CHINA: REPLACE DOLLAR AS INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL STANDARD

China argues to replace US dollar

The dollar has been the world's reserve currency for decades

China's central bank has reiterated its call for a new reserve currency to replace the US dollar.

The report from the People's Bank of China (PBOC) said a "super-sovereign" currency should take its place.

Central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan has loudly led calls for the dollar to be replaced during the financial crisis.

The bank report called for more regulation of the countries that issue currencies that underpin the global financial system.

"An international monetary system dominated by a single sovereign currency has intensified the concentration of risk and the spread of the crisis," the Chinese central bank said.

The dollar fell after the report was released. The US currency dropped 1% against the euro to $1.4088, and declined 0.8% versus the British pound to $1.6848.

SDRs

Mr Zhou caused a stir earlier this year when he said the dollar could eventually be replaced as the world's main reserve currency by the Special Drawing Right (SDR), which was created as a unit of account by the IMF in 1969.

CURRENCY RESERVES Foreign currency held by a government or a central bank Used to pay foreign debt obligations or influence exchange rates The dollar is viewed as the world's reserve currency as the vast majority of reserves are held in the US currency Smaller amounts are held in euros, pounds and yen Dollar poses dilemma for China

The PBOC said in the report that not only should the world adopt the SDR, but that the IMF should be entrusted with managing a portion of its member countries' foreign currency reserves.

"To avoid intrinsic shortcomings in using a sovereign currency as a reserve currency, we need to create an international reserve currency that is divorced from sovereign states and can maintain a stable value over the long term," the PBOC report said.

It also issued some veiled criticism of the US policies, saying that one of the major issues was that it was difficult to balance the needs of domestic politics with the requirements of being the world's reserve currency.

"The economic development model of debt-based consumption is most difficult to sustain," the PBOC said.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently joined Mr Zhou in saying it was time to consider an alternative benchmark currency for international debt.

But Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin then said "it's too early to speak of an alternative".

A shortlist of the Worlds Best Banks

As the dust starts to settle, which banks deserve the most plaudits?

Illustration by S. Kambayashi

TRYING to work out which banks are the world’s best is a bit like awarding the prize for prettiest war-torn village. It is a title that carries little kudos. It is also likely to prompt further shelling. Winners of industry awards in the past three years include Ken Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America, for banker of the year (2008); Société Générale for its risk management; and Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide, a failed mortgage lender, for a “lifetime of achievement”.

Still, the question is becoming more pertinent. After months of indiscriminate fear, widespread losses and government hand-holding, the banking industry is gradually stabilising. Money markets are steadily calming. American banks that got a clean bill of health in this month’s stress tests are queuing up to repay government money. A first wave of escapees is likely to include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. Those banks that emerge from this crisis with reputations and franchises strengthened will find it increasingly easy to raise funds, win clients, attract employees and buy assets.

Plenty of institutions have come through the crisis relatively unscathed. The Chinese banks now dominate rankings by market capitalisation. Standard Chartered, an emerging-markets lender, seems to be steering a deft course through the downturn in the developing world. Rabobank, a wonderfully dull co-operative bank in the Netherlands, is the only bank that can still boast a AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s. Bank of New York Mellon, a large custodian, has won lots of new business from belatedly risk-averse clients. But to win the shiniest medals, you need to have come under fire. In the heat of battle, which banks have come off best?

Working out the answer is trickier than it looks. Independence from the government is one marker of success, yet America’s largest banks were given little choice but to take government capital in October. In Europe some avoided state cash by treating existing shareholders badly: witness the money that Barclays hurriedly raised from Middle Eastern investors last year. And lowish credit-default-swap spreads on banks such as Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse partly reflect the assurance of government help if needed.

Share prices offer another perspective. Every bank investor has been hammered in the past two years, of course, but some have done much better than others. Investors in Citigroup and Royal Bank of Scotland have been all but wiped out. Even the best performing big banks have lost a third of their value in that period. Over a longer time frame, from the start of the bubble to the present, only a handful of the big firms have delivered capital gains for their investors. They include Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas of France and Banco Santander of Spain.

