Loomnie

From Reuters:

Nigeria’s central bank plans to diversify its $33 billion in foreign exchange reserves away from the dollar by switching a tenth of the stockpile into yuan, underlining the momentum behind China’s drive to internationalise its currency.

“We are looking at anything to start with from 5 to 10 percent of our reserves,” central bank governor Lamido Sanusi said on Monday.

The central bank had already said that it was considering reducing its reliance on the dollar, which economists say accounts for the bulk of its $32.96 billion in reserves . The bank does not publish the currency composition of its assets.

But Sanusi, speaking to CNBC news by telephone from China, said Africa’s second-largest economy was not abandoning the dollar and euro. “They are going to remain an important part of our holdings,” he said.

Continue reading for more analysis of the decision. From what I’ve seen, CBN seems to be the first central bank to do this.

See also FT TIlt for more analysis.

• Islamic finance in Nigeria – BusinessDay
• Why mobile money arrived in Africa before the UK – BBC
• What DSK’s fall says about transatlantic differences in attitudes to sex, power and the law – The Economist
• A new freight train route connects Antwerp in Belgium to the western Chinese city of Chongqing, 11,000 kilometers away – Duetsche Welle
• Expulsion of Lars von Trier from Cannes – Der Spiegel

The National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, recently trippled its exhibition place in a renovation and expansion that lasted about three and a half year. This makes it the largest museum in the world – it beats New York’s Metropolitan Museum, formerly the largest museum in the world, by about 20,000 square feet. The first exhibition?

On the occasion of the re-opening, several German museums and their curators were invited to create programming and exhibitions on the art of the Enlightenment: a survey of artifacts from an era of European creativity, scientific progress, and openness of thought.

This is in a period that China is embarking on what has been described as “the most intense crackdown on free expression in years”.

H/t Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen. Their weekly programme on pop culture and the arts is always a delight to listen to. It is also available as a podcast.

… in Newsweek. Which undermines the argument that one should pay attention to the message and not the messenger. As if the two could ever really be separated.

Gideon Rachman of FT writes:

It is ironic that the democratic movements in the Arab world broke out just as autocracy seemed to be coming back into fashion. Francis Fukuyama, whose “end of history” thesis epitomised the democratic triumphalism of 1989, recently wrote an article for this newspaper that lauded China’s ability to “make large complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well”, while lamenting that American democracy “will not be much of a model to anyone if the government is divided against itself and cannot govern”. This month has also seen the publication of Dambisa Moyo’s much-discussed How The West Was Lost, which laments the “economic folly” of western democracies and lauds the dynamism of China.

Placed in the context of the wider debate between democracy and authoritarianism, the sight of demonstrators on the streets of Cairo demanding freedom should be immensely cheering to the west. The neoconservatives who always argued that the Arab world could not forever be an exception to the global spread of democracy may be tempted to claim vindication.

FT’s Gideon Rachman thinks that the answer to that question might be Yes:

The backlash against immigration is particularly visible in Europe. In Britain, the new coalition government has promised to reduce the number of immigrants from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands. International banks and multinational companies are already complaining that their businesses are being badly affected. Over the past year anti-immigration parties have made breakthroughs in the Netherlands and Sweden – and a book lambasting the cultural effects of immigration has become a huge bestseller in Germany. In the US, the populist Tea Party movement has increased the pressure to crack down on illegal immigration from Mexico.

The re-regulation of capital movements is also moving up the international agenda, amid talk of a “global currency war”. As all the world’s major powers seek to export their way out of economic trouble, so tensions have grown. America complains that China is deliberately undervaluing its currency to maintain a vast trade surplus that is contributing to US unemployment. The Chinese retort that the US is printing money in an effort to drive down the dollar. Questions about the future of the euro have raised the spectre that capital controls might one day have to be reimposed within Europe, as part of a managed effort to break up the single currency. On a more minor, but practical level, some emerging markets – most notably Brazil – imposed controls on inflows of “hot money” last year, to prevent their currencies being boosted to hopelessly uncompetitive levels. Since a new global compact on currencies is unlikely in 2011, this trend is likely to gather momentum.

I know of many countries that will argue that they weren’t really part of globalization anyway (at least in the sense that it is described above), and that the role they play – as sources of primary resources – will remain largely unchanged, even if there were to be a relative retreat of ‘globalization’.

See also Kenneth Rogoff’s take on the topic, as well as Joseph Stiglitz’s.

The Economist talks to China Europe Business School’s Africa Programme Director, Kwaku Atuahene-Gima, about the reason the Chinese business school decided to establish a branch in Ghana:

CEIBS has been instrumental in developing the business talent that has helped China develop,…. The Europeans and Americans were the colonisers of Africa, but there was not much development, or improvement in standards of living. China has over the past 30 years transformed a very poor economy into a very vibrant one….We decided to bring our model to Africa to help Africa develop.

He also talks about his plans to design a  programme for traditional chiefs and their administrative staff.

Read about the school here. The audio file is here.

The Chinese market in fake European classical art is growing. Steadily. Something they bring to it? Industrial efficiency.

The village of Dafen in southern China has become the centre of a big industry, with about 8,000 artists responsible for creating 60 per cent of the world’s oil paintings.

Examining data from China – the biggest internal migration experience in human history – this column finds that migrants from the same village tend to cluster at the same destination for the same occupation. This pattern is driven by social networks within villages that reduce the moving costs for future migrants, such as the risk of not finding a job.

The whole column.

One of my colleagues, Anja Peleikis, found out the same thing about Lebanese migrants in West Africa. See this article [pdf]. It is also somewhat similar to the case of the Igbo traders that I work with. One finds that the trade in a particular product is dominated by people from the same village, either within or outside the country.

1. Is China a developing country?
2. Swedish think tank wants to clean up relief deliveries with a new ethical aid tool
3. Why cycling in Berlin is a dream
4. The corrupt reign of Emperor Silvio
5. Don’t cry for Wall Street
6. Towards a new world economy
7. Why some Egyptians are becoming vegetarians