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Post 1 (September 7, 2019)- Strongmen Help Insure the Economy

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Post 1 (September 7, 2019)- Strongmen Help Insure the Economy

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Autocrats such as President Balsonaro of Brazil, President Fattah Elosisi of Egypt and Prince Mohammed Bin Salman have brought economic growth due to their unmoral business decisions. Since, these countries lack government regulation these political players have “pushed through reforms”.  Not to mention, Mr. El-Sisi used the I.M.F to continue capital gains and taxed the wealthy to repay the financial aid. This article reminded me the Jamaica I.M.F video where it claims the I.M.F only gives a short-term fix to economic/development problems. Also, W.W Rostow’s moderation theory is seen in the economic modernization campaign as the goal is to reach economic growth by developing economic structures.

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Markets are amoral and won't complain about autocratic behavior if it produces economic growth.

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Credit Credit Ross MacDonald

Wall Street has long existed as a parallel universe where leaders cast by critics in the media as autocratic villains can be feted as heroes if their actions bode well for the economy. Lately, this split has reached new extremes.

In the critics' view, we live in an increasingly illiberal age, populated by dangerously erratic strongmen. Leading examples include President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who at the United Nations this week defiantly defended his government against charges that it is turning a blind eye as the Amazon burns; President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, whose tough, military-backed regime has been the target of protests over the past week; and Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, widely reviled for the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives.

Yet global investors view the same trio as promising economic reformers, following a mainstream playbook that could have been written (indeed sometimes is written) by analysts at the International Monetary Fund. Markets reward them accordingly. For much of their recent tenures, Brazil under Mr. Bolsonaro and Saudi Arabia under Prince Mohammed have all ranked among the world's hottest stock markets. Until this week, this year's top-performing market was Egypt.

The harsh reality is that markets are amoral, instinctively neutral barometers of economic performance, and they will at times ignore the brutality and excesses of strongmen for a simple reason: Facing little or no resistance from legislatures, courts or independent watchdogs, strongmen can push through sweeping reforms - particularly in emerging economies, where political institutions and the rule of law are relatively weak. Looking at the records for 150 countries between 1950 and 2010, I found 43 cases in which an economy grew at an annual pace of 7 percent or more for a full decade. An astonishing 35 of those economies - more than 80 percent of them - were run by an autocrat.

The downside is that nations subject to the unchecked whims of autocrats are also vulnerable to wild growth swings - and long slumps. Among the same 150 countries, I found 138 cases in which an economy grew at a pace of 3 percent or slower for a decade, and 100 of those economies were led by an autocrat.

Markets sense the erratic nature of economies run by strongmen and will bet big on these figures until the moment economic reforms lose momentum. Stock markets enjoyed bull runs under autocrats who instituted high-growth policies, like Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Suharto of Indonesia and Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

After 2000 a new generation of autocratic market darlings arose, led by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. In their first terms, the stock markets of Russia and Turkey rose, respectively, by about 100 percentage points and 300 percentage points faster than the average for emerging countries. Later, investors would turn on Russia and Turkey, not because their leaders grew more troublesomely autocratic but because they stopped pushing tough economic reforms.

What markets look for perhaps above all is financial stability, a necessary condition for solid growth. Today, while there are many differences among Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. el-Sisi and Prince Mohammed, they have each taken steps to put their financial houses in order.

Mr. Bolsonaro plans to downsize the bureaucracy, sell off state companies and cut up to $250 billion from pension payments that could bankrupt Brazil. Mr. el-Sisi, in part to secure I.M.F. help, has raised taxes on capital gains and on the rich, and slashed fuel subsidies by more than 50 percent. Prince Mohammed has cracked down on rich tax dodgers, including fellow Saudi royals, raised sales taxes and cut energy subsidies as a way to pare back a large budget deficit.

Wall Street research reports on Brazil, Egypt and Saudi Arabia barely mention autocratic tendencies. Instead, they say that reforms are "still on track" in Saudi Arabia, Egypt is "the best reform story" in its region, and "market considers Bolsonaro Brazil's 'last chance' to reform economy." The gap between market and mainstream media narratives is now a yawning chasm.

In May, Mr. Bolsonaro was driven out of Manhattan by headline-grabbing demonstrators chanting "fascista," shortly after his University of Chicago-educated economic minister, Paulo Guedes, was greeted as a savior by global investors at the I.M.F.'s semiannual meeting in Washington. One participant (a Wall Street liberal) told me Mr. Guedes's speech, outlining Mr. Bolsonaro's free-market plans, was "the most inspiring" she had ever heard at this confab.

One trait the new strongmen share is a tendency to blur ideological lines. Illiberal politics often combine with eclectic economics in ways that make them hard to place on the traditional left-right political spectrum. President Trump, a champion of blue-collar jobs and tax cuts for the rich, is a prominent example. More than any other American president, he has tried to please the stock market. And as the impeachment battles heat up, he is likely to try to please it more, in his erratic way - perhaps by looking for a quick trade deal with China or further badgering the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates again.

Not coincidentally, Mr. Trump has lavished praise on Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. el-Sisi and Prince Mohammed, who occupy the same gray area. The crown prince has freed women to drive as part of an economic modernization campaign while suppressing activists who push for broader women's rights. Is he right or left, progressive or reactionary, or beyond the old categories?

It is not that people on Wall Street themselves are amoral or aren't often appalled by the excesses of autocrats. But it is their job to filter out headlines casting strongman presidents and prime ministers as cruel villains, and focus instead on whether their policies are likely to spur growth.

With illiberal leaders still on the rise worldwide, this political age is likely to produce more strongmen the market can love.

Ruchir Sharma, author of "The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World," is the chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and a contributing opinion writer.
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Opinion | Why Wall Street Loves Strongmen

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Markets are amoral and won't complain about autocratic behavior if it produces economic growth. Wall Street has long existed as a parallel universe where leaders cast by critics in the media as autocratic villains can be feted as heroes if their actions bode well for the economy.

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Post 2 ( October 7, 2019)- Rebuilding Saint-Martin

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Post 2 ( October 7, 2019)- Rebuilding Saint-Martin

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The Caribbean Island, Saint-Martin was destructed by hurricane Irma and the locals are afraid of losing their property in the processes of rebuilding. France has invested a half-billion dollars and people of color that are low-income fear that they will never get to rebuilt their property. This article connects to chapter five “Globalization as Development” by McMichael which states “projects of development bring political intervention” (p.112). The French government had a campaign about how dangerous it was to rebuilt in areas that are victims of natural disasters. But locals did not like the “French bureaucracy [getting involved and] overseas control” because they don’t what gentrification to occur by their lands being sold to wealthy developers.

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Two years after Hurricane Irma, many damaged buildings can still be seen on Saint Martin, the French side of the island. Credit... Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

Promises Made

When Hurricane Irma crushed St. Martin two years ago, the French state vowed swift assistance. Aid has flowed in, but a fight has followed about recovery plans, exposing racial and class tension.

Two years after Hurricane Irma, many damaged buildings can still be seen on Saint Martin, the French side of the island. Credit... Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

When things go wrong, those in power often promise to make it right. But do they? In this series, The Times investigates to see if those promises were kept.
SAINT-MARTIN, French West Indies - In the debris that had once been furniture and a roof were the vestiges of a holiday home: a cluster of flip-flops, a romance novel, a child's ball floating in a plunge pool's fetid waters.

On a recent visit, it looked like an artillery barrage had smashed into this small bungalow and a dozen or so other nearby cottages in a similar state of ruin, in what had been a pleasant vacation compound on a bluff above the Atlantic Ocean.

This scene of utter destruction in the aftermath of a Category 5 hurricane was not in the Abaco Islands or on Grand Bahama, devastated by Dorian last month. This wasteland was on St. Martin, an island that took a direct hit from Hurricane Irma on Sept. 6, 2017, and where, two years later, recovery is still far from complete.

The hurricane caused billions of dollars in damage across the 34-square-mile island, which is split between the French territory of Saint-Martin, with a population of about 32,000,and Sint Maarten, a mostly autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with a population of about 41,000.

Immediately after the storm blasted the island, President Emmanuel Macron of France promised a speedy recovery for the French side.

"Saint-Martin will be reborn, I am committed," Mr. Macron vowed. "We will do it quickly, we will do it well, and we will do it better."

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But Saint-Martin's slow, if steady, recovery shows just how difficult coming back from a hurricane can be on a small island, with challenges that go well beyond just the size of financial aid packages.

In Saint-Martin, the toughest, most uncomfortable questions are less about who will pay for rebuilding - France has delivered more than a half-billion dollars of aid - but where and how to rebuild, or whether to rebuild at all amid the threat of evermore powerful storms.

This has made the debate less an economic one and more about politics, class, culture and race, often pitting the local majority-black population against the French state.

The top French official on the island says she wants more restrictions on construction in the areas most at risk to future storms, in order to protect lives and the economy.

But many working-class residents fear they could be forced to abandon property that has been in their family for generations. Some suspect a land grab, where their waterfront plots will be taken and sold to wealthy developers.