But share prices are also imperfect gauges of bank performance. During the boom investors rewarded growth, whether it was sustainable or not. Banks that avoided the stampede into credit in the go-go years grumble, with some justice, that they were punished for their conservatism. Continuing volatility in share prices partly reflects deep uncertainty over banks’ future earnings power.

The league table of industry write-downs and credit losses is another indicator. There is red ink everywhere but some have spilled much more than expected. HSBC has lost $42.2 billion to date, most of it thanks to its disastrous foray into America’s subprime-mortgage market. The bank is otherwise well run, with a conservative approach to funding that has served it well, but it has lost more to date than the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland, now largely in the hands of the state, and JPMorgan Chase, which has far more exposure to both America and investment banking. That is hard to forgive.

Success can also be judged by how well banks have positioned themselves for the future. Just surviving has been smart. The likes of Deutsche and Credit Suisse have not needed to do huge deals to produce bumper earnings in the first quarter. But many banks have splashed out during the crisis, with strikingly varied results. Bank of America’s purchase of Merrill Lynch and Lloyds TSB’s takeover of HBOS have been horror stories. Wells Fargo has done better with its purchase of Wachovia, but decent longer-term prospects cannot obscure the fact that a generous stress-test process still required it to raise more capital. BNP’s tortuous capture of Fortis gives it the euro area’s biggest deposit-taking franchise. But the dealmaking baubles go to Barclays for its cut-price acquisition of Lehman’s North American business; to JPMorgan Chase for its swoops on Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual; and to Santander for emerging from the ABN AMRO transaction, which killed off RBS and Fortis, with a big presence in Brazil at a fair price.

However the pack is shuffled, a few names keep resurfacing—in America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase; and in Europe, Credit Suisse, Deutsche, BNP, Barclays and Santander. They can be whittled down further. In Europe, concerns over what lies on the balance-sheets of Deutsche and Barclays are ebbing but are not gone. The British bank’s willingness to consider a sale of BGI, its asset-management arm, suggests worries over capital. Both banks still have lots of legacy assets, many of them tucked in the banking book.

Santander should rightfully take its bow alongside its regulators, who closed off the capital benefits of building up big off-balance-sheet positions and required Spanish banks to put aside provisions during the upswing. BNP has played its hand very well, but its business mix (a stable home market and a focus on equity derivatives) helped massively by keeping it away from the worst blow-ups.

In America, Goldman still has legions of admirers. It has posted losses of less than $8 billion to date, a performance not nearly as bad as those of its direct peers. Its focus on risk management is a template for others to follow. But its renewed swagger should not conceal the fact that it needed to convert into a bank-holding company in order to survive the market storm—nor the questions that hang over its future earnings in a re-regulated industry.

That leaves Credit Suisse and JPMorgan Chase to take the grand prizes. Credit Suisse has had its share of mishaps during the crisis but it was quick to scale down its balance-sheet, has plotted a credible strategy for its investment bank and pulled well ahead of UBS, its main rival in wealth management. As for JPMorgan Chase, it has kept a tight rein on risk, managed capital well and acquired sensibly. None of this is much comfort for weary Swiss and American taxpayers, of course. Well-run or not, both banks present the problem of being far too important to fail. And that’s to say nothing of the curse of awards.

Latin America's economies That fragile thing: a good reputation

A reformed region cannot escape recession but it can mitigate its impact

FOR much of the past two centuries Latin America has been a byword for the profligate squandering of economic promise and for financial crisis. So ingrained is this reputation that when Chile’s president recently met Britain’s prime minister and boasted of her government’s foresight in saving some of its windfall revenues during the boom years, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, sneered: “Gordon Brown is getting lessons from the Latin Americans about sound public finances. You couldn’t make it up.”

Happily, Mr Osborne’s view of Latin America is outdated, or at least it now applies in only a few places. Over the past decade, most of the bigger countries in the region have greatly improved their economic policies and the government institutions that implement them. That is the main reason why Latin America was until recently a spectator in the world financial crisis. Its banks are generally conservative and well-regulated. Many countries eschewed their past habit of abusing a boom to borrow. Public finances were mostly in balance, public debt fell and the region ran a current-account surplus. Indeed Chile is one of the world’s best-managed economies by almost any yardstick, but Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay are not all that far behind.

