CHUNG SUNG-JUN/Getty Images News

Think going to your local Safeway is unpleasant? Try shopping in South Korea. When the supermarket chain Lotte Mart attempted to be the first South Korean retailer to put U.S. beef back on its shelves last Friday, things got ugly. Protesters ransacked several stores and scuffled with the police. To make matters worse, some farmers even hurled cow dung to show their displeasure. But although the protests forced a handful of the chain's 53 stores to stop selling the beef that same day, the chaos didn't slow some eager Korean customers from gobbling up the cheaper American import. Lotte said that it had sold an estimated 2 tons worth of U.S. beef as of 2 p.m. on Friday, four times greater than the sale of imported beef the entire previous week.

Before South Korea shut its doors to U.S. beef in December 2003, citing anxiety over mad-cow disease, the country had been the third largest importer of U.S. beef. But Koreans were concerned about more than just mad-cow disease; another motive was simply to protect domestic farmers and ranchers from competition. The ban surfaced as a sticking point between the two countries during the recent negotiation of the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement, which was finally signed on June 30th after months of grueling talks. But with a disgruntled U.S. auto industry, the road to ratification here at home is still an uneasy one (click here for a closer look at the deal). Let's hope U.S. autoworkers don't decide to fling cow manure at any Hyundais or Kias as they express their concern about the agreement.

Almost exactly two years ago, the first Chinese-made car—the Landwind New Vision—arrived for sale in Western Europe. Since then, other Chinese car makers have followed suit and tried their luck in cracking the European auto market.

Peter Bijvelds, the first Dutch car dealer to sell the Landwind, has been brutally honest about the car's characteristics: "The work is really pretty bad.... The motor is also a little bit weak." In its first German automobile club crash test, the chances of the driver's survival were found to be roughly zero. Still, the fact that the Landwind is 40 percent cheaper than its European competitors has been enough to ensure its success. Bijvelds sold 500 cars in the first two weeks. As Bijvelds sums it up, Europeans "want a lot of car for a little money."

But although Chinese vehicles such as the hilariously named Hover Wingle (a Chinese SUV now being exporting to Europe, pictured above) are attracting an increasing number of middle-class customers in Europe, their safety doesn't appear to be improving yet. For instance, the new Brilliance BS6, another Chinese model, performed horribly in recent tests—as these alarming videos dramatically illustrate.

Increasingly, though, Chinese automakers are copying European safety designs and even collaborating with Western brands, including Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler AG (now Daimler AG) and Volvo. If this trend can help make cars like the Hover Wingle not just affordable, but actually safe to drive, look for "Made in China" vehicles to take the continent by storm.

Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

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Perhaps no gun on Earth is more popular than the Avtomat Kalashnikov, or AK. What makes the AK so popular? In a recent study by Oxford University Economist Phillip Killicoat, "Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles," two theories emerge. The first is the weapon's simplicity:

The AK-47 was initially designed for ease of operation and repair by glove-wearing Soviet soldiers in arctic conditions. Its breathtaking simplicity means that it can also be operated by child soldiers in the African desert."

But the AK is also less accurate, less safe, and has a smaller range than its competitors. So its popularity could also stem from its early competitive advantage:

In the case of the AK-47 that early advantage may be that as a Soviet invention it was not subject to patent and so could be freely copied. Furthermore, large caches of these weapons were freely distributed to regimes and rebels sympathetic to the Soviet Union - more freely, that is, than weapons were distributed by the US - thereby giving the AK-47 a foothold advantage in the emerging post-World War II market for small arms."

AFP

Either way, there's a lot of them floating around, something FP examined way back in 2004. Of the 500 million firearms found in the world today, an estimated 100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are the famed AK-47 (the "47" refers to the year in which the rifle was designed for the Soviet army). 

