The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide news box with a scoop on ailing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's apparent plan to begin transitioning power, according to anonymous U.S. officials. Unlike the last power change in North Korea 15 years ago, there is no clear successor to Kim, though his brother-in-law and third son are considered top candidates.
After India's election
Good news: don't waste it
May 21st 2009
From The Economist print edition
The voters of the world’s biggest democracy have given their government a precious second chance
INDIA is a land of bright promise. It is also extremely poor. About 27m Indians will be born this year. Unless things improve, almost 2m of them will die before the next general election. Of the children who survive, more than 40% will be physically stunted by malnutrition. Most will enroll in a school, but they cannot count on their teachers showing up. After five years of classes, less than 60% will be able to read a short story and more than 60% will still be stumped by simple arithmetic.
Some 300 parties and numerous independent candidates contested the election that has just ended (see article). They chose a bewildering variety of symbols: a lotus flower, a bow-and-arrow, a ceiling fan, a cricketer pulling the ball to the boundary. Of the 417m people who voted (a turnout of 58%), about 119m pushed the button next to an open hand, the symbol of the Congress party. That was enough to give it 206 of the 545 parliamentary seats. In a country more than twice the size of the European Union, speaking more languages, that is about as clear a mandate as any party can hope to win and—if Congress uses that mandate wisely—a wonderful chance to boost the welfare of the next generation of Indians.
Free at last…
The good news is that Congress has found it easy to form a coalition with what looks like a stable parliamentary majority. It will thus spare the country a repeat of the past five years, in which the party squandered its energies appeasing its allies in an unwieldy coalition. The election was also heartening because it revealed the limits of divisive politics. India’s second party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), remains rooted in the Hindutva (Hindu-ness) movement, which seems to believe that India’s 160m Muslims live there on sufferance. The BJP lost ground this time, showing yet again that Hindu nationalism is enough to underpin a party, but not a government.
Still, Congress must not now fall prey to complacency. The party is a big, shapeless tent, tethered to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has provided three of the country’s prime ministers. The courtiers have now turned their attention to the next in line, Rahul Gandhi, the son of Sonia Gandhi, the party’s leader. But, following the example of his mother, he is in no hurry to become prime minister. That is commendable. Manmohan Singh, the Oxford-educated economist who has been prime minister since 2004, has business to finish.
Liberals hope that Mr Singh’s reformist instincts will enjoy freer rein now that Congress is no longer beholden to the communist parties which abandoned the government last summer and suffered horribly at the polls this spring. But liberalising measures, such as lifting the cap on foreign direct investment in insurance, win few votes in India. Only 0.7% of households own any of the shares that jumped by 17% on the first day of trading after Mr Singh’s victory was declared.
Mr Singh says his aim is “inclusive” growth. He and Mrs Gandhi have shown a taste for redistributing the proceeds of growth to favoured constituencies, some of whom happen to be desperately needy. The government raised the pay of public employees, forgave the loans of small farmers and expanded its public-works scheme for the rural poor.
Congress will find it harder to repeat this trick in its second term. Although the electoral maths is now in its favour, the fiscal arithmetic is less forgiving. The government’s budget deficit (including the states’) could exceed 11% of GDP this year. If the economy recovers—India, alongside China, seems to be decoupled from the sluggish West (see article)—the government’s borrowing will put pressure on interest rates.
To narrow the deficit, it will be tempted to short-change infrastructure spending, an investment that pays off slowly. But this would be a false economy. If India is to grow at 9% a year, it needs to add at least 25,000MW of power a year. It is also bad politics: in the states of Bihar and Orissa, voters in this election proved they will reward state administrations that show an interest in improving their lot. A government with a secure five-year term has a chance to earn votes, not just buy them.
A better way to save money would be to curb government subsidies on fuel and fertiliser. These outlays are wasteful and mostly benefit better-off people who own vehicles, or farm large plots of land. Fuel subsidies, in particular, hold the public finances hostage to the world oil price, which threatened fiscal mayhem when it passed $140 a barrel last summer. Another crisis beckons if the world economy recovers.