Sadly none of this has shielded the region from the world recession (see article). Most forecasters predict that Latin America’s output will contract this year and recover only modestly next year, so income per head will shrink. Some countries are doing worse than others. Even before the flu outbreak, Mexico had been especially hard hit, because its economy is so closely tied to that of the United States. Brazil is better placed. Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador have spurned the prudence of their neighbours and antagonised investors. Only the uncertain prospect of Chinese aid stands between these three countries and possible financial crisis next year.

Yet overall, in contrast to its past recessions, Latin America is doing no worse than the world as a whole. In other words, it is not adding to its troubles with internal weaknesses. What’s more, its governments have been able to cushion the blow with counter-cyclical policies of the kind that the rich world has taken for granted since Keynes but which Latin America’s habitual profligacy and lack of credibility denied it in the past. So instead of having to cut spending as tax revenues fall, this time many governments have been able to increase it. Their central banks have earned sufficient credentials as inflation fighters, and many have enough reserves, to cut interest rates without prompting a dangerous weakening of the currency.

Know your limits

Still, there are limits to what governments can do to mitigate the pain. While there’s scope, by and large, for easing monetary policy, fiscal policy is more constrained. The IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank will plug much of the gap this year, but next year looks harder. Tax revenues will have fallen further and Latin American governments’ dodgy past records may hamper their ability to raise money in debt markets that will be heavily oversubscribed.

The priority for those governments should be to maintain their hard-won reputation for financial stability. That will mean keeping a tight rein on budgets. Some of the social gains of recent years will inevitably be lost. But governments can help the poor by focusing spending on, for instance, preventing child malnutrition, discouraging pupils from dropping out of school and beefing up health services.

There is another, harder lesson. Latin America’s recent growth owed much to the outside world, cheap money and high commodity prices. With the world economy facing (at best) several sluggish years, the region will have to look closer to home for growth, by raising its productivity. That needs a huge effort not just to improve education, but also to implement long-postponed reforms of, for instance, labour markets. Such things are never easy in Latin America, where democratic politicians face voters who have to bear the world’s widest inequalities of income. But if the region is to consolidate its still novel reputation for prudent progress and good management, they will have to be done.

(From The Economist print edition)

The Economies of latin America

A reformed region cannot escape recession but it can mitigate its impact

FOR much of the past two centuries Latin America has been a byword for the profligate squandering of economic promise and for financial crisis. So ingrained is this reputation that when Chile’s president recently met Britain’s prime minister and boasted of her government’s foresight in saving some of its windfall revenues during the boom years, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, sneered: “Gordon Brown is getting lessons from the Latin Americans about sound public finances. You couldn’t make it up.”

Happily, Mr Osborne’s view of Latin America is outdated, or at least it now applies in only a few places. Over the past decade, most of the bigger countries in the region have greatly improved their economic policies and the government institutions that implement them. That is the main reason why Latin America was until recently a spectator in the world financial crisis. Its banks are generally conservative and well-regulated. Many countries eschewed their past habit of abusing a boom to borrow. Public finances were mostly in balance, public debt fell and the region ran a current-account surplus. Indeed Chile is one of the world’s best-managed economies by almost any yardstick, but Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay are not all that far behind.

Sadly none of this has shielded the region from the world recession (see article). Most forecasters predict that Latin America’s output will contract this year and recover only modestly next year, so income per head will shrink. Some countries are doing worse than others. Even before the flu outbreak, Mexico had been especially hard hit, because its economy is so closely tied to that of the United States. Brazil is better placed. Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador have spurned the prudence of their neighbours and antagonised investors. Only the uncertain prospect of Chinese aid stands between these three countries and possible financial crisis next year.

Yet overall, in contrast to its past recessions, Latin America is doing no worse than the world as a whole. In other words, it is not adding to its troubles with internal weaknesses. What’s more, its governments have been able to cushion the blow with counter-cyclical policies of the kind that the rich world has taken for granted since Keynes but which Latin America’s habitual profligacy and lack of credibility denied it in the past. So instead of having to cut spending as tax revenues fall, this time many governments have been able to increase it. Their central banks have earned sufficient credentials as inflation fighters, and many have enough reserves, to cut interest rates without prompting a dangerous weakening of the currency.

