[LINK] Some Friday links

• Alpha Sources' Claus Vistesen takes a look at the parlous state of the Icelandic economy, caught--like many central European states--between "a large current account deficit coupled with high inflation at a time when the housing bubble and consumer credit boom." Will it be a hard or a soft landing?


• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism wonders why religion should be privileged over other belief systems when it comes to matters of conscience.


• Centauri Dreams has two interesting posts on the Saturn satellite system, one on Titan's apparent subsurface water, the other on the discovery of relatively warm water and organic compounds being emitted by Enceladus.


• Edward Lucas compares Tibet to the Baltic States. Tibet's biggest advantage, he argues, is that the Balts never had anyone like the Dalai Lama as their leader.


• Invisible College defines "The Rule of Law, in a Nutshell".


• "Who Were the Indo-Europeans?", Language Hat wonders. There is the non-trivial question or whether or not they existed as a group, but the comments are fun regardless of your stance.
  
• Peteris Cedrins at Marginalia commemorates the 59th anniversary of the Stalinist deportations from Latvia and the other Baltic states, actions which particularly targeted the current and future leaders of those countries.


• J. Otto Pohl links to a collection of documents recording atrocities committed against Sudeten Germans during their 1945 expulsion from Czechoslovakia.

[BRIEF NOTE] Chinese population futures and the economy

Over at Demography Matters, my co-bloggers Edward Hugh and Claus Vistesen have produced a couple of interesting pieces on how China's unique demographics will impact Chinese economic growth. Edward in "China's Inflation and Labour Shortage Problem, It's The Fertility Stupid!" outlines how, in the face of a growing shortage of young workers with consequent rising wages feeding into price increases labour shortage, inflation is rising and might create an unmanageable situation.

Obviously China can still get considerable growth by relocating the existing workforce across sectors to more productive ones. But the end of the labour intensive low economic value growth must now surely be in sight, and the big question is can China sustain inflation-free growth of the order of magnitude we have been seeing in recent years, bearing in mind that much of the recent growth in many of the higher growth developed economies - the US, the UK, Ireland, Spain - has been very labour intensive. My feeling is that it can't, this is why all those exhausted canaries swooning in Latvia have been so useful, and that we will see a slowdown in China which will not simply be cyclical, but rather structural. Possibly the moment of inflection (or tipping point) here will come around the time of the Olympic Games.

Elsewhere, Claus in "China's Demography and Economic Development" examined how the cohorts of young Chinese are steadily shrinking, thanks to several decades of below-replacement fertility triggered by China's one-child policy and the natural fertility decline evidenced by increasingly educated and urbanized populations around the world. China may be at serious risk of facing with central and eastern Europe, trying desperately to move desperately up the value chain beyond labor-intensive products while avoiding the large-scale emigration of Chinese workers to other countries. He worries that the consequences of this for the global economy could be severe given China's very high and growing profile in the international economy.

[LINK] "Police Close Off Lhasa's Muslim Quarter"

From the Associated Press "Police Close Off Lhasa's Muslim Quarter":

Police closed off Lhasa's Muslim quarter on Friday, two weeks after Tibetan rioters burned down the city's mosque during the largest anti-Chinese protests in nearly two decades.

Officers blockaded streets into the area, allowing in only area residents and worshippers observing the Muslim day of prayer. A heavy security presence continued in other parts of Lhasa's old city as cleanup crews waded through the destruction inflicted when days of initially peaceful protests turned deadly on March 14.

It was not clear why the area was cordoned off, although rioters had targeted businesses belonging to Chinese Muslim migrants known as Hui, who control much of Lhasa's commerce.

The Times of London, USA Today, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC carry more mentions, mostly parenthetical, about recent anti-Hui violence in Tibet. As well, Alexander Berzin provides an overview of the history of Islam in Tibet, while Wikipedia provides serviceable overviews of Tibetan Muslims and Hui.