When hostilities ended - with one million dead - Mozambique had nowhere to go but up. The country currently ranks tenth from the bottom on the UN's Human Development Index (just ahead of Burundi, and well behind Rwanda). It used to rank as the very poorest country in the world. So, yes, I guess things could be worse.
(...) But, most importantly, all this talk about privatization and foreign investment is very much beside the point. As Kaminski concedes, one in six Mozambican adults is infected with HIV. "Appreciating the change for the better takes some imagination," he writes. But you cannot speak of "the change for the better" unless the discussion starts with HIV. It's the only yardstick that matters in Mozambique, and in the rest of southern Africa as well. Some 37,000 Mozambican children contracted HIV in 2006, a jump of 60% over six years before. Nearly four of every 10 adults in Beira, the country's second largest city, are HIV-positive. Those are apocalyptic figures, however creative your thinking.
(...) The luxury building is full of foreigners here on business; the more posh of the country's two shopping malls is on the ground floor. It looks as if the land where the Four Seasons stood will be developed in much the same way, except that Part of the site will be set aside for a new American embassy. I have yet to meet a Mozambican who cares that the hotel is gone or about what will take its place.

chavez and oil:
The Times went on to claim this action would undermine Venezuela's growth hinting Big Oil's threat to leave might get Chavez to back down enough to get them to stay. It never happened as this writer suggested April 12 in an article titled "Wall Street Journal and New York Times Attack journalism." The article made it clear oil exploration and production in Venezuela is so profitable that even with a smaller share of the profits US, European and other Big Oil investors wouldn't dream of leaving. Whine plenty, leave, not likely, and now we know they won't.
(...) Hugo Chavez, in fact, is a self-proclaimed social democrat charting his own independent course toward progressive "21st century socialism" along the lines Latin American expert James Petras calls the "pragmatic left" in contrast to the more "radical left" of Colombia's FARC guerrillas; elements of "teachers and peasant-indigenous movements in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas in Mexico;" many "small Marxist groups in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere;" and Venezuela's "peasant and barrio movements," among others. Other Latin American leaders Petras calls "pragmatic" leftists include Bolivia's Evo Morales, Cuba's Castro and many "large electoral parties and major peasant and trade unions in Central and South America" including Mexico's PRD party, El Salvador's FMLN, Chile's Communist Party, "the majority in Peruvian (Ollanta) Humala's parliamentary party;" and others including "the great majority of left Latin American intellectuals."
(...) Hugo Chavez offers them a new choice having announced in March he intends creating a Bank of the South social democratic alternative to the repressive neoliberal Washington Consensus IMF-World Bank model. So far Bolivia and Argentina have agreed to be part of it with Chavez hoping other Latin countries will join as well by contributing 10% of their capital reserves for this enterprise he hopes will be operating by summer.
(...) Additional parts of Chavez's plan involve forging stronger ties to other oil importing nations like China to reduce Venezuela's dependency on a hostile US. He also announced April 29 the nation hopes to gradually sell its seven US-based Citgo refineries replacing them with a new Latin American-based network in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Dominica. It's part of his plan to provide the region a stable oil supply and 100% of the energy needs for Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) members and Haiti.
(...) Further, Journal writers take aim at PDVSA demeaning it as a state-run company claiming it has "little focus" because Chavez turned it into a "poverty-alleviation ministry." As a result, the Journal says it became inefficient and its production fell from 3.1 million barrels a day when Chavez first took office in 1999 to 2.4 million barrels a day now according to US government Energy Information Administration (EIA) figures that look to have been cooked to bring them down. They're disputable with differing ones coming from alternate sources including the 2006 CIA World Factbook listing Venezuela's daily production at slightly under 3.1 million daily barrels, around the same figure PDVSA reported then including extra-heavy crude from Orinoco belt production. In May, 2006, Venezuelan Minister of Petroleum and Energy, Raphael Ramirez indicated the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognized the nation's daily oil production at over 3 million daily barrels while the government reports it now at 3.3 million compared to 2.6 million or less claimed by international oil analysts and EIA deliberately understating oil output the way Washington and the West distort everything positive about Venezuela under Hugo Chavez.
(...) All it can say, with a heavy-handed dose of sour grapes, is that "Mixing oil and politics may not help Mr. Chavez in the long run" as he'll need "private companies' expertise to develop the heavy crude in the Orinoco region" without ever conceding he already has it and a long line of takers ready to step in if any now there foolishly leave. They won't, but don't expect to see that opinion reported anywhere in the Wall Street Journal as they'd then have to admit everything they wrote earlier was false and misleading. They don't have to. You just read it here.

rupert murdochs latest adventure:
Predictably, some critics have decried the current efforts by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to buy the Dow Jones company, which publishes The Wall Street Journal. But let's imagine the dynamics that might emerge if Murdoch gains control of that newspaper.