Tough outlook for emerging markets

Summary: A series of emerging market currencies are losing value and stock markets across the developing world are in retreat. The more excitable parts of the financial sector - and indeed on financial twitter (yes, there is such a thing) - are talking of a re-run of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997.

Duncan WeldonNewsnight economics correspondent@Duncanweldonon Twitter So, just to be clear, this is not a re-run of 1997. But that doesn't mean it isn't serious. In 1997 much of Asia fell into a severe financial crisis. Countries like Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea had become dependent on foreign credit, and when it dried up they were severely hit. Currencies crashed, economies tumbled, unemployment soared and there was serious talk of a global financial meltdown. The current situation is quantitatively different and rather than being a sudden episode of crisis, it feels like the culmination of some deeper structural changes in the world economy. Emerging market currencies have lost value against the dollar and currently stand at a six-and-a-half-year low in aggregate. The Financial Times today reports that almost $1tn of capital has flowed out of emerging economies in the last 13 months. After six years of near zero interest rates and extraordinary monetary policy such as quantitative easing (electronically creating money to buy bonds), the US Federal Reserve is close to the first interest rate rise in almost a decade. With the returns available in the US on the rise, it's becoming a more attractive home for often footloose global capital. That's pushing the dollar up and driving the capital outflow from the emerging world. A tightening of US monetary policy - especially after the last six highly unusual years - would always be an issue for emerging markets, but it comes at time when just about everything that could go wrong seems to be going wrong at the same time for them. Three long trending factors that have supported economic growth - and financial market returns - across the developing economies appear to be either reversing or slowing. The first is the process of economic globalisation itself - at least as expressed through world trade. As I've written before, for reasons that still aren't entirely clear, world trade has had a terrible few years. Commodity price collapse 2015 looks set to be the fourth consecutive year in which world trade growth is slower than global GDP growth. This slowing makes the kind of export-led growth strategies that many (although not all) emerging economies have pursued that much trickier. Secondly, there's commodity prices. The oil price has collapsed, from around $110 a barrel last summer to around $50 today. But it's not just oil, the price of things like industrial metals has collapsed too. Copper currently trades at a six year low. For many commodity exporting nations this is little shortage of a catastrophe. Go back eight or nine years and the talk was of a "commodity super cycle": how the industrialisation of Asia would drive commodity prices ever higher. The "super cycle" looks to have turned. Finally, financial conditions are getting tougher. This doesn't just relate though to the coming rise in US interest rates - although that is the catalyst for the recent sell-off. The bigger picture is that long-term interest rates across the developed world of the US, Europe and Japan have basically been falling for thirty five years. As the fund manager Bill Gross recently wrote long-term interest rates in the US were 14.5% in 1981. Today they're just 2.2%. Over the course of those years the Dow Jones Industrial Average of US shares has risen from 900 to 17,500. In other words investors have had a very good few decades, much of it underpinned by falling borrowing costs. But eventually a limit is hit, longer term interest rates can only fall so far. The fall in borrowing costs which underpinned the 35-year bull market in the West seems unrepeatable - unrepeatable at least if we rule out deeply negative longer term borrowing costs. Add together slowing world trade, collapsing commodity prices and less easy global financial conditions, and you've got a recipe for a tough time for emerging economies. Not necessarily for a 1997-style meltdown, but certainly for an environment for lower growth and lower returns for investors. Important component of global growth To an extent you can bind all three factors into a single story - the story of China's boom and slowing. Certainly China has been a driver of world trade growth and the single most important marginal driver of commodity demand in the last couple of decades. It may also be connected to the falls in long term interest rates. As Toby Nangle of asset management firm Columbia Threadneedle Investments has argued, the integration of China into the world economy coincided with the falls in the cost of borrowing. If nothing else, cheap Chinese manufactured goods helped to hold down inflation in the West allowing central banks to keep rates lower. China's economy was always destined to slow - no country can maintain a 10% annual growth rate forever - but the consequences of that slowing will be felt far and wide. Emerging economies have been an important component of global growth, especially since 2008. If that prop to the global economy is looking less firm, then that is a serious problem. It leaves already indebted consumers in countries like the US and UK responsible for generating even more of global demand. The outlook for emerging markets is tougher than it has been in years. But at least for the moment, reaching for the 1997 analogy feels like a stretch too far.

उभरते बाजार की मुद्राओं की एक श्रृंखला मूल्य खो रही है और विकासशील दुनिया में शेयर बाजार पीछे हट रहे हैं। वित्तीय क्षेत्र के अधिक उत्तेजक हिस्से-और वास्तव में वित्तीय ट्विटर पर (हां, ऐसी बात है)-1997 के एशियाई वित्तीय संकट के फिर से चलने की बात कर रहे हैं।


Vote for Britain's best new building: Weston Library

Summary: The Weston Library is one of six UK buildings up for the 2016 Riba Stirling Prize for architecture. A select line-up of judges will decide the winner, but the BBC, in partnership with Riba, is inviting you to vote for your favourite. Find out about the other buildings here .

