India needs reform, infrastructure for growth - OECD

Najam Hussain Syed

(translated from Punjabi by Irfan Malik and Jennifer Barber)

Khial

There have always been
sparrows, and will always be.
After the eagles' and hawks'
threatening bodies have taken
their assigned corners in museums
and the peacock's magic
is a handful of feathers
in an empty tomb,
the sparrows will remain.
They'll descend from the trees
branch by branch, gathering
like the girls of simple ways
who, with their laughter,
say whatever they please.

From a Poem by MIAN IJAZ UL HASSAN

Silken lies howso'ver uncouth
Are always more endearing than truth
to speak one's mind is like from the hind
You would let out in company an audible sound,
Truth is like a wart on a painted face
A fly in the ointment
Lipstick on the collar
A dog without a leash.

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Posted by Baljit Grewal

 What Is Meant by the Knowledge-Based Economy: An analysis of KBE on the Panjab.org.uk website

You can also use it by adding macro:grewalbs.knowledge to a query in any Live Search box.

Search operators like "", ( ), AND, NOT, OR, intitle:, inurl:, hasfeed:, has:, -, |, etc. are supported

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Posted by Baljit Grewal

i4donline reports that US government has joined the bandwagon. Japanese government has been thinking along these lines for a few years now specially under their u-Japan policy.

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Posted by Baljit Grewal

*Bush Tells Group He Sees a 'Third Awakening'
<http://letters.washingtonpost.com/W8RH03AFF903FA142F17F33E9171C0 >*
President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of
religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the
nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted
as "a confrontation between good and evil."
(By Peter Baker, The Washington Post

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Posted by Baljit Grewal

 

 

India beaten 2-1 by Korea, to fight for 9-12 place now
Monchengladbach, Sep 11 (UNI) A listless India's humiliation was complete as they squandered the lead and went down 1-2 to Korea in their fourth league match of the hockey World Cup here today.

Playing for a pride, the Indians failed to salvage it as they conceded two goals in the last stages of the match to remain winless after six days of the championship..... Read More

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Posted by Baljit Grewal

This item was sent to you by baljit@gmail.com from Google Reader. Word matters: Multicultural perspectives on information societies - by Alain Ambrosi, Valérie Peugeot, & Daniel Pimienta Journal of Communication Volume 56, Issue 3, Page 627-628, Sep 2006. ... Source: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00305.x?ai=6kng6&af=R If you no longer wish to receive message like this, please contact the sender. Try Google Reader today: http://www.google.com/reader/

GREED by Julian Edney (1)

Sign the tab in certain Midtown eateries and your neighbors' eyes slide over. Is that a $48,000 Michel Perchin pen? What's on your wrist – a $300,000 Breguet watch? In Palm Springs and Bel Air, $100,000 twin-turbo Porsches and $225,000 Ferraris buzz the warm streets. In New York at an exclusive Morell & Company auction last May, a single magnum of Dom Perignon champagne was sold for $5,750. And there are the paintings of course - one evening at auction two Monets sold for $43 million (2). Hotel rooms, anyone, at $10,000 a night?  Estate agents in suburbs of Dallas and Palm Beach have advertised baronial homes for sale at over $40 million (3). These are prices paid by the exceptionally wealthy, the folks who skim the pages of the Robb Report (average annual salary of subscribers: $1.2 million) in whose glossy pages are reviewed the best of everything. In a recent issue a southern plantation is advertised, "everybody's dream," at $8.5 million. Robert Reich points out that the superrich live in a parallel universe to the rest of the country: much of the time we don't see them because they live in walled estates, travel in private limousines and use different airports from the rest of us (4). There's lots of them. There are now more than 200 billionaires. Some five percent of American households have assets over $1 million. And we're back to levels of extravagant consumption not seen for 100 years (5). By historical accounts this is a nation of persistent and resilient people with an unshakable mission: the pursuit of happiness. This idea of happiness is largely connected with wealth (and this connection has long philosophic roots). It is a nation of ambitious people with notions of unfettered future growth, a nation that celebrates abundance. There seems to be no reason anyone should be deprived of luxury, if he works hard. Indeed with this country's aggregate wealth, there should be no reason anyone should ever go hungry or suffer. People are going hungry in America. A Los Angeles survey found more than a quarter of low income residents, many working, are not getting enough food to meet basic nutritional needs. And 10% are experiencing hunger(6). Estimates are that 3 out of 10 Americans will face poverty sometime in their lives (7). Misery is a word seldom applied to the contemporary scene. Like wretchedness it seems antique, an Old World term. But many Americans live in cold, dank slums; many do not earn enough for shelter, many sleep outside. In America's inner cities and at its lowest levels, under freeway bridges and in tubercular alleys, in stained and broken rooming houses and in torn-apart schools, misery exists and persists. All our largest cities contain neighborhoods where some people live day to day in apartments that could be mistaken for closets, some fearing to leave home on gang-terrorized streets, some sharing bus seats with people with drug-scarred arms. Every great metropolis has its skid row mired in fecal gutters, where whole blocks are awash in narcotics and violence, its inhabitants despised and flatly abandoned. America is once again a nation of extremes. ...... Read More