Reforming subsidies would be administratively easy, but politically tricky. The same, alas, applies to India’s onerous labour laws. It would take only a penstroke to repeal these rules, which make a tiny fraction of the workforce practically unsackable, at the expense of everybody else. But with exports plummeting and industry shrinking, it would be a brave new government that made Indians easier to fire.
Sadly, Congress has neither the courage nor the mandate to grasp this nettle. Yet some urgent reforms would be politically popular. To reform education or combat malnutrition, for example, the government needs to recruit, motivate and monitor millions of teachers and crèche-workers. Unfortunately, that asks a lot of India’s creaking bureaucratic machinery, which is notoriously prone to “leakage”, a euphemism for corruption. Mr Singh’s failure to repair that machinery explains a lot of his government’s failure to achieve much else. It has, for example, dawdled over a bill that would supposedly enforce the right to education, because it fears the practicalities. In India, it can take up to four years to fill a teacher vacancy.
…but no more excuses
In the past five years Congress could blame such shortcomings on the vagaries of coalition politics. But it lost that alibi this week. Unencumbered by its useless former allies, it now has a clear mandate to provide the country with educated minds, well-fed bellies, irrigated fields and uninterrupted electricity, without busting the budget. Promises to do just that featured prominently in Congress’s manifesto, just as they did in the election of 2004. If the hand comes up empty again, India’s voters will push someone else’s button next time.
時事风云 | 2009.05.23
蒙古大选形势微妙
4月底的一份民意调查显示，额勒贝格道尔吉将获得37%的选票，而另外36%的选民支持恩赫巴亚尔。目前尽管经济状况不好，但两人都向选民许诺让广大人民从矿产资源贸易中得到更多的实惠。
由于去年议会选举时引发混乱并造成5死300多伤的惨剧，因此此次选举将在严密的警戒措施下进行。周日首都将严禁出售酒精类饮品并取消一切公开活动。蒙古近一半的选民生活在乌兰巴托。
前总理额勒贝格道尔吉呼吁变革和反腐败，因此他 在城市居民中有着较高的支持率。来自蒙古人民革命党的现任总统恩赫巴亚尔则受农牧民欢迎。他许诺国家将给人民更多财政支持，同时在选战中强调了国家团结和 建设一个强大的法治国家的重要性。如果周日时广大农牧民都去参加选举，那么恩赫巴亚尔将以微弱优势胜出。
恩赫巴亚尔向260万左右的蒙古人民许诺，将给 大家献上"祖国母亲给所有公民的礼物"。他将仿效美国阿拉斯加设立一个基金，让所有人都参与到矿产财富的分配中来。而城市市民们也希望能分享矿产收入，他 们更信任来自民主党的竞选挑战者额勒贝格道尔吉。乌兰巴托的丝绸进口商沙·盖巴特蒙克哈说："额勒贝格道尔吉主张变革。他代表新的、进步的理念，这是我们 蒙古人最迫切需要的。"
2004到2008年，蒙古经济年平均增长9% 左右。这主要因为其出口的铜、钼和金的价格上升。矿产资源在该国国民经济中占据了非常重要的地位。正是依靠出口铜、金、铀、铅、锌和煤，该国已经有近 300万人摆脱了贫困。由于当前国际上原材料价格下跌，使得其经济增幅也大大下降，今年经济甚至会出现2%的倒退。税收收入目前已经锐减，而政府不得不出 台了削减社会支出的措施。近几年旅游业已经发展成为一个重要的经济部门。按照官方统计数据，辽阔的草原、放牧的牧民以及南方的戈壁沙漠每年都吸引了近40 万游客到来。
但蒙古仍是一个贫穷的国家，目前的人均收入为 1200美元，农民的生活水平极低。在联合国发展指数所统计的179个国家中，蒙古排在第112位。至少1/3的蒙古人生活在贫困中。同它的两个专制邻国 --俄罗斯与中国相比，该国在1990年和平革命以后便实行着民主体制。周日所举行的总统大选，将是该国进行的第五次民主选举。
（美联社法新社综合报道）
编译：赵翀
责编：石涛
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