In a region that has experienced the awesome forces of Category 5 storms with terrifying frequency in recent years, the story playing out on St. Martin is likely to be repeated on many other Caribbean islands - and in the United States, too.

WHAT WE FOUND

On the French side of the island, Hurricane Irma damaged about 95 percent of the buildings, including the home of Bernadette Carty.

Ms. Carty had lived all her 65 years on the waterfront, and she felt it was safe to ignore the evacuation orders that preceded Irma's landfall. After all, at least seven generations of her family had survived numerous hurricanes on this same patch of land, and she figured this time would be no different.

But Irma was among the most powerful storms ever to hit the island, and a prime example of how climate change has made hurricanes more destructive.

As Irma rumbled ashore, Ms. Carty, her daughter and two grandchildren dove for cover under a mattress and rode out the storm as it mauled her island.

When Irma had finally moved on, the family emerged from their hideaway to discover that the storm surge and wind had gouged holes in two sides of the house and had swept away Ms. Carty's sister from her home next door. She was one of 11 people who died on the French side of the island, according to the local authorities. Two died on the Dutch side, according to the prime minister's office.

Ms. Carty has been living in a temporary apartment ever since, and hopes to get permission to rebuild her house.

"This hurricane is the devil," she said.

The storm devastated the island's main airport, blocked its ports and effectively shut down the island's essential tourism industry for months.

The French government's promise to deliver substantial help was not an empty one.

It allocated more than $500 million in aid and subsidies in the first six months after the storm to the recovery and reconstruction of Saint-Martin and the smaller, nearby French island of Saint-Barthélemy, according to Sylvie Feucher, the French state's top representative based in the two territories.

Considering the dire shape Saint-Martin was in right after the storm, with its infrastructure flattened, the fact that much of the territory is back on its feet confirms the aid has made a difference.

Hotels and restaurants have reopened, and tourists are again lounging on its beaches.

But on a visit to the island in late August, a checkerboard of remaining damage was visible all around. Buildings without roofs. Businesses still shuttered. The half-sunken hulls of storm-scuttled ships.

While Irma battered the island for just a matter of hours, Ms. Feucher predicted that it could take up to three more years for the territory to fully recover.

WHAT WE FOUND

Hurricane Irma made clear that natural disasters not only obliterate structures and lives; they can also expose deep socioeconomic fault lines. In Saint-Martin, a long simmering discontent - loaded with racial and class tension - is on the verge of boiling over.

Ms. Feucher, the deputy prefect for Saint-Martin, is convinced that some areas of the territory are just too dangerously exposed to the power of the most severe storms to be safely inhabitable. And she is trying to convince the population of this, too.

The focus of her mission, backed by Paris, is a push for more severe restrictions on construction and land use in the areas at greatest risk of damage during major storms, like that bluff with the pulverized cottages.

But the campaign has become a flash point in an increasingly contentious relationship between the French government and a local population bristling against French bureaucracy and overseas control.

Several of the flood-prone coastal neighborhoods of greatest concern to Ms. Feucher have large low-income populations, and many residents suspect the French government is waging a veiled campaign to drive poor, black residents off their land through condemnation so it can be sold to developers.

Cédrick André, a community activist in Sandy Ground, one of the high-risk neighborhoods, views the matter as nothing less than an existential struggle for Saint-Martin's working-class population.

"They want to change everything: the way we live, the way we speak, the way we sex, the way we eat," said Mr. André, 42. "They want to change who we are."

"They are not attacking the people who have their pocket full and can defend themselves," he added. "They are attacking people without their pocket full."

Sandy Ground - bracketed by a bay on one side and a lagoon on the other - was first settled by squatters decades ago, many of them black immigrants from other Caribbean islands.

The authorities turned a blind eye to the settlement, allowing it to grow, and now thousands of people live along the neighborhood's narrow streets and unpaved lanes.

"Many of us living by the sea, we know the risk," said Marie Abner, 48, who has lived in the neighborhood since she immigrated from Haiti as a child. "If anything happen, we leave the home. Then we come back."

The French government has set up a fund to buy out property owners living in the highest-risk flood zones, but Ms. Feucher insists that nobody will be forced to sell.

Still, residents of Sandy Ground, and other neighborhoods with significant working-class populations, like Grand Case and Quartier d'Orléans, are unassuaged and angry.

Daniel Gibbs, president of the local government in Saint-Martin, has demanded that the French state give the community more time to study the issue.

"I need to hear the needs of my population - at least the majority of my population," Mr. Gibbs added. "I think there's plenty of room for compromise."

On a recent evening, Jah Bash, a Rastafarian farmer, said that the population's patience with an overbearing French state was wearing thin.

"For me, it's a conspiracy to take over the island," said Mr. Bash, whose family has lived in Sandy Ground for five generations. "It's about wealth."

Protests against the plan could turn violent, Mr. Bash warned. "The only way to get your attention is to do something to you that you fear," he said. "The country will burn easily."

WHAT WE FOUND

Hurricane recovery is hard anywhere. And that's particularly true in Caribbean islands like St. Martin because of a unique combination of factors.

As with many places in the Caribbean, the economy is over-reliant on a single industry - tourism - for jobs and tax revenue. When hotels are wrecked by a storm, business dries up, unemployment soars and government coffers suffer.

Geographic isolation makes everything more expensive. Building materials need to be brought in by ship or plane, increasing costs. The elevated demand for qualified workers in a small labor pool jacks up wages.

Recovery is also hamstrung by the fact that few are left untouched by a severe disaster: The officials responsible for leading the recovery are themselves sometimes fighting to get on their feet.

"They are so small that almost every human being on the island is directly impacted," said Tahseen Sayed, the World Bank country director for the Caribbean. "The challenge of the government for reconstruction becomes even longer and more difficult."

Local governments often lack the resources to manage the task of hurricane recovery alone.

Prime Minister Leona Romeo-Marlin of Sint Maarten said her government had insufficient fiscal, legal and environmental staff to help manage those aspects of recovery after Irma.

"The hurricane really exposed those weak areas that we have as a government," she said.

WHAT WE FOUND

The island that Saint-Martin and Sint Maarten occupy was divided between the French and the Dutch in the 17th century. As with two competitive siblings close in age, just about everything that happens on one side demands comparison with the other.

Hurricane recovery has been no different, revealing that distinctions in culture and governance have had a significant bearing on progress during the past two years.

The consensus view on both sides of the island is that the Dutch half has recovered more quickly. A higher percentage of hotel rooms on the Dutch side, for example, are open again for business.

The French state runs a famously laborious bureaucracy that, according to residents, has slowed the rebuilding process.

"We have norms and rules and regulations on the French side," said Angèle Dormoy, the president of Saint-Martin's Chamber of Commerce. "Everything is controlled and re-controlled, three or four times."

In contrast, Sint Maarten has developed a more laissez-faire culture, helping to accelerate the rebuilding process.

While the French state may seem overbearing to some in Saint-Martin, whose residents are French citizens, its people are entitled to all the protections of France's generous social net. But that state largess may have undermined private initiative during this reconstruction period.

"That's the strength and weakness of France," Ms. Feucher said. "We give a lot of attention to the population, and it can prevent people from developing a sense of responsibility in terms of taking care of themselves."

On the Dutch side, much of the rebuilding has been driven by private funds, particularly those associated with tourism, which dwarfs the French-side tourism sector.

"They pulled up their socks and got on with it," said Lorraine Talmi, board president of the Sint Maarten Hospitality & Trade Association.

But the differences have also left some on the Dutch side wondering whether in their haste to rebuild, and in their comparatively looser regulatory environment, the rebuilding did not happen with enough thought given to withstanding future storms.

On the French side, some believe their patience will pay off with a more resilient island, better able to withstand the effects of the Atlantic's warming waters.

In 2017, Mr. Macron said Saint-Martin will be "rebuilt in a durable way that also meets seismic and environmental needs." The widespread destruction, he said, could be blamed in part on "buildings that were constructed under conditions that wouldn't have been accepted in other territories of France."

Ms. Feucher said she was trying to get the population to take the long view in these matters: that getting the rebuilding right, even if it takes time, could save lives in the next big storm.

But Ms. Feucher conceded that persuading people to accept new regulations is no easy task.

"Changing mentalities is always difficult," she said.

The Takeaway: As storms become more destructive, hurricane recovery is as much about rethinking as it is rebuilding.

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After a Caribbean Hurricane, the Battle Is Where, or Even Whether, to Rebuild (Published 2019)

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Promises Made When Hurricane Irma crushed St. Martin two years ago, the French state vowed swift assistance. Aid has flowed in, but a fight has followed about recovery plans, exposing racial and class tension. Two years after Hurricane Irma, many damaged buildings can still be seen on Saint Martin, the French side of the island.

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Post 3 (October 11,2019)-Trump and China Impact the World Economy

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Post 3 (October 11,2019)-Trump and China Impact the World Economy

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The U.S and China have been in a trade war that has impacted the global economy. The U.S is avoiding on taxing Chinese exports for now and it has helped drive stocks. This article reminds me of Gidden Lecture video where he states, “the power of the U.S is shrinking rather than growing we need other countries” therefore, economic liberalization is required in the global economy. In other words, when the demand of exported goods is low the GDP decreases because there is no business investment spending. People started investing again once the mini-deal was done and this has stimulated the economy.