Know your limits

Still, there are limits to what governments can do to mitigate the pain. While there’s scope, by and large, for easing monetary policy, fiscal policy is more constrained. The IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank will plug much of the gap this year, but next year looks harder. Tax revenues will have fallen further and Latin American governments’ dodgy past records may hamper their ability to raise money in debt markets that will be heavily oversubscribed.

The priority for those governments should be to maintain their hard-won reputation for financial stability. That will mean keeping a tight rein on budgets. Some of the social gains of recent years will inevitably be lost. But governments can help the poor by focusing spending on, for instance, preventing child malnutrition, discouraging pupils from dropping out of school and beefing up health services.

There is another, harder lesson. Latin America’s recent growth owed much to the outside world, cheap money and high commodity prices. With the world economy facing (at best) several sluggish years, the region will have to look closer to home for growth, by raising its productivity. That needs a huge effort not just to improve education, but also to implement long-postponed reforms of, for instance, labour markets. Such things are never easy in Latin America, where democratic politicians face voters who have to bear the world’s widest inequalities of income. But if the region is to consolidate its still novel reputation for prudent progress and good management, they will have to be done.

Coca-Cola in China :Squeezed out

China indicates the real targets of its anti-monopoly law: outsiders

AP

LAST August, after 14 years of debate, the Chinese government at last imposed what was informally referred to as its “economic constitution”, a broad anti-monopoly law for a country rife with state-imposed monopolies. In the subsequent months, people have wondered how the law would be applied, and whether it would advance China’s transformation into a market economy, or serve as an impediment to genuine competition. On Wednesday March 18th an answer emerged with the rejection of the largest outright acquisition by a foreign company, a $2.4 billion offer by Coca-Cola for China Huiyuan, the country’s largest juice company.

When the deal was announced last September, it was at a price three times Huiyuan’s valuation at the time. Since then, as global markets have collapsed, it has only become more appealing. Huiyuan is a private company and juice had previously been free of government control, so theoretically it should have been available for purchase. “It is a very unfortunate outcome in an industry that has no economic or national-security significance,” says Lester Ross of WilmerHale, a law firm, in Beijing.

The most benign interpretation of the rejection being bandied about by lawyers and bankers is that it reflects a political response to critical comments by America’s new administration—a warning, of sorts, that could dissipate quickly if the economic relationship between China and America can find a firm footing. The more dire interpretation is that even as China publicly urges other countries to commit to opening their markets to Chinese investment and trade, it is imposing yet another barrier to outsiders. Worse still, the barriers are in its domestic consumer sector, one of the rare global economic bright spots.

Adding irony to the decision, it comes just as the Chinese government is indicating that it is actively encouraging, if not forcing, consolidation and greater market concentration in a number of areas, including steel, cars and airlines, and just after it imposed a new oligopoly in telecommunications. No domestic Chinese transaction has fallen foul of the new monopoly law.

Signs that foreign companies might be the primary targets of the law began to emerge in November, when a merger between two brewers, America’s Anheuser-Busch and Belgium’s InBev, was endorsed by Chinese regulators only on the condition that the combined firm’s existing interest in several domestic breweries be frozen. In particular, Anheuser-Busch’s non-controlling 27% stake in Tsingtao, a leading Chinese brewer, was largely liquidated in January after what is presumed to be pressure from the government.

The Coca-Cola Company holds as much as half of the domestic Chinese market for carbonated beverages, but the juice business is highly fragmented. Estimates are not particularly reliable, but various accounts suggest the two companies would control more than of 20% of the juice business. In a brief statement, China’s ministry of commerce said Coke’s “dominant status” might “imperil” small competitors and force consumers to face higher prices and less choice.

After the decision was announced, investment banks were left wondering, in the words of one employee, whether “a key plank in their business had just blown up.” Coke has spent years developing its presence in China, and has invested heavily, presumably making it one of the world’s more acceptable buyers. It is also one of the few companies able to finance a big deal in today’s difficult circumstances. If Coke was not acceptable to the Chinese authorities, then who is? The rejection will inevitably be used as evidence of non-reciprocity, and the collusion between the country’s state and private sectors, by anyone opposed to China’s recent efforts to buy companies abroad.

