Just how many chickens is a fighter jet worth?
Thai economists are currently trying to work out the answer as the government is hoping to barter chickens and rice to pay for everything from military aircraft to subway trains. When Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra opened the bidding on Thursday for Thailand's 1.7-trillion-baht (US$44 billion) public works program, he said thst his government was interested in alternative "financing mechanisms" -- namely, bartering.
The highlight of the new projects is an expansion of Bangkok's public transport system, expected to cost some 550 billion baht. The defense ministry also wants to barter for the purchase of fighter jets it is considering to buy from Russia, Sweden or the US.
Thaksin's government believes that bartering for such big-ticket items would help keep the country's foreign debt ratio below 50 percent of GDP.
The scheme envisions trading farm goods already in government stocks, such as surplus rice, instead of using cash for at least part of the payment to foreign companies.
To that end, a special barter trade committee has been created in the Commerce Ministry to assess the bids for the public works projects and negotiate how much chicken, rice or tapioca could be used to finance the deal.
"When they say they've settled on ... the barter trade, the committee will make the decision which commodity they will use for barter," Tikhunporn Natvar of the ministry's department of foreign trade said.
Nazir Rizk, who heads the Thai subsidiary of French engineering conglomerate Alstom, said he doubted that barter was the most attractive payment option for foreign companies.
"It is one solution, but ... how you put it in place remains unclear ... A company like us, we don't do barter, we sell trains. We cannot sell chickens," he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day