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Financial markets are downright exuberant about the arrival of some trade peace - at least for now - between the United States and China.

President Trump boasted Friday afternoon of a "substantial phase one deal," including Chinese purchases of American agricultural products and an accord on currency policy. The United States is also holding off on tariffs that were to go into effect next week. Over the last few days, the expectation of such a "mini-deal" between the two superpowers drove up stocks and helped ease recession fears.

There's no question that this is good near-term news for the economy and the markets. But anybody who has followed the ups and downs of trade policy in the last two years - or who understands the actual ways that the trade wars are affecting the economy - won't be nearly as optimistic as the president's words suggest are warranted.

In the Trump trade strategy over the last two years, tariffs have acted as a ratchet - movingin only one direction or holding steady, never reversing. Apparent agreements are always subject to renegotiation.

The administration turns up the pressure on China with sharp words, higher tariffs and promises of future tariffs. The Chinese retaliate, aiming to punish American interests. The stock market drops, which prompts negotiations to resume, and the administration backs off the pledged escalation.

Friday's events represent the latter stages of that cycle. It's particularly evident when you look at what the de-escalation consists of. The deal did not reduce tariffs already in place on Chinese imports but rather further delayed an increase that was announced during the escalation phase over the summer.

"The only things we've learned are that Trump loves tariffs and he doesn't have a long-term plan," said Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Are these guys in markets like Charlie Brown and the football?"

The central tensions between the United States and China - and the domestic political constraints on each side that stand in the way of an overarching deal - remain very much in place. China's president, Xi Jinping, cannot back away from goals of dominating many of the industries of the future; President Trump cannot acquiesce to those goals without huge political risks. The new "phase one" deal does not address one of the most fraught issues, around the ability of the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei to sell in the United States.

Moreover, the recent history of American trade policy implies that even when a deal seems to be signed, sealed and delivered, it doesn't mean trade peace has been achieved.

In June, President Trump threatened to put new tariffs on Mexican imports to force the Mexican government to do more to curtail migration from Central America. The threat came after the conclusion of extended negotiations to rework Nafta into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Even though those particular Mexican tariffs never went into effect, the message to businesses was that trade tension is a new normal - not a limited, tactical war with achievable goals, but a perpetual state of aggression that can become more or less intense at any particular time.

You can see that recognition in how businesses are behaving. The scale of the tariffs actually being collected thus far remains moderate relative to the scale of the United States economy. But there is plenty of evidence that this sense of trade chaos is hanging over business decision-making, especially in the export-focused manufacturing sector.

"Markets may respond, but that doesn't mean that firms will," said Emily Blanchard, a trade economist at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "It's firms' decisions that matter for the economy."

Business investment spending subtracted from overall G.D.P. in the second quarter, and job creation by the factory sector has slowed enormously in 2019 - only 3,000 jobs a month, down from 22,000 in 2018. A report on September factory activity showed it in negative territory.

"It is difficult to take that much comfort from the latest signs of progress given that we've had plenty of apparent truces in recent months end abruptly in a sudden further escalation in trade tensions," Michael Pearce, senior United States economist at Capital Economics, said in a note to clients.

He noted a twist: The agreement on currency policy that is a key part of the new deal was part of a previous truce that then fell apart during a period of re-escalation.

As that shows, in Trump-era trade policy, the risk of a major disruption to world commerce never really goes away. It just arrives in unpredictable waves - and Friday's deal represents a low ebb.

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Trump and China Have a 'Phase One Deal.' The World Economy Is Still at Risk.

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Financial markets are downright exuberant about the arrival of some trade peace - at least for now - between the United States and China. President Trump boasted Friday afternoon of a "substantial phase one deal," including Chinese purchases of American agricultural products and an accord on currency policy.

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Post 4 (October 12, 2019)- China Imperializing the Mekong River

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Post 4 (October 12, 2019)- China Imperializing the Mekong River

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In Cambodia the village of Lat Thahae is being purposed by Chinese companies to build a dam and get rid of locals' homes, schools and Buddhists temples. The article is pertinent because it talks about how the purpose of the dam is to create “economic growth” for the villagers who live along the Mekong river. China’s “foreign investment” will gain them great profit and the locals lower Mekong countries will lose their source of nutrition. This reminded me of the term insulate because the river’s goods are only for the locals. Also, it reminded me of Frank’s dependency theory that rich countries take advantage of poor countries. The hydropower dam would only make the villagers depend on exported goods this would impact their quality of life.

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A family's floating home on the Mekong River in Cambodia in December, near the site of a proposed dam. Chinese officials and companies hope that building new dams in the region will offset slackening growth back home. Credit Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

ON THE MEKONG RIVER - When the Chinese came to the village of Lat Thahae, perched on a muddy bend of a Mekong River tributary, they scrawled a Chinese character on the walls of homes, schools and Buddhist temples.

No one in this isolated hamlet in northern Laos could read what it said. But the character means "demolish" - the fate of hundreds of communities along Asia's great river reduced to a single foreign word.

This year, a dam will begin transforming this stretch of jagged hills and pristine jungle in one of the world's most remote countries, part of a broader effort to propel some of Asia's least-developed economies. It is one of seven Chinese-built hydropower projects on the Nam Ou River.

To make way for the dams, Lat Thahae and dozens more villages are being demolished. A Lat Thahae resident who goes by one name, See, said she was not satisfied with the offer from Sinohydro Corporation, China's largest builder of dams overseas, to build her a bamboo shack miles away in return for destroying her spacious riverside home.

But what power, she asked, does an illiterate farmer like her have in the face of China's might?

"I have to move because they tell me to move," she said as an excavator with a Chinese driver and a Chinese license plate tore at the earth by her doorstep. "Our life on the river is finished."

Note: Map shows dams in the Mekong River basin as of December 2018, the most recent data available. Because construction and financing details are not always disclosed, China may have been involved with more dams than the map shows. Data from the CGIAR Mekong Dams Observatory, WorldPop and OpenStreetMap. Map by Derek Watkins.

For the region's governments, the dams are supposed to deliver economic salvation by bringing hundreds of them to the lower Mekong and its tributaries, along with accompanying infrastructure. Chinese officials and companies hope that building new dams, as well as roads and other development, will offset slackening growth back home and provide countries with a model for lifting themselves out of poverty.

As plans for damming the lower Mekong gathered force in the early 2000s, the Mekong River Commission predicted that its four members - Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam - would reap $30 billion in benefits. But a reassessment years later by the same commission, which China has refused to join, produced a far different forecast: The economies of the lower Mekong countries will take a $7 billion hit if the planned hydropower projects go ahead.

Already, water levels this July reached their lowest recorded height, according to the commission.

With water flows shifting as new dams start their turbines, fishers, farmers and local ecosystems are suffering. A survey by the commission found that if all the dams planned for the Mekong network go forward, 97 percent of the sediment that once flowed to the river's mouth could be blocked by 2040, starving the land of nutrients needed for agriculture.

In Laos, the collapse last year of a dam that killed dozens of people and swept away thousands of homes in two countries highlighted the dangers of building in remote places with little oversight. Despite the Laotian government's conclusion that the accident was caused by man-made factors, no one has been held responsible.

[ A day before a dam in Laos failed, builders saw trouble.]

Environmental activists were alarmed last year when a Chinese company report on the cross-border impact of a major dam project in Laos, supposedly the product of months of rigorous research, turned out to have passages that were lifted from an earlier report about another Chinese project.

"The people who depend most on the Mekong have the least control over what happens to the river," said Bruce Shoemaker, a researcher on natural resource conflict in the region.

Critics worry that the cost of these dams is being borne by governments ill equipped to afford it.

"Are these dams for the good of the Mekong downstream countries, or are they for the good of a country like China that's trying to gain economic influence and offload excess capacity?" said Maureen Harris, Southeast Asia program director at International Rivers, an environmental watchdog.

"Dams aren't something that can be easily undone," she added. "We have to think of the consequences."

Poor and landlocked, Laos is betting that hydropower will become its largest moneymaker by 2025. The government, one of the world's few remaining communist regimes, has signed off on more than 140 dams for the Mekong and its tributaries.

The Laotian government is relying on money borrowed from China to fund many of these dams. Yet Laos is among the eight nations most vulnerable to being overwhelmed by debt to China, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Laos is also one of Asia's most corrupt countries, according to Transparency International, and the bidding for hydropower projects is notoriously opaque.

"Transparency and accountability?" said Mr. Shoemaker, who co-wrote a book on hydropower in Laos. "Those aren't words I'd used to describe Laos."

Critics worry that Laos's plan for vaulting out of the least-developed country bracket through dams will instead widen income disparity.

"I have not seen a single case in which people have been compensated fairly for the disruptions to their lives caused by dams," said Ian Baird, a Southeast Asia expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the social effects of dams. "If governments are arguing that these projects aren't viable without underpaying compensation, then maybe these projects aren't right for the country."

The damming of the Mekong comes as mega-infrastructure projects are on the wane worldwide. In the United States, where hydropower was once celebrated as man's triumph over nature, dams are being dismantled to let rivers flow unimpeded again.