Killicoat also looks at the price of an AK-47 in 208 countries between 1990 and 2005. He finds that, although the average global price of an AK-47 has risen from $448 in 1990 to $534 in 2005, in African countries purchasing an AK-47 is on average $200 cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Here's why:

[T]his staggering Africa-discount is predominantly driven by porous borders. Since borders are more porous than elsewhere, the trade in assault rifles across the African continent approaches a deregulated market in which prices converge and there are only negligible trade barriers that arms supply must overcome to meet demand. At any one time, only a few African countries have very high demand for weapons due to conflict. This demand profile across the continent changes over time as localized tensions rise and recede. Porous borders enable the entire supply of weapons on the African continent to meet whichever country currently has high weapons demand.

In fact, the weapons are so ubiquitous in Africa that "Kalash," an abbreviation of Kalashnikov, has become a popular boy's name in some countries.

(Hat tip: HTWW)

I've often dreamed of finding the perfect virtual secretary to manage those mundane tasks of life—paying bills, filing paperwork, keeping track of appointments, making travel arrangements—that are difficult to manage on a hectic schedule. Now it appears that I haven't been dreaming big enough. An article in Saturday's Wall Street Journal highlights the potentially huge phenomenon of "personal offshoring": 

Offshore outsourcing has transformed the way U.S. companies do business. Now, some early adopters are figuring out how to tap overseas workers for personal tasks. They're turning to a vast talent pool in India, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere for jobs ranging from landscape architecture to kitchen remodeling and math tutoring. They're also outsourcing some surprisingly small jobs, including getting a dress designed, creating address labels for wedding invitations or finding a good deal on a hotel room, for example.

Along with Guru.com, one of the bigger players is Elance, a California-based company whose site lists a huge variety of freelance jobs. Disturbingly, many of the tasks listed are in my job description: blog writing, copy editing, article writing, web layout ...

Evalueserve, the Indian research firm that wrote the white paper (pdf) that prompted the Journal's story, estimates "the total addressable market in the United States" for personal offshoring to be "easily" over $20 billion. Gulp.

The good news is that my dream of having a personal assistant is now attainable: There's GetFriday, an unfortunately named Indian company that offers a "personal virtual assistant" for as little as $7 an hour, depending on which plan you choose. So as long as I don't get offshored myself, my life may just have gotten a little easier.

The Financial Times declared in a headline this week that "India is set to gain from outsourcing." Hardly breaking news. But the article goes on to discuss how, by 2010, the developing world will account for more than a quarter of all electronics manufacturing output, up from less than one fifth two years ago. Further, outsourcing is likely to propel India to increase its electronics manufacturing from $5 billion in 2005 to $38.8 billion in 2010—almost an eightfold increase. No doubt this could be a significant leap for India's electronics manufacturing industry, especially since India has traditionally been viewed as a software provider rather than a hardware provider, unlike China. But for all the hype about India's gains—and assuming that India can sustain the skill-base required to develop at this rate—the projections show that India still won't catch up to its east Asian competitor. As the FT notes:

China, which in the past 10 years has become the most important country for electronics manufacturing, will in 2010 account for 46 per cent of outsourcing work in this industry, down from 48 per cent two years ago.

So even if India will be a "big gainer, accounting for a projected 10 per cent of the total in 2010, up from 2 per cent in 2005," electronics manufacturing outsourcing will still be largely dominated by China.

John Burcham/Nat. Geographic

Ever wondered why men pay more for bathing suits than women, why women pay more for hiking boots than men, or why woven wool shirts are cheaper for women? The answer, it seems, is the United States Congress, which assigns differing tariff rates for men and women's apparel. According to Michael Barbaro in the International Herald Tribune, there is no apparent pattern to the tariff rates, which sometimes favor men and at other times favor women, with as much as a one hundred percent difference in tariff rates. He also notes that "the fees tacked onto clothing, shoes and swimwear as they enter the country's ports may be the last legal form of sex discrimination in the United States, approved year after year by lawmakers and passed on to consumers." But maybe not for long.

A number of major apparel companies, including Steve Madden, Asics and Columbia Sportswear, are challenging this sex discrimination in tariffs through lawsuits against the U.S. federal government. If they win, they could earn as much as $1 billion worth of tariffs, and higher future profits as tariffs are scaled down for consistency. Of course, they run the risk of increasing the prices for consumers if the government ultimately decides to raise the tariffs to equalize the rates rather than lower them.

