Categories
CSS Blog

Selected Chinese AI Companies, Projects and Cooperations

This graphic maps out a selection of Chinese AI companies and provides an overview of their current projects and collaborative efforts. To find out more about China’s ambitions to become a world leader in artificial intelligence, see Sophie-Charlotte Fischer’s CSS Analyses in Security Policy here.

Categories
CSS Blog

Selected Chinese AI Companies, Projects and Cooperations

EmailFacebookTwitter

This graphic maps out a selection of Chinese AI companies and provides an overview of their current projects and collaborative efforts. To find out more about China’s ambitions to become a world leader in artificial intelligence, see Sophie-Charlotte Fischer’s recent addition to our CSS Analyses in Security Policy series here. For more graphics on economics, see the CSS’ collection of graphs and charts on the subject here.

How Brazil’s Political and Economic Crisis Affects its Military Spending

Image courtesy of ryanscottdavis/Flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)

This article was originally published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on 22 June 2017.

SIPRI’s recently published data shows a decrease of 7.2% in Brazil’s military expenditure in 2016 compared to 2015. The reasons behind this cut are quite complicated, since the country is embroiled in a mix of a political and economic crises. This blog post briefly discusses some of the features driving Brazil’s military spending downwards and how the current context may affect the future.

Brazil’s economic growth—and crash

First, we need to understand why Brazil’s military spending went up in the first place. Between 2000 and 2010, Brazil had significant economic growth, especially during President Lula’s term in office. Not only did the country’s economy grow, but inequality dropped. For instance, in 2007 the national Gini coefficient–an index created to measure income inequality–reached its lowest level in 30 years. These outstanding growth results enabled the government to allocate large resources to military projects, like the KC-390 aircraft, the Integrated System of Border Monitoring (SISFRON) and the Guaraní armoured vehicle production. In fact, between 2002 and 2013—the year Lula took office and the beginning of Petrobras corruption scandal, respectively—Brazil’s military spending increased by 28%.

Policy Response to Low Fertility in China: Too Little, Too Late?

Courtesy of DurhamDundee/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This article was originally published by the East-West Center in April 2017.

Introduction

In 1970, Chinese women were having an average of nearly six children each. Only nine years later, this figure had dropped to an average of 2.7 children per woman. This steep fertility decline was achieved before the Chinese government introduced the infamous one-child policy. Today, at 1.5 children per woman, the fertility rate in China is one of the lowest in the world. Such a low fertility level leads to extreme population aging–expansion of the proportion of the elderly in a population, with relatively few children to grow up and care for their aging parents and few workers to pay for social services or drive economic growth. China’s birth-control policies are now largely relaxed, but new programs are needed to provide healthcare and support for the growing elderly population and to encourage young people to have children. It will be increasingly difficult to fund such programs, however, as China’s unprecedented pace of economic growth inevitably slows down.

China’s Fertility Decline

Most of China’s fertility decline took place in the 1970s, before the government launched its one-child policy in 1980 (see Figure 1). During the 1980s, fertility fluctuated, for the most part above the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, which would maintain a constant population size. Then in the early 1990s, fertility declined to below-replacement level, and since then it has further declined to around 1.5 children per woman today. If very low birth rates persist, eventually the population starts to shrink, and it can shrink very quickly. Today’s low fertility could lead to a decline in China’s population by as many as 600 million people by the end of the 21st century.

Reasons for Rejecting Globalisation: Beyond Inequality and Xenophobia

 

Courtesy of SliceofNYC/Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)

This article was originally published by the Elcano Royal Institute on 14 March 2017.

Theme

The authors analyse reasons accounting for the growing discontent with globalisation and the liberal establishment in advanced democracies.

Summary

This paper presents five hypotheses to account for support for anti-establishment and anti-globalisation movements. In addition to the predominant perception that the economic decline of the middle classes and the growing xenophobia evident in the West account for Donald Trump’s victory in the US, Brexit and the rise of the National Front in France, among others, the authors set out another three reasons: the difficulties that significant layers of the population are having in adapting to technological change, the crisis of the welfare state and the growing disenchantment with representative democracy.

Analysis

A consensus has existed for decades among the main political forces of the US and Europe revolving around the idea that economic openness is positive. The flows of trade and investment and, to a lesser extent, workers have thus been gradually liberalised over time. Thanks to this liberal order, Western societies have become more prosperous, more open and more cosmopolitan. Although some lost out from this economic openness, the majority of voters were prepared to accept a greater level of globalisation. As consumers they could acquire products more cheaply from countries such as China, and they also understood that the welfare state would protect them appropriately if they temporarily fell into the category of the losers (in political economy this is known as the ‘compensation hypothesis’,1 according to which more open countries tend to have larger state sectors and redistribute more). For their part, developing countries have also benefitted from economic globalisation, exporting products to the wealthy transatlantic market (which is more and more open) and sending remittances from the West to their countries of origin. The invention seemed to work.