Scientists in the West now consider solar and wind possibly more sustainable sources of power. Even international financial institutions like the World Bank, which once spread the hydropower gospel across the developing world, are warning about the long-term consequences of dams.

But for Laos's planners, some of whom studied engineering in the Soviet Union, dams still represent the pinnacle of socialist progress.

"The problem is that you've got people sitting in government ministries who aren't going to give up their dreams of modernizing through hydropower," Mr. Baird said. "Their whole development model is based on this."

Yet scientists are doubtful the region can consume all the energy that Laos hopes to harness. The country's seven million people will never need all that power, and neighboring Thailand already has a glut of energy. The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, which planned to buy power from the $2.4 billion Pak Beng project in Laos, is rethinking its decision.

That hasn't stopped Chinese engineers, entrepreneurs and construction workers from flooding Laos. At the Sinohydro construction sites for the Nam Ou cascade dams, giant red banners hang off rock faces, proclaiming the importance of Chinese-Laotian socialist brotherhood. The signs are only in Chinese. There are few Laotian workers.

Wei Jun, a Sinohydro supervisor at a rock-crushing facility, shrugged at the fact that villagers were being forced to move with paltry compensation. When China built the Xiaowan Dam on the upper reaches of the Mekong, 35,000 Chinese were moved, he said.

"Progress," he said, using a Chinese idiom, "means eating bitterness."

The Mekong's headwaters spring forth high in the Tibetan plateau, but in China the river holds little utility for humans. The Lancang, as the Mekong is known there - a name that means "turbulent" - is too fast and steep to do much more than power turbines. Seven dams have been built on the Mekong's upper reaches since 2000.

But for the downriver nations, the Mekong is a lifeblood. Like the Nile, the Tigris and the Yangtze, the Mekong watered empires. Two capitals, Vientiane of Laos and Phnom Penh of Cambodia, stand on its banks.

The world's most productive rice growers, in Thailand and Vietnam, depend on the Mekong's generosity in depositing rich alluvial soil during the rainy season. The river network is the world's largest inland fishery.

More than any other country, Cambodia is nourished by the Mekong. The country's 16 million people get about 80 percent of their protein intake from its system, which includes a tributary that is the only river in the world that changes course seasonally.

Cambodia also depends on China, now its largest trading partner and benefactor. Prime Minister Hun Sen, Asia's longest serving leader, has turned his back on Western patrons whose aid has failed to catalyze democratic overhauls.

A single Mekong dam proposed for Cambodia, the Sambor, could produce more electricity than all of what Cambodia currently consumes. This year, the country has suffered outages that have idled factories and left millions without power.

But a Chinese-built dam at Sambor could "literally kill the Mekong River and devastate Cambodia's economy," according to a Cambodian government-commissioned report by the Natural Heritage Institute, an American watchdog that monitors the world's major river basins.

Sixty percent of the sediment needed to nourish Vietnam's rice paddies in the Mekong Delta could be blocked by the Sambor, the report warned, and "would create a complete barrier to migratory fish."

Instead, the institute recommended floating solar panels in an existing reservoir as a better solution to Cambodia's electricity shortage.

Cambodia's largest dam to date is the $800 million Lower Sesan 2, on a feeder of the Mekong. Its Chinese-built turbines began turning last December, flooding five villages as the reservoir filled. Today, the spire of a Buddhist pagoda protrudes from waters that have inundated the village of Srekor. Former residents travel by boat to rescue belongings from flooded homes, where stalled clocks mark when the waters arrived.

Srekor's villagers have been moved, but their new homes are far from the river that once supported them. There is a high school with no teachers, a clinic with no doctors. Electricity is expensive, galling given that they were evicted for a power project, residents said. No clean water is available.

Mr. Hun Sen, who presided over the dam's inauguration, called complaining villagers "radicals."

In the resettlement community, villagers mourned the loss of a river that sustained them for generations.

"Our river was like a god to us," said In Chin, a resident. "It makes me sad that we killed it."

Sun Narin contributed reporting from Srekor, Cambodia.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Mekong in Peril: 'Our Life on the River Is Finished'. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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'Our River Was Like a God': How Dams and China's Might Imperil the Mekong

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ON THE MEKONG RIVER - When the Chinese came to the village of Lat Thahae, perched on a muddy bend of a Mekong River tributary, they scrawled a Chinese character on the walls of homes, schools and Buddhist temples. No one in this isolated hamlet in northern Laos could read what it said.

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Post 5 ( October 13,2019)- Not An American Dream

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Post 5 ( October 13,2019)- Not An American Dream

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Two-hundred Pacific Islanders were paid to work in an Iowa pork plant and claim they were promised benefits that were never received. They were forced to pay back their airplane tickets to the Seaboard Triumph Foods Company with their labor. Also, the were controlled by the company since their passports were taken away and worked ten-hour shifts. This article reminds me of the Maquilapolis film as both in the meat industry and industrial workers are seen as commodities. Not to mention, the “world system theory” is seen as the company is a representation of western domination that is exploiting the people’s labor of developing countries. (Wallerstein 1979).

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200 Pacific Islanders recruited to work at an Iowa pork plant ended up in a tangled migration dispute with accusations of mistreatment and broken promises.

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"They told us they'd find a house for us. They didn't. They said they'll provide food. But now we have to pay for our own food." - Jowain Alexander, 34, who trims pork shoulders in Sioux City, Iowa. Credit Credit KC McGinnis for The New York Times

SIOUX CITY, Iowa - Anthony Pretrick was scraping by as a fisherman in his Pacific island homeland of Micronesia when he met a job recruiter with an irresistible offer: There was a fortune to be made slaughtering hogs in a faraway place called Iowa.

A new pork processing plant was hiring workers for $15.95 an hour - nearly 10 times what Mr. Pretrick, 26, made.He would get a one-way plane ticket. A hotel room. Free meals. Cash to send home to his wife and two sons. Hundreds of other Micronesians had already signed up.

"It was big money for us," Mr. Pretrick said. "We left."

Poverty propelled the Micronesians to take jobs trimming pork carcasses, jobs that few Americans want in an era of record low unemployment. And a quirk of law made Micronesians like Mr. Pretrick uniquely valuable to employers who might be worried about becoming the next target of the Trump administration's workplace immigration raids: They were legal, allowed to work in the United States without visas or green cards under decades-old agreements rooted in America's atomic testing and military history in the Pacific.

But what unfolded after 200 Micronesians made the 7,000-mile journey over the past year to the cornfields and hog farms of western Iowa became a tangled migration saga of what the workers called mistreatment and broken promises.

The workers say their pay was siphoned off to repay their $1,800 plane tickets. They say a recruiter for the pork plant seized their passports and threatened to have the workers deported if they got sick or missed shifts. The workers struggled to find their footing in an unfamiliar city where they knew nobody, spoke little English and spent their days being shuttled back and forth between their hotel and 10-hour shifts at the pork plant.

"We were lost," Mr. Pretrick said.

For decades, thousands of people from Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands have migrated to work in the United States at nursing homes, cleaning companies, coffee farms and food plants in Hawaii, Arkansas, Missouri and elsewhere. They arrive and can work legally under agreements called Compacts of Free Association, but they are usually ineligible for Medicaid or other federal benefits - an omission that advocates say leaves many islanders impoverished and sick in the United States.

Now, as the Trump administration slashes refugee admissions and arrests hundreds of immigrant workers in high-profile raids at meatpacking plants in Mississippi and Tennessee, the Pacific Islanders are becoming an increasingly attractive option for businesses searching for entry-level workers.

"These employers understand we're legal residents," said Jocelyn Howard, the program director for We Are Oceania, a Hawaii-based advocacy group. "For recruiters in America, it's a good opportunity because we're legal."

The workers who landed in Iowa were recruited to work at a huge new pork plant operated by Seaboard Triumph Foods that employs 2,400 people and butchers about 21,000 pigs a day.

Seaboard Triumph touts its technological advances and community awards, but it is now facing an international public-relations mess after a video went viral showing one of the company's recruiters yelling at workers in a hotel lobby and then grabbing for a woman who had been recording him.

The embassy of the Federated States of Micronesia sent the State Department a letter calling for an investigation. The union that represents most workers at the plant began looking into the allegations. Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa said the state would temporarily block millions of dollars in incentives for Seaboard Triumph.

A spokeswoman for Seaboard Triumph said the company followed all labor laws and had not forced or coerced the Micronesians to travel to Iowa. The company said it helped its Micronesian recruits adjust to life and work in the state by paying for temporary housing, meals and transportation after they arrived. It gave each worker a $100 gift card.

After the complaints erupted, Seaboard Triumph said it had suspended the recruiter who was seen on the video yelling at Micronesian workers and declaring that the female workers were "my women." Last week, Seaboard sent a letter to its Micronesian employees saying it was canceling their obligations to repay their airfare.

"We'll continue to support you as one of our valuable employees," the letter said.

The Micronesian recruits who arrived over the past year, some with little more than shorts and flip-flops, said in interviews they had no problem with their working conditions at the plant.