If you are viewing this page on the BBC News app, tap here to vote. What is it and where? A restored and extended Grade II listed building at Oxford University, originally designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, built in the 1930s and known as the New Bodleian Library. The remodelled and renamed building, still used as a library but with added exhibition and teaching space, was designed by WilkinsonEyre. How much did it cost? £50m, although the total project cost is reported to have been about £80m. What was the vision? The New Bodleian was more of a storage facility than public building and, with some of its books now kept elsewhere, the Weston opens up the space to provide more public access and show off the central bookstack. The university says the design aimed to respect the building's heritage while modernising its infrastructure and providing better facilities for students and researchers, as well as greater opportunities for outreach to the wider community. What have people said about it? "A fine attempt to ensure the repository of books survives into the future." Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times, July 2016 "The dreary old New Bod has become the Mod Bod. For the first time, shafts of natural light fall into the central core and the reading rooms and there is a strong sense of a building that now breathes easily, rather than holds its stale bookish breath." Jay Merrick, i, March 2015 "The Weston is a competent and professionally committed reworking of a historic building, albeit with some awkwardness in its spatial arrangements, but without the spark that you would hope for in a Stirling prize winner." Rowan Moore, Guardian, July 2016 Explore the other buildings on the shortlist BBC Riba Stirling home page Find out more about the BBC Riba Stirling Prize partnership Credits: Video by Richard Kenny and Dave O'Neill. Animation by Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.

वेस्टन पुस्तकालय वास्तुकला के लिए 2016 के रिबा स्टर्लिंग पुरस्कार के लिए ब्रिटेन की छह इमारतों में से एक है। कुछ चुनिंदा न्यायाधीश विजेता का फैसला करेंगे, लेकिन रिबा के साथ साझेदारी में बीबीसी आपको अपने पसंदीदा के लिए मतदान करने के लिए आमंत्रित कर रहा है। यहाँ अन्य इमारतों के बारे में पता करें।


Press fumes at India's power failure

Summary: India's mainstream press was unanimously scathing in its criticism of the power outages which caused major disruption to much of the country over the past two days. Several papers expressed concern at how the blackout had affected India's image as an emerging superpower.

Commentators were also displeased at the timing of a cabinet reshuffle which saw Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde moved to the ministry of home affairs on the second day of the outages. A number of newspapers identified the overdrawing of power by three northern states - Uttar Pradesh (UP), Haryana and Punjab - as the probable reason for the outages. Most papers agreed on the need for urgent reforms in the country's power sector. The Times of India The paper ran the headline: "Powerless and clueless". In an editorial it said: "Lack of power holds back India's industrial take-off, and prevents it from making the kind of strides in reducing poverty that China or East Asia have." The Economic Times The paper's main headline was: "Superpower India, RIP". In its editorial, it said India "cannot afford the power blackout witnessed on Monday and again on Tuesday… This simply must stop". Hindi daily Dainik Jagran "Not only is this a new example of incompetence, it is also an occasion for shame. The grid failures have provoked laughter at India around the world." Hindi daily Amar Ujala "If there was an Olympic competition for power blackouts, India would win gold." Hindi-language Navbharat Times "For a country that aspires to be an economic power, this incident is disgraceful." Rashtriya Sahara "What can we say of our country? When half the country was sunk in darkness due to a power failure and there was chaos all around, Power Minster Sushil Kumar Shinde was being promoted to the post of home minister… " English-language daily The Indian Express In its editorial, the paper said Uttar Pradesh was the "habitual offender" for taking more than its allocated share of power from the grid. "Without punitive measures in place, plans to set up a [higher-capacity] national grid… cannot be started on." The Hindu "State governments need to understand that they should either find the funds to invest in power generation, or make it worthwhile for the private sector to set up new plants that can feed into the grid in order to cope with rising demand." Business standard "The scale of the disruption was unprecedented. And coming as it did just a day after a similar collapse of the power grid for the northern region, with almost similar consequences, it underlined once again the depressing state of the country's power sector and its poor governance by regulators." Hindi daily Hindustan "What is most essential is that power should be treated as an industrial commodity. Only then can we end the atmosphere of wastage and mismanagement… but will this two-day crisis be able to compel the centre and states to implement the necessary reforms?" BBC Monitoring selects and translates news from radio, television, press, news agencies and the internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages. It is based in Caversham, UK, and has several bureaux abroad. For more reports from BBC Monitoring, click here

