Europe’s tough new data-protection law

BOOK clubs usually meet to discuss literature. But members of DataKind, a group of volunteers that helps charities use data to improve their services, are gathering in London to study a legal text. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), set to come into effect on May 25th, is arguably the most complex piece of regulation the European Union (EU) has ever produced. A thick print-out includes its 99 articles and 173 preliminary comments. Gianfranco Cecconi, a data scientist leading discussions, is poring over a lengthy section he has annotated in red pencil.

After years of deliberation on how best to protect personal data, the EU is imposing a set of tough rules. These are designed to improve how data are stored and used by giving more control to individuals over their information and by obliging companies to handle what data they have more carefully. Recent revelations that Cambridge Analytica acquired data on Facebook users in underhand, and possibly illegal, ways has underscored the need to...Continue reading

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Spotify makes its stockmarket debut

Gulliver’s most popular posts on the world of travel

TODAY is a very special day for Gulliver, for it is ten years to the very day since his column at The Economist opened for business. Since then, much has changed in the world of travel. A barrel of oil is now worth a tad over $60, instead of around the $100 mark as in April 2008. Old friends such as Monarch Airlines of Britain, Continental, NorthWest and US Airways of America and Air Berlin of Germany have long been consigned to the dustbin of history due to bankruptcies and mergers. Airbus’s A380 superjumbo, the largest passenger airliner ever built, somehow managed to go from the future of aviation to its past in less than a decade. 

But 2,911 posts since Gulliver started to blog for The Economist (after he had escaped from the tiny Lilliputian people that...Continue reading

from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2018/04/happy-birthday-me?fsrc=rss
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The average American is much better off now than four decades ago

JUST how bad have the past four decades been for ordinary Americans? One much-cited figure suggests they have been pretty bad. The Census Bureau estimates that for the median household, halfway along the distribution, income has barely grown in real terms since 1979. But a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a non-partisan think-tank, gives a cheerier rise of 51% for median household income between 1979 and 2014. Which is nearer to reality?

The gap between the two is accounted for by three methodological differences (see chart). First, the CBO takes demography into account. This seems sensible: more Americans are living alone and American women are having fewer children, so households have fewer mouths to feed.

The second is that the CBO uses the personal-consumption expenditures (PCE) index to measure inflation, whereas the Census Bureau uses the consumer-price index (CPI). These differ in two main ways. The CPI includes only what consumers spend on themselves, whereas the...Continue reading

from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21739662-estimates-income-growth-vary-greatly-depending-methodology-average?fsrc=rss
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Asia’s small open economies may suffer in America’s trade war

CHINA is the stated adversary in Donald Trump’s incipient trade war. But 30% of the value of the goods China exports to America is added elsewhere. If the row escalates, countries entwined in Chinese supply chains will suffer.

In absolute terms, Japanese suppliers will fare worst. Japan is the country that exports most to firms in China that export onwards to America. But relative to economic size, such suppliers are a bigger part of several small, open Asian economies (see chart). Between 1% and 2% of some countries’ total output is shipped first to China and then on to America. If Chinese exports to America were to fall by 10%—an extreme but not impossible scenario—it could knock 0.1-0.2 percentage points off their economic growth.

China’s competitors in industries that have been threatened with tariffs, namely aerospace, machinery and IT, however, would benefit. There are many of these in Mexico, Germany and Japan. Tariffs also encourage companies to switch their investment plans....Continue reading

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Wakandanomics

“THIS will require a quick lesson in global economics…bear with me,” says Erik Killmonger, the muscular villain in “Black Panther”, a long-running Marvel Comics series. In that saga and the recent film it inspired, Killmonger and the Black Panther vie for the throne of Wakanda, a fictional African kingdom little known to the outside world. A land of great wealth and technological sophistication, it lends itself to several quick lessons in economics. Bear with us.

The source of Wakanda’s riches is its “great mound” of vibranium, a versatile ore left behind by a meteor strike, which can absorb sound and motion. Like other deposits of natural treasure, Wakanda’s vibranium attracts some vicious intruders. But unlike some other resource-rich countries, Wakanda has never succumbed to outside foes.

That has helped it escape the “resource curse”, in which natural riches keep a country poor by crowding out manufacturing or ushering in predatory government. The curse is...Continue reading

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Mediapro offers a combustible mix of sport and politics

LIKE Jaume Roures and Gerard Romy, two of its founders, Mediapro is proudly Catalan. Too proud, according to the Spanish police. The television company, which launched in 1994, has been investigated for paying for a press centre for foreign journalists during an unconstitutional independence referendum in the region last October, and for producing a sympathetic documentary on the vote. Mediapro denies wrongdoing. At Madrid’s main annual contemporary art fair last month its third co-founder, Tatxo Benet, purchased a contentious set of photographs which labelled the plebiscite’s jailed Catalan organisers as political prisoners.

Pro-independence antics may be popular in Catalonia, which on March 25th again erupted in violent protest after German authorities arrested Carles Puigdemont, the former Catalan president. But they could be a headache for Mediapro’s new Chinese owners. On February 15th Orient Hontai Capital, an investment firm from Beijing, bought 53.5% of Imagina, a holding firm which owns Mediapro, in a deal that valued the firm at...Continue reading

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