What's most interesting—or amusing—about this case is the utter lack of rationale for the differing rates. Some believe that it comes down to old-fashioned sex discrimination (but that doesn't explain why men/women lose sometimes and win at other times), or that it's a different form of protectionism. But the companies' lawyers, after years of scrutinizing tariff lists, international trade court records and congressional testimony, have found no explanation for the tariff discrepancies. As Daniel Altman writes in his IHT blog:

What they really show, at bottom, is how arbitrary the tariff system is in the United States. In the midst of all the talk about global, regional and bilateral trade agreements, has anyone thought to check if the present regime is even rational?"

Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty

We witnessed the tens of thousands of demonstrators decrying the rapidly (and exorbitantly) rising price of corn in the "tortilla protests" in Mexico City earlier this year. The protests came about as a result of the growing demand for corn-based ethanol, the Bush administration's biofuel of choice. But now there appears to be a new dietary staple under threat from the rising demand for ethanol: German beer.

Der Spiegel Online reports that a 2006 barley shortage will raise the wholesale price of German beer this May. Many brewing industry lobbyists attribute the price rise to farmers forgoing barley for corn in order to satisfy the global demand for biofuels, especially from the United States. In the past year, the price of barley has doubled on the German market, from €200 to €400 per ton.

But it's not just Germany that is set to see soaring beer prices. The chief executive of Heineken (the Dutch brewer) warned in February that the expanding biofuel sector was starting to cause a "structural shift" in European and U.S. agricultural markets, which could precipitate a long-term upward shift in the price of beer. Already, futures prices for European malting barley have risen since last May by 85 percent to more than €230 a ton, and barley production in the United States has fallen to 180.05 million bushels (in 2006)—the lowest level since 1936. Global stockpiles of barley have shrunk by a third in the last two years. All of this augurs ill for beer drinkers, who may soon be paying significantly more for their pints.

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InformationWeek reported today that hourly wages of IT professionals have hit their highest levels since 2001. A study of wage levels found that the average hourly wage of IT workers rose 5.5 percent from the first quarter of 2006 to the first quarter of 2007. Technical consultants are riding highest, pulling down an average of $83.72 per hour.

So what's behind the sudden jump in wages? "There's an unprecedented customer demand and not enough people," says Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing at Yoh, the IT staffing firm that conducted the study.

But it's not only in the United States that demand for quality professionals in the IT field is beginning to outstrip supply, pushing up the price of labor. The salaries of IT workers from Central Europe to India to China have been rising—often by double-digits—every year. In India, around 1.3 million people applied to Infosys, India's IT behemoth, yet fewer than 2 percent were actually employable. The same is true for engineering, where only around one quarter of the 400,000 new engineers produced every year in India are ready to enter the real "job world." Could it be only a matter of time before outsourcing starts to look less than lucrative?

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Tomorrow, March 17th, is St. Patrick's Day. To commemorate, many in the United States—both those of Irish descent those merely Irish for the day—will gather in that quintessential neighborhood watering hole, the Irish pub. But, in one of the great ironies of globalization, it turns out that the outpost of traditional Irish culture on the corner is actually a finely-tuned corporate creation. In 1991, the Dublin-based Irish Pub Company (IPCo) hit on a profitable model for fabricating and selling "authentic Irishness." Slate's Austin Kelly made the revelation last year:

In the last 15 years, Dublin-based IPCo and its competitors have fabricated and installed more than 1,800 watering holes in more than 50 countries. Guinness threw its weight (and that of its global parent Diageo) behind the movement, and an industry was built around the reproduction of "Irishness" on every continent.

Yes, that's right. Ireland exports pubs the way the United States does T.G.I. Friday's.

IPCo provides its customers with five choices of theme: Country Cottage, Gaelic, Brewery, Traditional, and Victorian Dublin. Evidently, the Irish themselves have not traditionally been wont to spend their time quaffing brews with antique farm implements lying around or pictures of James Joyce staring down from the walls. Those touches of "authenticity" were devised to make the Guinness go down more naturally in Minneapolis, Shanghai or Dubai.