The Micronesians were hardly the first immigrants to go to work in western Iowa's packing plants. While much of the landscape is overwhelmingly white and conservative - voters here narrowly elected the anti-immigrant Rep. Steve King to a ninth term in 2018 - a more diverse future is taking shape in meatpacking towns like Storm Lake and Sioux City.

At factory shift changes, a polyphony of dialects from Central America, Africa and Myanmar floats through parking lots. The Virgin of Guadalupe hangs from some rearview mirrors; pastel leis dangle from others. On Saturday afternoons, Latino families line up for tangy mangonadas at La Palapa, a food trailer in Sioux City. The Hong Kong Food Store stocks its shelves with dried shrimp, spicy kimchi, taro, palm oil and other flavors of distant homes.

A Micronesian woman holds a box of kimchi-flavored noodles at the Hong Kong Food Store in Sioux City. Credit KC McGinnis for The New York Times

Taro roots, displayed in a refrigerated container, are among the items the store stocks that are popular with Micronesian families. Credit KC McGinnis for The New York Times

"We're a meatpacking town," said Mayor Bob Scott of Sioux City. "They came, they assimilated, they're coaches in our schools."

The Micronesian workers said their trouble began soon after they boarded flights from the island of Pohnpei for the two-day trek to Iowa. Many were nervous about traveling outside Micronesia for the first time, and they said that a guide who had been promised to them to navigate their airport transfers never showed up.

They landed at 3 a.m. for long layovers in Honolulu, often confused and hungry. Some did not have enough money for an airport meal. They were thirsty because they did not realize they could ask a flight attendant for more juice or soda. One worker kept visiting the airplane bathroom to refill a plastic water glass, said Mele Tataipu Arati, a Hawaiian-Samoan relative of some workers who lives in northern Iowa.

Ms. Howard, the Hawaii-based advocate, said that members of Oahu's Micronesian diaspora began rushing to the airport with food and water for the arriving workers, and helped them connect to their mainland flights.

"These people were so hungry," she said. "In our culture we're so trusting and respecting and caring for each other. We expect the same. But in America it's different. You're on your own."

Several workers said that a recruiter for the plant took their passports, ostensibly to verify their legal work status and get Social Security numbers, but then refused to return them. They said they did not have any other identification to cash checks, open bank accounts or wire money back home. Seaboard Triumph said it was not holding any employees' passports.

Outside the plant one afternoon, Danifer Mark said he felt stranded. He was bewildered by America's immigration bureaucracy, and was contemplating whether he should quit and try to move in with relatives in Cincinnati.

"How can I go back?" he asked. "I'm stuck. I don't have money. What am I going to do?"

Curtis Weilbacher, a Micronesian citizen who helped hire many of the workers, attributed the problems to cultural divides, misunderstandings and misbehavior by workers who drank too much and caused trouble. (Mr. Weilbacher is not the recruiter who was suspended after being captured berating workers on the video)

"The mistake we made is we sent all of them at once," Mr. Weilbacher said, as he headed into a workers' meeting to discuss their grievances. "When you pick apples, the next day there are some rotten ones inside. You need to remove them."

Some of the Micronesian workers said Seaboard and the local hotel that housed them had been fair and welcoming. The hotel provided dinners and karaoke nights and a free shuttle to take them to the plant. They said their countrymen and Micronesian officials had blown the complaints out of proportion on social media.

But others were adrift. They struggled to find apartments or come up with the advance rent and security deposits that American landlords required, and felt as though they had no option but to stay on at the downtown hotel that had initially put them up free.

"There's three of us, and it's $1,500 a month," said Jowain Alexander, 34, who trims pork shoulders. "They told us they'd find a house for us. They didn't. They said they'll provide food. But now we have to pay for our own food. I don't want to go out on the streets, sleeping under a bridge."

Other workers had quit and had moved to Colorado, to other towns in Iowa, or even back home to jobs that pay $1.75 an hour.

"I'll stay," Mr. Alexander said. "My wife and my kids need money."

Miriam Jordan contributed reporting.

Jack Healy is a Colorado-based national correspondent who focuses on rural places and life outside America's "City Limits" signs. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri's journalism school. @jackhealynyt * Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Crossing an Ocean to Butcher Hogs, and Then Set Adrift. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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They Crossed an Ocean to Butcher Pigs. It Was No American Dream.

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200 Pacific Islanders recruited to work at an Iowa pork plant ended up in a tangled migration dispute with accusations of mistreatment and broken promises. SIOUX CITY, Iowa - Anthony Pretrick was scraping by as a fisherman in his Pacific island homeland of Micronesia when he met a job recruiter with an irresistible offer: There was a fortune to be made slaughtering hogs in a faraway place called Iowa.

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Post 6 (November 6, 2019)- India's Economy 

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Post 6 (November 6, 2019)- India's Economy 

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India's economy has improved according to the World's Bank report it ranks 63rd. "The World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business rankings are primarily an assessment of how good a country’s laws look on paper rather than how they operate in practice". This is an example on how World Bank is providing research to developing countries to help economic advancement. By offering loans they have helped countries internationally and in this case Indian. Poverty is a global issue that the World Bank has tried to reduce by giving aid to many countries. This case study is an example of a global governance as many countries are part of the World bank.

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Growth is slowing. Blame illiberalism for hurting investors' confidence.

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Mr. Basu is an economist.

Mumbai, India, with its financial district in the background, in June. The nation's economy was once one of the world's fastest-growing. Credit... Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters

Countries with strong governments often end up with weak economies, and India, after years of impressive growth, risks becoming one of them.

The World Bank recently released its annual report comparing the ease of doing business in 190 countries, and India's ranking improved to 63rd, up from 77th last year. India - along with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China - was among the 10 states that made the most progress. Yet major indicators show that its economy is slowing down sharply.

Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 on the back of the promise that if elected, he would make of India an economic powerhouse that would rival China. This year, after being re-elected, he pledged to turn India into a $5 trillion economy, nearly twice its current size, by 2024.

According to official government data, however, the growth rate of national income for the second quarter of this year was only 5 percent, down from 8 percent a year before. The International Monetary Fund's just-released World Economic Outlook cut India's growth forecast for 2019 to 6.1 percent, down from the 7.3 percent that the organization had predicted in April. Between 2003 and 2011, growth averaged nearly 8.5 percent, well exceeding 9 percent every year between 2005 and 2008. The recent turnaround is sudden and unexpected, and that is a cause for concern.

The decline is visible in the details, big and small. Passenger car sales, which had been falling for a while, dropped by more than 23 percent in the period between April and September, compared with the same period in 2018, according to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers. Export growth has been lethargic for a while. Standard & Poor's recently warned of rising risks in India's financial sector. The unemployment rate is at a 45-year high.

It's not just that economic growth is slowing down overall; inequality is rising as well. According to Oxfam, 73 percent of the wealth generated in India in 2017 went to the richest 1 percent. Inequality was worsening before the present administration took office, but with growth slowing down and unemployment rising, the effects are more painful.

So how can it be getting easier to do business in India, apparently, even as by some measures, economic growth is decelerating? These simultaneous developments, far from being conflicting, actually explain each other.

The World Bank's ease-of-doing-business rankings are primarily an assessment of how good a country's laws look on paper rather than how they operate in practice. By the report's own account, "approximately two-thirds of the data embedded in the Doing Business indicators are based on a reading of the law." In other words, a government can adjust its regulations in a way that ensures it will make progress along the index, even if the changes have minimal effect on the ground.

Real growth, on the other hand, depends on how well the laws are actually carried out.

These days in India, divisiveness is increasing throughout society while trust in the government is declining, at least among major economic actors. Consider this indirect indicator of waning confidence, which is often overlooked: what economists call "investment," the part of national output that leaves out consumables like food, clothing and housing and refers to production that will enhance future productivity, such as the building of machines, factories and infrastructure.

Both a body of economic theory - including the seminal work of Robert Solow at M.I.T. - and much real-life evidence, especially from the superfast growth of East Asian economies in the 1980s, suggest that in emerging economies with plentiful labor, a rise in the investment rate boosts overall growth.

India was a low-investment country for many years after independence in 1947. Investment did not exceed 20 percent of gross domestic product until the late 1970s. It crossed the 30 percent mark for the first time in 2004-05 and climbed to 39 percent in 2011-12. India had begun to look like, and grow like, an East Asian economy in the 1980s. But then investment started to decline, and by 2016-17 it was back to around 30 percent.

A drop in investment is usually connected to a lack of trust in the present and the near future. When businesses worry about a country's policy environment, they hesitate to sink money into it. A government's heavy-handed interference in the market - such as the Modi administration's decision to ban some paper currency in late 2016 - or general fractiousness, in politics or within a bureaucracy, can hurt confidence in the economy.

Economists don't much like to admit this, but a country's economic performance depends as much on its politics as on its economic policies. Starting at independence, India invested in political institutions first - establishing democracy, free speech, independent media, secularism and protections for minority rights. After World War II, as nations broke free from the yoke of imperialism, there were other progressive leaders who tried this - in Indonesia and Ghana, for example - but those efforts did not last. Coups, chaos or conflict caused democracy to collapse in one nation after another, bringing in military rule or religious strife. India was an exception, with its liberal Constitution, regular elections and powerful Supreme Court.