Deepening the gloom, another new Chinese law comes into effect on May 1st, subjecting any transfer of a state-controlled asset to yet another layer of review, this time by a local commission. Theoretically this is not aimed at any particular kind of acquirer, and would not block well-conceived deals, but that, of course, was said about the monopoly law as well. The new law had not received much attention. It will now.

Corporate lending: Waiving or Drowning

Dec 4th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Even big firms are finding it tough to secure credit from the banks

Illustration by David Simonds

CONVENTIONAL wisdom says that it is better to be a large company than a small one when credit is tight. Bigger firms have more room for manoeuvre: they have access to more types of funding, they have more fat to cut, and they have greater bargaining power with lenders. Even so, life is getting ever more uncomfortable for the bigger beasts of the corporate jungle.

According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent lending survey, American banks are tightening terms more aggressively for bigger firms than for tiddlier ones (see chart). Lenders are more cautious than they have been at least since 1990. The story among European banks is similar. Lenders in emerging markets can be more suspicious of multinational firms than they are of locals. “We just don’t know what they’ve got on their balance-sheets back home,” says one bank boss in Africa.

Violent movements in exchange rates are causing additional headaches, says Andrew Balfour of Slaughter & May, a law firm. Calculations of financial ratios can be thrown out by wild currency movements, potentially triggering breaches of loan covenants. Companies with sterling-denominated credit lines may find that their facilities are not big enough as a result of the pound’s recent sharp fall, for instance.

It is not panic stations yet. Most firms can survive for a while with the credit tap turned off. Analysis by Moody’s, a rating agency, shows that the vast majority of highly rated companies in America and Europe have enough headroom, in the form of cash and undrawn bank facilities, to be able to survive for 12 months without needing new financing. European corporate-debt markets have seen a rare flurry of issues in the past few days by opportunistic, highly rated firms.

Governments are also working hard to prop up credit markets. The Fed’s programme to buy commercial paper, a form of short-term company debt, had acquired almost $300 billion by November 26th. Banks on both sides of the Atlantic are issuing lots of government-backed bonds, which should encourage lending.

For now, an uneasy truce exists between most companies and their lenders. Some banks made tentative attempts in the autumn to pull out of loan agreements because their cost of financing had spiked so high. But they quickly backed down. In turn, banks are doing what they can to persuade corporate treasurers not to draw down credit facilities unless they have to. But hard choices are looming.

As the economic news worsens and profits dive, more firms will be at risk of breaching covenants on standard measures such as the ratio of debt to earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Furthermore, a good deal of debt will fall due in the next few years: Reuters Loan Pricing Corporation, a data provider, estimates that more than $1 trillion of loans will need to be refinanced globally in each of the next three years, mainly in America and Europe.

Competition for capital is bound to increase in that time, given the coming torrent of government-debt issuance. Auditors also want to be reassured about refinancing prospects well before maturity dates so they can sign off on companies as going concerns. With little obvious benefit in waiting, many expect to see a concerted effort by companies to renegotiate funding facilities early in 2009, once the year-end squeeze is over (see article).

In the face of more requests for waivers and refinancings, banks will react selectively. “We will distinguish between companies that are temporarily in crisis and those that are not,” says Alessandro Profumo, the chief executive of UniCredit, an Italian bank.

The lucky ones will still pay a hefty price for access to credit. Not only will the costs of borrowing zoom, but terms will become much tighter. Old-fashioned provisions such as “clean-up” clauses, which require borrowers to pay their debts down to zero for a specified period every year, are creeping back into some discussions. The onus is also on borrowers to show that they are taking steps to cut costs before they come to lenders for more money. Banks want to know that you have exhausted all other avenues yourself, says Sheila Smith of Deloitte, a consultancy. Even then, facilities are likely to shrink as non-bank investors such as hedge funds drop out of loan syndicates and banks that had only extended money in the hope of ancillary business also draw back.