Of course, in this wired-together world, it was only a matter of time until the craze for Irish pubs worked its way back to Eire herself. After proselytizing for the pub abroad, IPCo has been able to turn its sights back to the home market, and now sells its version of traditional Irishness to the Irish themselves:

IPCo has built 40 ersatz pubs on the Emerald Isle, opening them beside the long-standing establishments on which they were based.

What's your kidney worth to you? Prisoners in South Carolina may soon find that one of theirs is worth six months of freedom. In a new bill before the state legislature, prisoners will be given 180 days off their jail sentences if they donate a kidney or bone marrow. 

The problem is that U.S. federal law prohibits giving donors "valuable consideration" in exchange for organs. In other words, patients in need of kidneys (or middlemen) are prohibited from giving donors money or property in order to prevent an organ market from emerging.

So, does freedom count as money or property? Hard to say. But I think the scheme in South Carolina clearly violates the law because it incentivizes donating a kidney in a coercive fashion, just as a monetary payment would. It preys upon the prisoners' situation, in the same way that offering a poor person money for his kidney does. And since prisons are disproportionately full of low-income people, this is just another way of getting one class of society to provide for the health of a wealthier class—the reason why we don't want an organ market in the first place. 

Of course, the recipient rolls are still beating out the donor rolls by a mile. Perhaps there should be amendments to the law that allow incentives for dead people. Pennsylvania tried to implement a program a few years ago that would reimburse a person's family for funeral expenses if the newly deceased became a donor. Donate a kidney, let your family avoid debt for your goodbye party. Everyone's a winner.

A Michigan couple got a macabre surprise recently when they received two packages that they thought contained the table they'd just bought on eBay. Instead, inside the bubble wrap, they found a human liver and ear that had been culled from corpses in China and plasticized. As the New York Times reported last August, Chinese companies are churning out body parts, mostly for museums:

Inside a series of unmarked buildings, hundreds of Chinese workers, some seated in assembly line formations, are cleaning, cutting, dissecting, preserving and re-engineering human corpses, preparing them for the international museum exhibition market.

Thankfully, it sounds as if the delivery service DHL is to blame for the mistake and that eBay is still refusing to allow the sale of body parts. The liver and ear were bound for a medical research lab nearby. Police think another two dozen plasticized body parts from China are on their way to wrong addresses across Michigan. So, if you're expecting a parcel, you may want to double check the return address before opening.

Back in 2000, I sat in on our interview with anti-globalization activist Lori Wallach. (I was the guy running the tape recorder). Wallach had this great line, which she has often repeated, about two ships passing in the night. One ship is loaded with chopsticks cut from wood in the Pacific Northwest and being shipped to Japan. The other ship is loaded with toothpicks cut from trees in Malaysia and packaged in Japan on their way to California. How could these two companies possibly be profitable?

Wallach's illustration comes to mind when I read sustainability engineer Pablo Päster's latest column. Producing and shipping one bottle of Fiji bottled water around the globe consumes nearly 27 liters of water,  nearly a kilogram of fossil fuels, and generates more than a pound of carbon dioxide emissions. No wonder that stuff is so overpriced.

KARIM SAHIB/
AFP/Getty Images

In this year's Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006, FP noted that "Russia and OPEC countries are moving their holdings out of dollars and into euros and yen."

And this trend will continue into 2007. The United Arab Emirates announced this week that by September, it will move 8 percent of its foreign exchange holdings from dollars to euros. The amount of money in this case is relatively small—a shift of around $2 billion. Most of the dollars in the Middle East are held not by central banks, but by state-owned investment firms. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, for instance, manages $500 billion.

But the message the UAE move sends is clear: the dollar is still weak and it's better to diversify.

UPDATE: See also currency expert Brad Setser's comments. Setser notes that the Saudi central bank does have huge assets, but it seems to be hanging on to its dollars... for now.