India's growth in the early decades after independence was sluggish, though. One can debate whether India's early investment in progressive politics was the right choice. (I think it was.) But having made that investment, it would be a colossal mistake now to squander the political capital that choice generated - especially after the economy finally did take off, first in early 1990s and spectacularly so after 2003.

The fundamentals of India's economy remain strong. The current slowdown is mostly collateral damage, the result of an erosion of trust caused by the country's drift toward illiberalism. India can boost its economy again by reclaiming and building on its progressive heritage.

Kaushik Basu, a professor of international studies and economics at Cornell, was chief economic adviser to the Indian government from 2009 to 2012 and chief economist of the World Bank from 2012 to 2016.
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Opinion | India and the Mistrust Economy

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Growth is slowing. Blame illiberalism for hurting investors' confidence. By Mr. Basu is an economist. Countries with strong governments often end up with weak economies, and India, after years of impressive growth, risks becoming one of them.

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Post 7 (November 11, 2019)- Rejection of Foreign Student

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Post 7 (November 11, 2019)- Rejection of Foreign Student

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A foreign student planned to immigrate to Quebec to study abroad but was rejected. She stated, "it is not a good strategy to turn away the best and brightest students if Quebec wants to improve its economy"(Bilefsky). This illustrate how migration leads to development of new skills, economy, and knowledge that flows from one country to the next. The article "Beyond Remittances by Kingetal mentions the transfer of knowledge that could have occurred if the Latvian graduates would have gone back home in other words social remittances. International students don't have the same job opportunities back home and stay in a foreign country.This is why the French government has placed limited immigration policy.

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MONTREAL - A French woman whose desire to immigrate to Quebec was upended because she wrote a chapter of her doctoral thesis in English will receive a document necessary to remain in the province, she said on Monday.

The woman, Émilie Dubois, a 31-year-old Francophone from Burgundy, had applied for a certificate required to settle permanently in Quebec.

But Quebec authorities, alluding to the chapter of her biology doctorate written in English, initially rejected her application on the grounds that she had not demonstrated sufficient proficiency in French.

After an international outcry, the authorities called Ms. Dubois to let her know they had reversed their decision, she said on Monday.

"I am happy and relieved, but I hope my case has raised awareness about the government's immigration policies," she said by phone from Quebec City. "It is not a good strategy to turn away the best and brightest students if Quebec wants to improve its economy."

The right-leaning government of the Quebec premier, François Legault, came to power last year with a promise to limit immigration. It has been exploring policies that would narrow the criteria for newcomers, including students, to gain residency.

Immigrants coming to Quebec will also soon have to pass a values test to assure they understand Quebec's approach to issues such as gender equality.

The government's efforts to rein in immigration have prompted concerns that Quebec, home to some of the country's leading universities, will no longer be as attractive to talented international students who once viewed studying in the province as a pathway to gaining Canadian residency and eventual citizenship.

The province is determined to uphold French, the language of government, commerce and the courts. Mr. Legault has made clear that while he wants to reduce the number of immigrants coming to Quebec, he is eager to attract skilled labor from France.

Nevertheless, Ms. Dubois's initial application was turned down despite the fact that she completed a biology doctorate at Laval University in Quebec City, a French-language university. She also started a scientific graphic design company.

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Quebec Reverses Decision on French Citizen's Immigration Application

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MONTREAL - A French woman whose desire to immigrate to Quebec was upended because she wrote a chapter of her doctoral thesis in English will receive a document necessary to remain in the province, she said on Monday. The woman, Émilie Dubois, a 31-year-old Francophone from Burgundy, had applied for a certificate required to settle permanently in Quebec.

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Post 8 ( November 15, 2019)- FASA leads to loans

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Post 8 ( November 15, 2019)- FASA leads to loans

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Financialization in the education system has impact students. Since FASA is not offering much to middle class students they are having to look for financial help from a for-profit sector. The expected family contribution is not a good estimation that FASA has provided. Families are accepting student loans from banks therefore, banks are doubling their money with interest. Financial aid packages are not enough for students which puts them in debt. This reminded me that these services are increasing therefore, financial capitalism has gone up too. Private loans, unsubsidized loans, and subsidized loans are financial channels that students have to resort to.

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The form opens the door to student aid. But it's "a terrible measure of what people can actually afford," one expert said. And many families will be asked to pay more, anyway.

The form filled out by most parents of college-bound students told Julie and Andrew Phipps they should expect to contribute about $14,000 to their daughter's education. It was way off. Credit... Yoon Byun for The New York Times

Like millions of other parents, Julie Phipps filled out the federal form last November that determined her college-bound daughter was eligible for financial aid. She also learned how much the federal government figured her family could contribute to the bill: $14,000.

That figure, known as the expected family contribution, was generated immediately after she completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. But with every dollar from their solidly middle-class income already accounted for, Ms. Phipps, 53, said she and her husband, Andy, were stunned at what they were expected to pay.

That was just the start.

The real shock came later, when they learned that the expected contribution was only about half of what their daughter's chosen school expected the family to pay.

"If we were paying our expected family contribution, we would be thrilled," said Ms. Phipps, of South Portland, Maine. "But we are paying twice our expected family contribution, so it means absolutely 100 percent nothing."

Now that the latest FAFSA is out - it became available on Oct. 1 - millions of families are plugging in their numbers. The form is the first step to unlocking any potential federal financial aid, including grants, loans and work-study jobs, as well as aid from states and some colleges.

But it also generates their expected family contribution, or E.F.C. - a number that can easily be misleading. It's often higher than many households can afford, and yet in many cases, like the Phipps family's, it's still not enough.

"For a long time, there has been this growing chasm between the need-analysis formula and accurately reflecting a student and their family's ability to pay for college," said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, which has members at nearly 3,000 schools.

The gap has grown wider not just because of the exponential rise in college prices, but also because of the E.F.C. formula itself. The formula, which stretches across 36 pages, often assumes families have far more income available to pay for college than they actually do, financial aid experts said, particularly in high-cost areas. The reason lies in its basic assumptions: that a family of four, for example, can subsist on less than $30,000, no matter where they live.

"Students have a lot more need than we are recognizing," said Eddy Conroy, an assistant director at the Hope Center for Community, College and Justice at Temple University. "But the system isn't really capturing that properly."

Colleges use the E.F.C. to determine a student's financial need - the difference between the college's cost of attendance and the family's expected contribution. Then, schools come up with a financial aid package. (About 400 schools and programs, mostly private colleges, also use another formula, known as the CSS Profile, to determine institutional aid, according to the College Board, which created the calculation.)

But unless a student attends a college that promises to meet 100 percent of his or her need - and the vast majority do not - students and their families will probably pay more than what the FAFSA estimates.

"The expected family contribution is a terrible measure of what people can actually afford," said Robert Kelchen, associate professor in Seton Hall University's department of education, leadership, management and policy. "It's more of a way for colleges and government to rank people by how much need they have. It's really more of a rationing tool."

(The nomenclature has drawn the attention of lawmakers. The Student Aid Improvement Act, a bill introduced by Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee that would mandate funding for historically black colleges, simplify the FAFSA and make other changes, includes a provision that would rename the E.F.C. the Student Aid Index.)

Ms. Phipps and her husband agreed that an art school would be the best fit for Isabella, who wants a career in animation. Specialized schools can be expensive, even when they're public: The cost of attendance at the school where she's now a freshman, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, was about $55,400 for out-of-state students. A program offering a discount to New England residents knocked the price down to a bit over $47,000.

A $14,000 expected family contribution meant the Phippses were eligible for an aid package of about $33,000.

They got $16,700 - a $10,200 grant from the college, $1,000 for a work-study program and $5,500 in subsidized and unsubsidized federal loans, the maximum for first-year students.

That left a hole of roughly $31,000 - or about double their E.F.C.

"We basically have given her every ounce, every bit of savings," Ms. Phipps said.

She said their daughter was a dedicated worker and saved $5,000 by working at a movie theater, which went straight to school costs. And Mr. Phipps, who works as a contract specialist for an insurance company, took a second job driving a limousine at night.

Ms. Phipps does not work but receives disability because of an autoimmune disorder, and she dipped into their emergency fund two years ago to cover medical bills from a mastectomy. The couple took out a home equity line of credit to cover other unexpected expenses that may arise, like the $6,000 in braces they just learned their 13-year-old son needs.

The E.F.C. calculation does not take all of those kinds of expenses into account (though colleges can be asked to consider special circumstances), nor does it adjust for the cost of living in different areas. And its assumptions for the costs of food, clothing and shelter are unrealistically low for even the cheapest places in the country.

For a family of four, the so-called income protection allowance - or the amount shielded from the formula - is $29,340. For a single parent with one child in college, it's a mere $19,080.

"It's a very harsh assessment of the ability to pay," said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial-aid expert and publisher of Savingforcollege.com. "The assumptions they are using to calculate all of this have no connection to reality."