For those firms that find doors starting to shut on them, the prospects are grim. Despite some talk of a bigger role for private placements, this is not the best time to start forging relationships with new creditors if existing ones turn unfriendly. Many firms are going into this downturn with fewer unencumbered assets than in previous recessions, which makes it harder to secure new credit. Asset disposals, one obvious way of raising cash, are extremely hard to pull off at the moment. Nor does it help that many corporate loans have been securitised and divvied up among lots of investors, making it harder for firms to negotiate modifications.

Projections for defaults are rising fast. Bain, a consultancy, now expects as many as 140 American speculative-grade companies to default in 2010, sharply up from a forecast of 40-50 in April. Worse, firms that default are likelier to end up in full liquidation. In America, debtor-in-possession financing, which helps firms that have entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to meet their cash needs while they reorganise, has dried up. “The gap between financial distress and financial disaster has become much smaller,” says John Grout of the Association of Corporate Treasurers, a British trade body. So too, it seems, has the difference between big companies and small ones

The world is poorer than we thought, the World Bank discovers

The world is poorer than we thought, the World Bank discovers

IN APRIL 2007 the World Bank announced that 986m people worldwide suffered from extreme poverty—the first time its count had dropped below 1 billion. On August 26th it had grim news to report. According to two of its leading researchers, Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, the “developing world is poorer than we thought”. The number of poor was almost 1.4 billion in 2005.

This does not mean the plight of the poor had worsened—only that the plight is now better understood. The bank has improved its estimates of the cost of living around the world, thanks to a vast effort to compare the price of hundreds of products, from packaged rice to folding umbrellas, in 146 countries. In many poor countries the cost of living was steeper than previously thought, which meant more people fell short of the poverty line.

Ms Chen and Mr Ravallion have counted the world’s poor anew, using these freshly collected prices. They have also drawn a new poverty line. The bank used to count people who lived on less than “a dollar a day” (or $1.08 in 1993 prices, to be precise). This popular definition of poverty was first unveiled in the bank’s 1990 World Development Report and was later adopted by the United Nations (UN) when it resolved to cut poverty in half by 2015.

The researchers now prefer a yardstick more typical of the 15 poorest countries that have credible poverty lines. By this definition, people are poor if they cannot match the standard of living of someone living on $1.25 a day in America in 2005. Such people would be recognised as poor even in Nepal, Tajikistan and hard-pressed African countries such as Uganda. But for those who still think a “dollar a day” has a better ring to it, the authors also calculate the number of people living on less than that at 2005 prices (see table).

The discovery of another 400m poor people will not satisfy some of the bank’s critics, who think it still undercounts poverty. Its cost-of-living estimates are based on the prices faced by a “representative household”, whose consumption mirrors national spending. But the poor are not representative. In particular, they buy in smaller quantities—a cupful of rice, not a 10-kilogram bag; a single cigarette, not a packet. As a result, the “poor pay more”.

Such concerns prompted the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to carry out its own study of the prices faced by the poor in 16 of its member countries (not including China). Its results, released on August 27th, found that in nine of those countries the poor in fact pay less. Even though they buy in smaller quantities, they save money by buying cut-price goods from cheaper outlets: kerbside haircuts not salons; open-air stalls not supermarkets; toddy not wine.

This penny-pinching adds up. In Indonesia, for example, the poor’s cost of living is 21% below the World Bank’s estimate. The survey also shaved more than 10% off the cost of living in other populous countries, such as Bangladesh and India. The difference was narrower in smaller countries, such as Cambodia. This may be because in big countries, such as India, the rich are large in number, though a tiny part of the population. Perhaps their spending has an undue influence on the prices faced by the representative household.

The ADB’s findings face an obvious philosophical objection. In theory a poverty count is supposed to calculate how many people fail to meet a certain standard of living. A person eating coarse rice, not fine-grained basmati, dressed in polyester not cotton, has a lower standard of living, even if he eats the same amount of grain and owns the same number of shirts. And when a household buys fruit in a supermarket, its members are buying more than just an apple. They are also enjoying the comfort of air-conditioning, the convenience of a parking space, and the hygiene of airtight packaging. But until such comforts are within the poor’s reach, the ADB is right to track the prices the poor actually pay. It hopes the next global price survey, due in 2011 and led by the World Bank, will do the same. Then, perhaps, the number of poor will be back to nine digits.

taken from :http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12010733