Singapore is again ranked first for Ease of Doing Business by the World Bank. For some reason they call the report issued in any given year as the report for the next year (which makes no sense to me). The data shown below is for the year they released the report.

The rankings include ranking of various aspects of running a business. Some rankings for 2008: Dealing with Construction Permits (Singapore and New Zealand 2nd, USA 26th, China 176th), Employing Workers (Singapore and the USA 1st, Germany 142nd), protecting investors (New Zealand 1st, Singapore 2nd, Hong Kong 3rd, Malaysia 4th, USA 5th), enforcing contracts (Singapore 1st, Hong Kong 2nd, USA 6th, China 18th), getting credit (Malaysia 1st; UK and Hong Kong 2nd; Singapore, New Zealand and USA 5th), paying taxes (Hong Kong 3rd, USA 46th, Japan 112th, China 132nd).

These rankings are not the final word on exactly where each country truly ranks but they do provide a interesting view. With this type of data there is plenty of room for judgment and issues with the data. Several of my posts, from my other blogs, that I recommend on this topic: The Future is Engineering, Science and Engineering in Global Economics and Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation.

Related: Easiest Countries from Which to Operate Businesses 2007 - Countries Which are Easiest for Doing Business 2006 - New Look American Manufacturing - Top Manufacturing Countries (2007) - Oil Consumption by Country - International Health Care System Performance - Economics, America and China

Kiva is a great charity and example of how to use the web effectively. Kiva has added a fellows blog - which is a great idea. The fellows are funded by Kiva (fellows are unpaid) to go to spend time in the countries Kiva facilitates loans for working with the local partners. This post is about Rita Bashnet (in photo) an entrepreneur from Nepal:

Great story, and exactly my hope for using capitalism to improve the standard of living for people around the globe.

I notice a few days ago, for the first time, some of those seeking loans are about to have their listings expire unfunded. Kiva gives listings 30 days to be funded. Yesterday Kiva announced they were providing funds to lenders as soon as the entrepreneur has made a payment (it used to provide the funds to lenders only once the loan was closed out). My guess is they were smart to create a backlog of available loan options before flooding the Kiva market with lots of extra capital (I, for example, now have over $500 available to lend. If they didn’t have a backlog when this change took place they would have created a situation whee lenders could log in to lend money and can’t find anyone to lend to.

I have no problem if some loans are not funded (I want to help entrepreneurs by providing funding to build a business - some loans are for things like adding a room onto their house, which is fine but not what I want to support with interest free loans from me). A significant number of the unfunded loans where for pubs (I think Kiva lenders might not have the same criteria as banks :-).

If you haven’t loaned money through Kiva, please consider it now. If you do, send me your Kiva lender link and I will add it to Curious Cat Kivans. We have a couple readers that have provided links (including fellow bloggers Kevin Meyer and Tom Southworth) but I really would like to see more.

Related: Using Capitalism to Make the World Better - Millennium Development Goals - Appropriate Technology - Provide a Helping Hand with Kiva

Jules Verne predicted cars would run on air. The Air Car is making that a reality. The car would be powered by compressed air. Certainly seem like an interesting idea. Air car ready for production:

The car is said to have a driving range of 125 miles so by my calculation it would cost about 1.6 cents per mile. A car that gets 31 mpg would use 4 gallons to go 124 miles. At $3 a gallon for gas, the cost is $12 for fuel or about 9.7 cents per mile. I didn’t notice anything about maintenance costs. I don’t see any reason why the Air Car would cost more to maintain than a normal car. Five-seat concept car runs on air

Now does that sound like the Toyota Production System to you? It should. If I were an executive at Toyota I would sure examine this to see if it really is as promising as it looks. And if it is Toyota sure has plenty of cash and the management practice to make a very compelling case for allowing Toyota to produce this globally. The engineers desires closely match what Toyota has learned. Both seek to eliminate the waste of transportation (friction).

Related: Click Fraud = Friction for Google - Manufacturing Takes off in India - Electric Automobiles

At Toyota, a Global Giant Reaches for Agility

Yet another article on the management of Toyota. And here is another: Toyota heir slowly following in family footsteps. And another: Toyota explores more efficient methods to build cars.

Related: 12 Stocks for 10 Years Feb 2008 Update - No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota - New Articles on Toyota Management - Toyota’s Effort to Stay Toyota - More Positive Press for Toyota Management - Toyota in the US Economy

Business Week has several good articles on the topic of China’s Economic impact including: Shaking up Trade Theory and The China Price.

In Shaking up Trade Theory Aaron Bernstein explores: “The fact that programming, engineering, and other high-skilled jobs are jumping to places such as China and India seems to conflict head-on with the 200-year-old doctrine of comparative advantage.” Over the last few years the white collar job losses in tech US have seemed to cause quite a bit more concern than the manufacturing and other job losses of the 1980s and 1990s. His article does a good job of exploring this issue within the limits of a short magazine article.

He captures the surprise economist (in the US) see because “Conversely, India, where just a fraction of its 400 million-plus workers have gone to college, should grab the low-skilled work and leave higher-end products to the U.S.” That conflicts with the data that many high skilled jobs are going to India (and elsewhere). The US Economists don’t seem to realize India is producing as many college educated engineers as the US. So India also has hundreds of millions of low skill workers that doesn’t mean they don’t also have plenty of high skilled worked (that speak English, which is, of course a huge benefit that is less true of Chinese high skilled workers).

Ok, I need to do better research but here is one source: “I know that US production of engineers declined from about 80K (in ‘85) to about 65K - but is back up to about 75K in the latest data. For context, however, the production of engineers is over 200,000/yr in each of China and India.” Wm. A. Wulf, President, National Academy of Engineering (United States) in talk entitled: Out-sourcing/Off-shoring of Engineering Jobs. - Update: see USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates
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