Ansuya Harjani
CNBC
February 28, 2014
The tightly controlled Chinese yuan will eventually supersede the dollar as the top international reserve currency, according to a new poll of institutional investors.
The survey of 200 institutional investors – 100 headquartered in mainland China and 100 outside of it – published by State Street and the Economist Intelligence Unit on Thursday found 53 percent of investors think the renminbi will surpass the U.S. dollar as the world’s major reserve currency.
Optimism was higher within China, where 62 percent said they saw a redback world on the horizon, compared with 43 percent outside China.
This article was posted: Friday, February 28, 2014 at 2:28 pm
US companies in China are shifting their focus to the service sector in line with China’s transition from being the world’s factory floor to a knowledge-driven economy, a survey has found.
For the first time, services accounted for more than half, or 52 percent, of US companies’ revenue in China in 2013, up 11 percentage points from the previous year.
This is according to the annual China Business Report released on Tuesday by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.
The survey, which tracks performance and confidence of the largest US business community in China, shows that companies are continuing to move beyond purely manufacturing for exports as costs surge and markets mature.
The growing importance of services contrasts sharply with manufacturing, which dropped by 10 percent to comprise 37 percent of companies’ revenues in 2013, the survey shows.
“It is important to keep in mind that China’s leadership has prioritized the development of the country’s service sectors, and American businesses are world leaders in these areas,” said Kenneth Jarrett, president of AmCham Shanghai.
Tim Huang, chief operating officer of Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Shanghai, said, “I’ve seen a growing number of our clients in the service sector in the past five years and I expect this trend to continue.”
The study interviewed 399 member companies that run operations in first-tier cities including Shanghai and Beijing, the Yangtze River Delta region, as well as central and western powerhouses of China. Fifty-four percent of them have been in the country for more than 10 years.
The service sector accounted for 46.1 percent of China’s gross domestic product in 2013, outpacing manufacturing for the first time in the country’s economic output, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Shanghai has the largest proportion of the service sector, with more than 62.6 percent.
Buoyancy in the sector is backed by the increasing presence of small and medium-sized US enterprises, thanks to growing transparency in China and lingering economic struggles in the home market, the survey found.
Thirty-seven percent of companies identified themselves as small and medium-sized enterprises in 2013, or firms with 500 or fewer employees worldwide, up from about 25 percent a year ago.
The first wave of SMEs to settle in China arrived in early 2000, largely to adjust to demands by multinational corporations that invested in the country earlier, said Chris Wingo, founder of China Sage Consultants (Shanghai) Co. His firm helped SMEs from the United States to prepare and manage their businesses in China.
But as more SMEs became interested in China’s growth, and the US economy remained lackluster, China has been on the radar for many smaller US firms since the late 2000s,Wingo added.
Robert Theleen, who chairs AmCham Shanghai and is chief executive officer of merchant bank China-Vest, which is based in the city, said that with China demonstrating its ongoing commitment to economic liberalization through initiatives like the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, it is only natural that more firms are setting up in the country.
“When you combine this improving infrastructure with the decades of experience that American businesses now have in this market, it’s easier for US companies to profit from China’s growth, regardless of their size,” he said.
China has continued to act as a key profit center for US companies, with 74 percent of respondents reporting profits in 2013. Three out of four saw positive cash flows in their China operations, up by 3 percentage points from a year ago.
Eighty-six percent of the firms surveyed said they remain “optimistic or slightly optimistic” about forecasts for China’s business prospects in the next five years.
But only 65 percent of the firms reported making additional investment in China, down from 74 percent the previous year.
In addition, as a top-three investment priority China fell by 8 percentage points among respondents to 46 percent.
Kent Kedl, managing director for China and North Asia at Control Risks, a business consultancy, said this suggests a healthy rebound in developed economies, meaning that China is no longer the only “bright spot”.
This trend is reflected in companies’ efforts to integrate China further into their global operations.
Forty-three percent of firms said they conduct their research and development for China-specific products in both the US and China, with only 7 percent relying on US headquarters as their R&D hubs for designing products for the Chinese market.