The income protection allowance is subtracted from the family's adjusted gross income, along with some other items (like taxes), while other items are added back (retirement savings contributions, for example). The final figure is the family's so-called adjusted available income.

Using a progressive table similar to tax brackets, the formula assumes parents should dedicate anywhere from 22 percent to 47 percent of that amount to college costs each year. Many middle-class families and above are assessed at 47 percent.

(Families earning less than $26,000 a year can qualify for an "automatic zero" E.F.C., if they meet certain requirements.)

The formula also considers parents' and students' assets - and some allowances have actually become less generous over the years. Retirement savings and home equity are excluded from the federal formula, but the amount of other savings that parents can shield has plummeted over the past decade.

Take, for example, a 48-year-old parent, the median age of a person with college-age children: That parent was able to shelter $52,400 from the formula in 2009-10; now, the parent can shield only $6,000. Mr. Kantrowitz said that meant a parent with at least $52,000 saved would have an E.F.C. that is about $2,600 higher now than a decade ago.

House Democrats proposed several tweaks to the need-analysis formula in a giant bill introduced last month, which would update the Higher Education Act of 1965 for the first time in a decade. The bill would enable more families to qualify for an E.F.C. of zero by increasing the income threshold to $37,000 from $26,000.

The bill would also shield more of a student's income from the formula, according to aides for Representative Robert C. Scott, a Virginia Democrat and chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor. But parents with dependent children wouldn't receive anything extra when it came to sheltering income.

Adjusting the federal formula, however, goes only so far. Even if families' expected contributions decrease, the gulf between that figure and the cost of attendance will only widen.

"It will not be enough to just get the formula right," said Jessica L. Thompson, director of policy and planning for the Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit advocacy group. "To truly bring college costs within realistic reach will require much broader federal investments in financial aid and in public colleges."

For now, students and their families facing steeper costs of attendance for their schools of choice are faced with tough decisions: Find a cheaper institution? Borrow? Find some other creative mix of solutions?

Ms. Phipps explored private loans, but said she was blown away by the interest rates. Next year, they will continue to tap their savings and use earnings from her husband's second job and their daughter's summer job - and joked about finding a buyer for one of her kidneys. She's also going to suggest that her daughter move off campus, which may yield savings.

Still, private loans are also likely in the family's future, Ms. Phipps said. "But we hope to postpone them as late as possible."

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FAFSA Says How Much You Can Pay for College. It's Often Wrong.

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The form opens the door to student aid. But it's "a terrible measure of what people can actually afford," one expert said. And many families will be asked to pay more, anyway. Like millions of other parents, Julie Phipps filled out the federal form last November that determined her college-bound daughter was eligible for financial aid.

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Post 9 (November 8, 2019)- Climate change and the UN

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Post 9 (November 8, 2019)- Climate change and the UN

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Scientists are put to work by the United Nations in solving the issue of climate change. This is an example of "global governance" because countries work together to response to international problems. The "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group of thousands of scientists representing 195 countries" did research and found the world is getting warmer by 5.4 degrees. The UN has agreed as a whole that global warming is happening. Countries have come together to construct "stricter limits on tailpipe emissions". These reports are shared globally to educate and get every country to participate in stopping climate change.

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Few thought it would arrive so quickly. Now we're facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios.

By

Mr. Linden has written widely about climate change.

Transit workers pumped water out of the South Ferry subway station in Lower Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Credit... Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

For decades, most scientists saw climate change as a distant prospect. We now know that thinking was wrong. This summer, for instance, a heat wave in Europe penetrated the Arctic, pushing temperatures into the 80s across much of the Far North and, according to the Belgian climate scientist Xavier Fettweis, melting some 40 billion tons of Greenland's ice sheet.

Had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch, bake the Arctic and produce Sahara-like temperatures in Paris and Berlin, the prediction would have been dismissed as alarmist. But many worst-case scenarios from that time are now realities.

Science is a process of discovery. It can move slowly as the pieces of a puzzle fall together and scientists refine their investigative tools. But in the case of climate, this deliberation has been accompanied by inertia born of bureaucratic caution and politics. A recent essay in Scientific American argued that scientists "tend to underestimate the severity of threats and the rapidity with which they might unfold" and said one of the reasons was "the perceived need for consensus." This has had severe consequences, diluting what should have been a sense of urgency and vastly understating the looming costs of adaptation and dislocation as the planet continues to warm.

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group of thousands of scientists representing 195 countries, said in its first report that climate change would arrive at a stately pace, that the methane-laden Arctic permafrost was not in danger of thawing, and that the Antarctic ice sheets were stable.

Relying on the climate change panel's assessment, economists estimated that the economic hit would be small, providing further ammunition against an aggressive approach to reducing emissions and to building resilience to climate change.

As we now know, all of those predictions turned out to be completely wrong. Which makes you wonder whether the projected risks of further warming, dire as they are, might still be understated. How bad will things get?

So far, the costs of underestimation have been enormous. New York City's subway system did not flood in its first 108 years, but Hurricane Sandy's 2012 storm surge caused nearly $5 billion in water damage, much of which is still not repaired. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey gave Houston and the surrounding region a $125 billion lesson about the costs of misjudging the potential for floods.

The climate change panel seems finally to have caught up with the gravity of the climate crisis. Last year, the organization detailed the extraordinary difficulty of limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), over the next 80 years, and the grim consequences that will result even if that goal is met.

More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became a mainstream issue.

Conventional wisdom, in the 1950s,

Each large square = 100 years

Each large square = 100 years

The word "upended" does not do justice to the revolution in climate science wrought by the discovery of sudden climate change. The realization that the global climate can swing between warm and cold periods in a matter of decades or even less came as a profound shock to scientists who thought those shifts took hundreds if not thousands of years.

Scientists knew major volcanic eruptions or asteroid strikes could affect climate rapidly, but such occurrences were uncommon and unpredictable. Absent such rare events, changes in climate looked steady and smooth, a consequence of slow-moving geophysical factors like the earth's orbital cycle in combination with the tilt of the planet's axis, or shifts in the continental plates.

Then, in the 1960s, a few scientists began to focus on an unusual event that took place after the last ice age. Scattered evidence suggested that the post-ice age warming was interrupted by a sudden cooling that began around 12,000 years ago and ended abruptly 1,300 years later. The era was named the Younger Dryas for a plant that proliferated during that cold period.

At first, some scientists questioned the rapidity and global reach of the cooling. A report from the National Academies of Science in 1975 acknowledged the Younger Dryas but concluded that it would take centuries for the climate to change in a meaningful way. But not everyone agreed. The climate scientist Wallace Broecker at Columbia had offered a theory that changes in ocean circulation could bring about sudden climate shifts like the Younger Dryas.

And it was Dr. Broecker who, in 1975, the same year as that National Academies report playing down the Younger Dryas, published a paper, titled " Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? " in which he predicted that emissions of carbon dioxide would raise global temperatures significantly in the 21st century. This is now seen as prophetic, but at the time, Dr. Broecker was an outlier.

Then, in the early 1990s, scientists completed more precise studies of ice cores extracted from the Greenland ice sheet. Dust and oxygen isotopes encased in the cores provided a detailed climate record going back eons. It revealed that there had been 25 rapid climate change events like the Younger Dryas in the last glacial period.

The evidence in those ice cores would prove pivotal in turning the conventional wisdom. As the science historian Spencer Weart put it: "How abrupt was the discovery of abrupt climate change? Many climate experts would put their finger on one moment: the day they read the 1993 report of the analysis of Greenland ice cores. Before that, almost nobody confidently believed that the climate could change massively within a decade or two; after the report, almost nobody felt sure that it could not."

In 2002, the National Academies acknowledged the reality of rapid climate change in a report, " Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises," which described the new consensus as a "paradigm shift." This was a reversal of its 1975 report.

"Large, abrupt climate changes have affected hemispheric to global regions repeatedly, as shown by numerous paleoclimate records," the report said, and added that "changes of up to 16 degrees Celsius and a factor of 2 in precipitation have occurred in some places in periods as short as decades to years."

The National Academies report added that the implications of such potential rapid changes had not yet been considered by policymakers and economists. And even today, 17 years later, a substantial portion of the American public remains unaware or unconvinced it is happening.

Were the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica to melt, sea levels would rise by an estimated 225 feet worldwide. Few expect that to happen anytime soon. But those ice sheets now look a lot more fragile than they did to the climate change panel in 1995, when it said that little change was expected over the next hundred years.

In the years since, data has shown that both Greenland and Antarctica have been shedding ice far more rapidly than anticipated. Ice shelves, which are floating extensions of land ice, hold back glaciers from sliding into the sea and eventually melting. In the early 2000s, ice shelves began disintegrating in several parts of Antarctica, and scientists realized that process could greatly accelerate the demise of the vastly larger ice sheets themselves. And some major glaciers are dumping ice directly into the ocean.

By 2014, a number of scientists had concluded that an irreversible collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet had already begun, and computer modeling in 2016 indicated that its disintegration in concert with other melting could raise sea levels up to six feet by 2100, about twice the increase described as a possible worst-case scenario just three years earlier. At that pace, some of the world's great coastal cities, including New York, London and Hong Kong, would become inundated.

