Countries around the world are working to diversify their supply chains and reduce their dependence on China, which is “probably good for everyone,” World Bank president David Malpass said on Tuesday.
Speaking at an event in Warsaw, Malpass said that cross-border trade would remain important to the global economy, and China — already the world’s second-largest economy and likely to become the largest — had a big role to play as both a consumer and producer of goods.
VALUE SYSTEM
Photo: AFP
However, China also needed to be part of a value system shared by other countries in the global trading system, he said, adding: “I don’t know that that will happen.”
Asked whether China was headed for a crisis due to severe COVID-19 lockdowns and debt problems in its property sector, Malpass said: “They’re having setbacks, major setbacks in various areas, and the forecasts for growth have been brought down.”
However, he said the World Bank continues to work well with China, which is a major shareholder and a borrower whose use of the lender’s financing is shrinking.
TRANSPARENCY
The bank is also working closely with China to encourage more transparency its lending to developing countries, Malpass said.
“So I guess the way I think of it is that the world needs to interact with China, recognizing that it’s important in the world and growing in importance,” Malpass said.
He also said he did not believe the world faced a new “Bretton Woods moment,” a reference to the 1944 conference that revamped the international financial architecture and created the World Bank and the IMF amid the ruins of World War II.
That system, with the US dollar at its core, “works pretty well,” he added.
“My view is we’re not at that point now at all. There’s not a sense of the world being lost,” Malpass said. “There’s this sense actually of unity of a great deal of the world in one endeavor, which is to end the war in Ukraine.”
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
NATIONAL SECURITY: Intel’s testing of ACM tools despite US government control ‘highlights egregious gaps in US technology protection policies,’ a former official said Chipmaker Intel Corp has tested chipmaking tools this year from a toolmaker with deep roots in China and two overseas units that were targeted by US sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Intel, which fended off calls for its CEO’s resignation from US President Donald Trump in August over his alleged ties to China, got the tools from ACM Research Inc, a Fremont, California-based producer of chipmaking equipment. Two of ACM’s units, based in Shanghai and South Korea, were among a number of firms barred last year from receiving US technology over claims they have
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
OPTION: Uber said it could provide higher pay for batch trips, if incentives for batching is not removed entirely, as the latter would force it to pass on the costs to consumers Uber Technologies Inc yesterday warned that proposed restrictions on batching orders and minimum wages could prompt a NT$20 delivery fee increase in Taiwan, as lower efficiency would drive up costs. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi made the remarks yesterday during his visit to Taiwan. He is on a multileg trip to the region, which includes stops in South Korea and Japan. His visit coincided the release last month of the Ministry of Labor’s draft bill on the delivery sector, which aims to safeguard delivery workers’ rights and improve their welfare. The ministry set the minimum pay for local food delivery drivers at
RSS