The firms surveyed cited rising costs, constraints on human resources, and intensifying competition as the top three challenges hindering business performance in 2013.
For the third consecutive year, surging costs ranked the top business hurdle, with 89 percent of companies reporting increases in primary costs from labor to tax and materials.
Last year, companies also became increasingly concerned about complying with China’s laws and regulations following efforts by the central government to target firms for corruption investigations.
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(NaturalNews) The implications of the so-called Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, are apparently so drastic that as many as 83 percent of private physicians have considered calling it quits. This is according to a new survey recently released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association (DPMA), a nationwide physicians group dedicated to maintaining and protecting individualized care for all patients.
The survey, which included nearly 700 doctors from at least 45 U.S. states, revealed that most doctors and care providers are incensed by the nationalization of medicine, and believe that the transition from privatized care to government-run care will further erode the quality of healthcare in America. Not only will demand for patient care increase dramatically as a result of the Affordable Care Act, but pay for doctors will also decrease, which will drive many practices out of business.
“Doctors clearly understand what Washington does not — that a piece of paper that says you are ‘covered’ by insurance or ‘enrolled’ in Medicare or Medicaid does not translate to actual medical care when doctors can’t afford to see patients at the low-ball payments, and patients have to jump through government and insurance company bureaucratic hoops,” said DPMA co-founder Kathryn Serkes to The Daily Caller about the survey results.
Out of the 36,000 doctors surveyed, only 4.3 percent actually responded, according to DPMA. The vast majority of those who responded work in solo or small group practices, and are office-based rather than hospital-based, representing a true cross-section of America’s most personalized physicians. And more than three-quarters of respondents are considered to be mid-career, meaning they have been practicing for between 11 and 30 years.
A whopping 65 percent of respondents indicated that their existing problems are a result of too much government involvement, and that more government involvement in the form of the Affordable Care Act will make things work. 95 percent of doctors also said that private practice is already suffering as a result of “corporate medicine,” which will only get progressively worse under the Affordable Care Act.
Interestingly, nearly 75 percent of the doctors surveyed said less government, rather than more government, would help fix the existing problems with the medical system. These problems presumably include things like government oppression against so-called alternative and non-mainstream medical treatments and procedures, as well as the persistent dilemma of “too many hands in the financial cookie jar,” which raises medical costs for everyone.
You can view the complete results of the DPMA survey here: http://www.doctorsandpatients.org
Sources for this article include:
http://www.doctorsandpatients.org
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA606.html
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WASHINGTON — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.
As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused – on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.”
“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
“If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work,” she said. Children, she said, have “nothing better to do than to get on drugs.”
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government’s poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines “economic insecurity” as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.
Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.
“It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position,” said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama’s election, while struggling whites do not.
“There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front,” Wilson said.
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Nationwide, the count of America’s poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $ 23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation’s destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.
Sometimes termed “the invisible poor” by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America’s heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.
Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation’s most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.
More than 90 percent of Buchanan County’s inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.
Salyers’ daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend’s disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn’t even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.
Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to “buy the kids everything they need.”
“It’s pretty hard,” she said. “Once the bills are paid, we might have $ 10 to our name.”
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Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they’re only a temporary snapshot that doesn’t capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.
In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person’s lifetime risk, a much higher number – 4 in 10 adults – falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.
The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.
Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
“Poverty is no longer an issue of `them’, it’s an issue of `us’,” says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. “Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need.”
The numbers come from Rank’s analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.
Among the findings:
_For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.
_Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.
_The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods – those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more – has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.
The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.
_Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.
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Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.
The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.
Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites – defined as those lacking a college degree – remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.
Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.
Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential “decisive swing voter group” if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. “In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for `the middle class’ and `average Americans,’” Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.
“They don’t trust big government, but it doesn’t mean they want no government,” says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.
“They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them,” Goeas said.
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AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and AP writer Debra McCown in Buchanan County, Va., contributed to this report.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/poverty-unemployment-rates_n_3666594.html
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