Some Search strings: Sorting by date is a very useful feature and throws up interesting results, some going back to the 19th century for these words which we think are of recent coinage.

 

1. Knowledge-based economy

2. Knowledge economy 

3. Knowledge Society 

4. Information Society

5. Knowledge-based society 

6. Information economy

MOOL MANTRA

Share and Learn

Source:  Technology in Society  Volume 25, Issue 3 , August 2003, Pages 319-335

The virtuous cycle between institutional elasticity, IT advancement and sustainable growth: can Japan survive in an information society?

Reiko Kondo^, and Chihiro Watanabe

On the basis of the above comparative analysis on the effectiveness of institutional systems in Japan and the US, Fig. Japan suggests how Japanese institutional systems and those of the US performed as the paradigm shift occurred from an industrial society to an information society. As analyzed above, though the Japanese institutional system was effective in the paradigm of an industrial society, it cannot be effectively applied to the new paradigm of an information society. Conversely, the US system, which was ineffective in the paradigm of the 1980s, was very effective in the paradigm of the 1990s.

 OECD reported an uneven growth trend of GDP per capita in OECD countries over the past decade compared with the 1980s. It described this trend in the 1990s as being higher than in the 1980s in countries such as Australia, Canada, and the US, while growth declined markedly in areas such as Japan, Switzerland and Korea. Although there are a number of factors to explain these divergences, ^,one reason is undoubtedly Japan's inflexibility in broadly adopting IT.

Fig. Japan 1 summarizes a scheme leading Japan to lose its institutional elasticity by comparing the US system which indicates that, contrary to the dual virtuous cycle up to the end of the 1980s, Japan has been suffering from a dual vicious cycle.

During the period of an industrial society initiated by manufacturing industry, Japan's domestic institutions based on young vitality functioned efficiently towards the "catching-up" target leading to high economic growth.

In the 1990s, Japan's economy clearly contrasted with the preceding decades. Facing a new paradigm characterized by a shift to an information society initiated by service oriented industry, globalization, diversification of the nation's interest, aging trend, and subsequent low, zero or negative economic growth, Japan's traditional institutions did not function efficiently as they did in preceding decades.

Consequently, a virtuous cycle between institutional elasticity and economic development changed to a vicious cycle between non-elastic institutions and economic stagnation. Previous analyses in Fig. Japan with respect to the contribution of network expansion to GDP growth, and the imbalance of technology incorporation in labor and capital, exemplify this vicious cycle. These vicious cycles resulted in Japan losing international competitiveness and further contributed to economic stagnation. Thus, Japan has been facing a dual vicious cycle leading to a solid institutional elasticity.