Then this year, a review of 40 years of satellite images suggested that the East Antarctic ice sheet, which was thought to be relatively stable, may also be shedding vast amounts of ice.

As the seas rise, they are also warming at a pace unanticipated as recently as five years ago. This is very bad news. For one thing, a warmer ocean means more powerful storms, and die-offs of marine life, but it also suggests that the planet is more sensitive to increased carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought.

The melting of permafrost has also defied expectations. This is ground that has remained frozen for at least two consecutive years and covers around a quarter of the exposed land mass of the Northern Hemisphere. As recently as 1995, it was thought to be stable. But by 2005, the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated that up to 90 percent of the Northern Hemisphere's topmost layer of permafrost could thaw by 2100, releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

For all of the missed predictions, changes in the weather are confirming earlier expectations that a warming globe would be accompanied by an increase in thefrequency and severity of extreme weather. And there are new findings unforeseen by early studies, such as the extremely rapid intensification of storms, as on Sept. 1, when Hurricane Dorian's sustained winds intensified from 150 to 185 miles per hour in just nine hours, and last year when Hurricane Michael grew from tropical depression to major hurricane in just two days.

If the Trump administration has its way, even the revised worst-case scenarios may turn out to be too rosy. In late August, the administration announced a plan to roll back regulations intended to limit methane emissions resulting from oil and gas exploration, despite opposition from some of the largest companies subject to those regulations. More recently, its actions approached the surreal as the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into those auto companies that have agreed in principle to abide by higher gas mileage standards required by California. The administration also formally revoked a waiver allowing California to set stricter limits on tailpipe emissions than the federal government.

Even if scientists end up having lowballed their latest assessments of the consequences of the greenhouse gases we continue to emit into the atmosphere, their predictions are dire enough. But the Trump administration has made its posture toward climate change abundantly clear: Bring it on!

It's already here. And it is going to get worse. A lot worse.

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Opinion | How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong

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Few thought it would arrive so quickly. Now we're facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios. By Mr. Linden has written widely about climate change. For decades, most scientists saw climate change as a distant prospect. We now know that thinking was wrong.

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Post 10 (October 28, 2019)- El Salvador Immigrants in the U.S

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Post 10 (October 28, 2019)- El Salvador Immigrants in the U.S

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The Temporary Protected Status has allowed 250,000 Salvadorans to stay one more year and work in the U.S. In 2018, "remittances from Salvadorans living abroad, most of them in the United States, totaled nearly $5.4 billion, equivalent to about 20 percent of El Salvador’s gross domestic product, according to the World Bank" (Jordan and Semple). This shows that their economy has benefitted from migration and remittances. This will allow poverty and child labor to decrease as health, education, and technology will increase. This impacts the quality of life of an immigrant's family back home as remittances are their main source of income.

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Those who have Temporary Protected Status will have another year to work legally in the United States.

"I am very happy," said Veronica Lagunas, 41, a Salvadoran whose permission to work in the United States will be extended. She was photographed after speaking at a vigil and protest march in Los Angeles in 2017. Credit... Emily Berl for The New York Times

Eager to seal a deal with El Salvador to curb a surge of migrants to the southwestern border, the Trump administration on Monday agreed to special legal protections that would allow an estimated 250,000 Salvadorans to stay and work in the United States for an additional year.

The announcement walks back an earlier decision to strip Temporary Protected Status in January from these Salvadoran immigrants, many of whom have resided lawfully in the United States for nearly two decades.

All told, about 400,000 immigrants from around the world are beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status - a program that allows immigrants from countries that have suffered from natural disasters or other urgent situations to live and work in the United States. It was intended to be temporary, and President Trump after his election immediately began trying to roll it back for countries whose residents had benefited from its provisions for many years.

Monday's decision marks a concession to Salvadorans who have built lives in the United States and sent billions of dollars in American wages home. It comes as part of a package of agreements the Trump administration has negotiated in recent weeks aimed at winning Central America's cooperation in slowing the movement of migrants fleeing violence and poverty.

The United States and Guatemala have also signed a cooperation agreement to reduce the number of Central American asylum seekers traveling to the United States. Once the accord is enforced, the United States will begin returning asylum seekers who traveled through Guatemala back to that country, where they can choose to apply for asylum or to return home.

In March, President Trump suspended aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to exercise additional pressure. This month, the president announced he would restore some aid to those countries after they agreed to take in asylum seekers as requested.

These agreements, in combination with policies that have pressured Mexico to shelter more asylum applicants, have contributed to a steep drop in unauthorized immigration in recent months.

The number of migrants taken into custody at the southwestern border peaked at 144,200 in May; that number was down to 52,000 in September, though numbers are often down during the hot summer months.

Monday's agreement with El Salvador called for a new law enforcement partnership to identify air passengers linked to terrorism or to narcotics, weapons or currency smuggling. Under its provisions, the United States will send American law enforcement officials to help "mentor" their police, border security and immigration counterparts in El Salvador.

But its most talked-about provision is the one that allows Salvadorans who have Temporary Protected Status to legally work in the United States until Jan. 4, 2021 - a year later than the deadline set earlier by the Trump administration.

They could conceivably be allowed to remain longer because the order also guarantees that Salvadorans will have 365 days from the conclusion of litigation over the program - whenever that is - to "repatriate" back to their home country.

"The administration's goal is to create an orderly and responsible process to repatriate Salvadorans and help them return home," the news release said. Immediately ordering all 250,000 people enrolled in the program to return home, it said, "could spark another mass migration to the U.S. and reinvigorate the crisis at the southern border."

But critics who successfully sued the government to win an injunction over the rollbacks in Temporary Protected Status said the administration was using vulnerable immigrants to achieve its border security goals.

"This suggests that the government is using the program that protects tens of thousands of people as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with other countries," said Ahilan Arulanantham, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which is representing immigrants from six countries in a lawsuit to reinstate the program.

The Salvadoran diaspora in the United States is by far the largest of any Central American nation, and it provides a hefty economic lifeline for that country. In 2018, remittances from Salvadorans living abroad, most of them in the United States, totaled nearly $5.4 billion, equivalent to about 20 percent of El Salvador's gross domestic product, according to the World Bank.

Salvadorans have also become an important part of the United States economy. Roughly one-fifth of all construction workers in Washington, D.C., are immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, most of them Salvadorans.

Under the humanitarian program, some Salvadorans were granted the status to stay in the United States after a pair of devastating earthquakes struck their country in 2001. In the ensuing years, the George W. Bush and Obama administrations extended the protection several times.

The deal announced on Monday was a major political victory for El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, who took office in June. Mr. Bukele has sought to strengthen his country's relationship with the United States, its largest trading partner and the home of more than 1.4 million Salvadoran emigrants. At the same time, he has aggressively lobbied the Trump administration for an extension of the protected status guarantees.

Mr. Bukele, a businessman who has cast himself as a iconoclastic reformer, has taken pains when dealing with the Trump administration to disavow his predecessors' embrace of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. He has also sought to position El Salvador as a welcoming place for American investment and to distance his nation from Guatemala and Honduras, two troubled neighbors that have also sent large numbers of immigrants to the United States.

Most importantly, perhaps, Mr. Bukele has thrown his support behind Mr. Trump's efforts to decrease migration from Central America, including signing an agreement last month, similar to the one negotiated with Guatemala, that would allow the United States to require asylum seekers who passed through El Salvador on their journey to the American border to apply for asylum there first.

"They said that it was impossible - that the Salvadoran government couldn't do anything," Mr. Bukele wrote on Twitter on Monday in announcing the protected status extension. "But we knew that our allies would not leave us on our own."

In seeking to cancel many of its protections, the administration argued in 2018 that the Temporary Protected Status program had turned into a quasi-permanent benefit for hundreds of thousands of people.

But a year ago, a federal court in California temporarily blocked the administration from terminating the protection for immigrants from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti or El Salvador. Subsequent lawsuits effectively retained protections for people from Honduras and Nepal under the same terms.

The government then announced that it would abide by the injunction, and extended the program to January 2020 for migrants from those countries as part of negotiations with the A.C.L.U. A decision on the appeal could come in the coming months.

Enrollees from the other countries still face the January 2020 cutoff for the program.

As news spread about the announcement on Monday, Salvadorans across the United States expressed relief that they would not have to leave, or resort to living in the shadows if they chose to remain illegally.

"I am very happy," said Veronica Lagunas, 41, a Salvadoran who works overnight cleaning offices in Los Angeles. She has two children born in the United States and owns a mobile home.

Ms. Lagunas had said last year that she would risk arrest and deportation to stay in the United States if her Temporary Protected Status were to end. But without the work permit that comes with the status, she would lose the job she has held for more than a decade, and her family would no longer have medical insurance or other benefits.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

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U.S. Extends Temporary Work Permits for El Salvador Immigrants

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Those who have Temporary Protected Status will have another year to work legally in the United States. Eager to seal a deal with El Salvador to curb a surge of migrants to the southwestern border, the Trump administration on Monday agreed to special legal protections that would allow an estimated 250,000 Salvadorans to stay and work in the United States for an additional year.