भारत की मुख्यधारा की प्रेस ने सर्वसम्मति से बिजली कटौती की आलोचना की, जिससे पिछले दो दिनों में देश के अधिकांश हिस्सों में भारी व्यवधान पैदा हुआ। कई समाचार पत्रों ने इस बात पर चिंता व्यक्त की कि कैसे ब्लैकआउट ने एक उभरती हुई महाशक्ति के रूप में भारत की छवि को प्रभावित किया है।


More or Less: Calculating how much migrants cost or benefit a nation

Summary: Now the initial furore about Romanian and Bulgarian people being allowed to work in the UK has subsided, what does a more detailed look at immigration statistics tell us about the benefits, or otherwise, of welcoming overseas citizens? The picture is mixed.

By Ruth AlexanderBBC News Immigrants to the UK since 2000 have made a "substantial" contribution to public finances, a recently published report claimed. Those from the European Economic Area (EEA - the EU plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) had made a particularly positive contribution in the decade up to 2011, the authors noted, contributing 34% more in taxes than they received in benefits and services. "Given this evidence, claims about 'benefit tourism' by EEA immigrants seem to be disconnected from reality," one of the study's authors Christian Dustmann, professor of economics at University College London, said. The story is slightly different for immigrants who came to the UK from outside the EEA in that period. They also put more into the public purse than they took out, but by a smaller margin of 2%. However, studying the numbers in the UCL report more closely, another finding emerges. And that is, that if you look at the figures for the whole of the period under study, 1995-2011, immigration has been a drain on the public purse. To the tune of about £95bn. So how can that be? How can the picture be so radically different if you look six years further into the past? It's because these figures include all immigrants living in the UK at that time - so, not just recent arrivals, but people who'd been in the UK for, in some cases, decades. This is significant because a good proportion of those people who have been in the UK for some time are likely to be older than the most recent immigrants, and so are more likely to be on benefits and using health services than those who have arrived since 2000 (who have an average age of just 26 years). Dustmann argues therefore if you look at the fiscal contribution of all immigrants in this way, then you may not be capturing the truest picture of their total contribution to the public purse. Certainly, focusing on the most recent immigrants gives a clear view of how much immigrants contribute to the public purse in the first few years of their stay in the UK, but it also doesn't give a complete picture, because what you are capturing is a very particular time in their lives - some of their youngest, most productive years. To make sense of the numbers, it helps to break them down a little - to divide the net contribution to the public purse by the number of people in each group under study. When we do that, we see that between 1995-2011, on average each EEA immigrant put about £6,000 more into the public purse than they took out. Non-EEA immigrants each took out about £21,000 more than they put in during that period. And this group is the biggest - non-EEA immigrants make up two thirds of the UK immigrant population. So both groups of immigrants - EEA and non-EEA - considered together, take out around £14,000 more than they put in, amounting to a deficit of around £95bn for the public purse between 1995-2011. Of course it's well known the UK government has been running an annual deficit that's much larger than this. That is, it's been spending more than it's got for some time now. And it's spending a large proportion of that money it doesn't have on, of course, its own people. And we can see that clearly when we look at how much native Brits are each putting in and taking out of the public purse. On average, each native Briton took out roughly £11,000 more than they put in between 1995-2011. So to conclude, on average only Europeans are putting in more to the UK public purse than they're taking out. At least that was the case between 1995 and 2011. It's worth highlighting the UCL calculations are conservative, in the sense that they are likely to allocate relatively more costs to immigrants than to natives. "For instance, while allocating costs of education of children to immigrants, we allocate the contributions of these children when they enter the labour market to natives," Dustmann says. "We also don't include in our calculations the implicit savings made by the UK because the cost of education of immigrants is borne by the sending countries." But there's a bigger question to consider. We've been discussing the impact immigrants - and natives - have on the government's books. But what about the impact they have on the economy as a whole? You would expect the economy to grow if there are more people in the country. But what we really want to know is, are immigrants creating added value? That is, are we all better off because of the newcomers? Therefore, we have to think about what's happening to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita of the resident population. A few studies have considered that for the UK and other countries, but the impact is generally found to be quite small, according to Thomas Liebig, a migration specialist at the OECD. "If you look at it in per capita terms, most studies don't find a particularly large impact and these studies depend on a whole range of assumptions and the impact will depend on how you look at things," Liebig says. "Another specific issue is the impact on the labour market - who benefits and who loses. And globally, you find that the impact is not particularly large. That doesn't mean that it can't have a significant impact on some specific groups or sectors." Indeed, perhaps some people feel the effects of immigration more than others. Two groups are generally believed to be clear beneficiaries of immigration - the immigrants themselves, who move from poor countries to ones where more opportunities are on offer, and the employers of cheap labour. Two studies from the US give us some insight into how the resident workforce might be affected, according to Carlos Vargas-Silva, an economist at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University. One, by George Borjas of the Harvard Kennedy School, makes the point that migrants who move to the US reduce the wages of competing workers. "Employers are going to benefit from migration because they are going to pay lower wages than before," Vargas-Silva says, explaining the study's findings. "But native workers are going to be competing with those migrants, and they are going to be negatively affected - their wages are going to be lower." But the work of another immigration expert in the US, Giovanni Peri from the University of California, suggests immigrants can help boost the prospects of native workers. "Before, you could have a native person doing construction work," Vargas-Silva says. "But then you have more Mexican workers going in there, working in construction and then these native workers become supervisors and that native person has become more productive because of the existence of the migrant workers." So we've considered both the fiscal and aspects of the economic impact of immigrants. But experts agree it's hard to capture the true picture, without making a lot of assumptions. There are many things you can measure, and you can measure them in many different ways, making many different assumptions. And of course it's not just a question of economics and numbers. There are less tangible effects to consider. The impact on culture, on community, for example - important considerations, which are difficult to measure. Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook

अब यू. के. में रोमानियाई और बल्गेरियाई लोगों को काम करने की अनुमति दिए जाने के बारे में प्रारंभिक हंगामा कम हो गया है, आप्रवासन आंकड़ों पर अधिक विस्तृत नज़र हमें विदेशी नागरिकों का स्वागत करने के लाभों के बारे में क्या बताती है? तस्वीर मिश्रित है।


BJP's big risk on Narendra Modi

Summary: Narendra Modi is one of the canniest Indian politicians.

Soutik BiswasDelhi correspondent Hours after he had been named as the prime ministerial candidate for the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for next year's general election, his flashy website welcome had duly been updated. "Thank you! Let us work together to make Mission 272+ a reality," the new slogan said, replacing India First, the moniker of his muscular nationalist campaign. Mission 272+ alludes to the number of seats in parliament the party needs to win for an absolute majority, a miracle for any party in India's severely fractured politics. In the background, a beaming Mr Modi flashes a victory sign. He has tried hard to reinvent himself, from the somewhat remote chief minister of Gujarat who steadfastly refused to apologise for the 2002 religious riots that killed more than 1,000 people, to a sprightly, energetic leader who appeals to a rising tide of young voters. At 62, he's comparatively young by Indian political standards. People in Gujarat have backed him enthusiastically for four successive terms, impressed by his reputation as a no-nonsense administrator. The jury is still out on whether Gujarat's enviable record of development has been truly inclusive. Mr Modi has been clever enough to retool his image to appeal to India's young. He talks about an India that has changed from a "nation of snake charmers to a nation of mouse charmers", referring to its info-tech success. He says he "sows dreams in the eye of my fellow-citizens". Closely fought On Twitter, he exhorts the young to register to vote because they are the "power and strength of India". However, Mr Modi continues to remain a hugely divisive and polarising figure. One key ally of the BJP-led coalition quit after fears that supporting him could lose Muslim votes. Some 15% (180 million) of India's 1.2 billion people are Muslims. They comprise over 11% of the voters in six states, including the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh. It is unlikely that they will warm to Mr Modi. Many people believe that by making the 2014 election a presidential-style referendum on Mr Modi, the Hindu nationalist BJP is taking a huge risk. For the past two decades, elections in the world's largest democracy have been closely fought affairs, with regional aspirations, local issues, caste dynasts and local chieftains playing a crucial role. In the end, the parties with the bigger numbers and common interests cobble together a ruling coalition. The BJP hopes that Mr Modi, taking advantage of a ruling Congress party that is tired and enfeebled, will attract enough votes to sweep the party into power.

नरेंद्र मोदी भारत के सबसे चतुर राजनेताओं में से एक हैं।


Pondersbridge crop fire battled as UK heatwave takes hold

Summary: More than 40 firefighters have tackled a large crop blaze as temperatures have soared across Cambridgeshire.

Plumes of thick black smoke were seen billowing into the sky from a field near the B1040 at Pondersbridge in the Fens. A line of flames was seen spreading across the field in what the fire service called an "extensive fire". Station commander Pete Jones said the blaze was "more or less under control", with hotspots being dampened down. The cause of the fire remains unknown. The fire service has advised that people avoid the area.

40 से अधिक अग्निशामकों ने एक बड़ी फसल की आग पर काबू पा लिया है क्योंकि कैम्ब्रिजशायर में तापमान बढ़ गया है।