The windows for poverty reduction will shrink dramatically, as robots and automation help bring back to developed countries the jobs lost to poorer ones.

Sir, Ben Bland writes: “Automation in Bangladesh may not make sense because you still have to ship but, if you make in the US, it makes more sense because there’s no [import] duty, no shipping, you’re closer to the customer and there are shorter lead times,” said Mr Rajan. “March of the robots stalls as clothes maker Crystal backs human workers” January 2.

What can I say? Should those robots working in the US share a moment of silence for those poor Bangladesh workers they will be substituting for?

https://perkurowski.blogspot.ca/2017/02/here-some-disorderly-lose-cannon.html

@PerKurowski

Don´t give microfinance a blanket approval!

Sir in “Dhaka´s spiteful attack on Yunus” March 3, you write “microlenders have small margins in spite of their high interest rates… their loans are cheaper than those provided by traditional money lenders, and free of the social conditions attached to credit in feudal relationship” and I must ask… how on earth do you know that?

As a former Executive Director of the World Bank and very interested in the subject I have closely followed the debate on microfinance, and I have quite often found the need to remark on the fact that most evaluations of the sector are geared to establish the profitability of micro-finance and very little or nothing is said about for instance the rates the micro-borrowers have to pay.

There is much good in microfinance but there is also an enormous amount of hypocrisy, not the least among a crowd of those who make a career and a living out of being microfinance groupies. If you like the concept of microfinance, as I indeed do, then hold it to strict standards and do not give it a blanket approval. (Or otherwise accept it as any other kind of non-holy business).

And of course this has nothing to do with approving or condoning whatever is being done to Mohammed Yunus the founder of Grameen Bank, something of which I know too little about to opine.

How will the fines from Siemens be distributed?

Sir Daniel Schäfer reports on December 16 that Siemens has to pay $1.4bn in fines to US and German authorities in order to settle bribery inquiries in the United States and Germany related to Venezuela, Argentina, Iraq, Israel, Russia and Bangladesh. How much of these fines will the real victims, the citizens of those countries that were the object of the bribery receive and how will these be distributed?

A corruption of a third kind?