Video Game for Economists

This article listed 7 video games in economics.

1. Capitalism
2. Virtonomics
3. Pharaoh
4. Cities: Skylines
5. Theme Park World
6. Civilisation
7. Animal Crossing: New Horizon

https://inomics.com/advice/the-best-video-games-for-economists-1454883

Bruce Lee's Quote

To all Bruce Lee's Fans out there, here is a quote for you. 

"You must be shapeless and formless like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can also drip and splash. So, be like water my friend."

-Bruce Lee

When Will the Economy Recover from the Pandemic?

An article published in 16 September 2020 on the shape of economic recovery. Will it be a V, W, L or U-shaped? According to the article:

In the U.S. and Japan, 23% of CEOs said W-shape recovery. 

In China, 21% of CEOs, anticipate a quick, V-shaped recovery. 

Gulf Region CEOs feel the most pessimistic about potential economic recovery. 57% predict L-shaped. 

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/shapes-of-recovery-when-will-the-global-economy-bounce-back/

Difficulties in Economic Forecasting During Pandemic

An Excerpt from Harvard Business Review, May 18, 2020:

"By April 29, the most optimistic forecast among the 28 institutions in our weekly coronavirus survey saw the U.S. economy contracting 8.2%. The most pessimistic projected a huge 65.0% contraction — a spread of 56.8 percentage points — with an average of -31.4%. While most institutions expected a rebound in Q3, some saw further declines. And in Q4, although all economists projected growth of some form, forecasts ranged from a minimum of +1.1% and a maximum of +70.0%. The spreads observed in recent weeks are by far the widest recorded since we started covering the U.S. a decade ago."

Three Reasons Why it is Difficult to Forecast (according to the article):

1. The economic impact and speed of policy changes have never been higher.

2. The pandemic is undermining the reliability of economic data - the bedrock of any good  

    macroeconomic model.

3. The models are diverging so much is because economic forecasters are not familiar with evolution of  

    the coronavirus outbreak in each country.

https://hbr.org/2020/05/why-economic-forecasting-is-so-difficult-in-the-pandemic

HBR Staff/carlosalvarez/Getty Images

5-Steps to Open the Economy Post Pandemic

According to the IMF article below (21 April 2020), the 5 steps are:

1. Gain public confidence.
2. Prioritize which economic sector to be opened first.
3. State how the financial support measures plan post-pandemic.
4. Explain cross-border containment process to prevent new outbreak.
5. Communicate effectively to the public on the well-thought-through plan.

https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/covid-19-how-do-we-re-open-economy?gclid=CjwKCAjwh7H7BRBBEiwAPXjadvUqMpAxI3knK5s9yy8QQRoicgmXY3JfkBxegE28UfDgg0fHHTu6uRoCln0QAvD_BwE

https://voxeu.org/article/five-lessons-tracking-global-pandemic-economy

Gig-Centric

The gig economy consists of four main sectors.

According to Mastercard, these are the following:

Asset-Sharing Services - home/car/boat/P2P equipment sharing; Airbnb, HomeAway, TURO.

Transportation-Based Services - carpooling, goods/restaurant delivery; Uber, BlaBlaCar, DOORDASH.

Professional Services - microwork, tech/coding, design, translation/writing, SEO services, business work; Upwork, Catalant, Freelancer, and similar gig economy platforms.

Handmade Goods & Misc - babysitting, handmade crafts, pet/home services; Etsy, Airtasker, Care.com.

The rest you can read here: https://capitalcounselor.com/gig-economy-statistics/

Source: Internet

Kritikan Kritis

An article in Tinta  Minda (in Malay) on critical thinking.

https://www.bernama.com/bm/tintaminda/news.php?id=1881038

Petikan Karya Pantun tradisi Minang:

"Nasi bungkus siap tersaji,
Buat hidangan makan siang;
Sejak tikus naik haji,
Banyak kucing yang sembahyang."

Book on Amazon.

Best Processor for Your Laptop

Read here https://laptopswhizz.com/what-is-the-best-processor-for-my-laptop/

Excerpt:

"What are different Brands of Processors:
Intel 8088 (1979)
MOS Technology 6502 (1975)
Zilog Z80 (1976)
AMD Opteron 240 (2003)
RCA COSMAC CDP 1802 (1976)
AIM PowerPC 601 (1992)
Motorola 68000 (1980) Breakthrough application: Apple Macintosh (1984)
Intel Pentium (1993) Breakthrough application: Brand-name processors"

5 Top Virtual & Augmented Reality Trend in 2020 - Forbes

Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) = Extended Reality (XR).

4 Companies selling their products via virtual online:
i. IKEA
ii. Rolex
iii. Glasses
iv. Measuring shoes size.

If you have business online, you might want to think of XR and 5G. Watch the video.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/01/24/the-5-biggest-virtual-and-augmented-reality-trends-in-2020-everyone-should-know-about/#6fe204e824a8

Explanation by Bernard Marr

Top 10 Blogs on COVID-19 Acccording to the IMF

Here is the link to the 10 Blogs. 

https://blogs.imf.org/2020/08/13/top-10-blogs-on-covid-19/

Gig-Centric

A short article I wrote on Gig economy as a new source of economic growth. It is in Malay Language.
Happy Reading.

http://www.myaidconference.com/alumni-aid-menulis---umum_artikel17.html

Subscription for Sukuk PRIHATIN ends September 17

Have you subscribed Sukuk Prihatin? Minimum subscription is RM500. It will end on September 17, 2020. Make sure you read the Knowledge Pack before investing. It is a two-year tenure so you are not going to be able to use the money for the next two years. Invest wisely.

The link below for a quick read. 

https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2020/08/20/sukuk-prihatin-how-you-can-help-malaysia-while-earning-something-for-yourse/1895447

Happy Malaysia Day on Sept 16, 2020

Digital Nomads - A New Rich, A New Elite

Digital nomad is simply working remotely. Digital nomads are the new elite. Nomadic workforce. The new rich in terms of space and time. A nomadic lifestyle in the global village with a touch of upscale nomads, i.e., the professionals.

Once upon a time, people roam the earth freely, now we do the same, but remotely.

The big question is, do they harm the economy?

Working 9 to 5 is the relic of the 20th century. Gig Economy and Corporate Gig are not just fads.

An interesting read for the digital nomads below and selected Excerpt:

"It’s not always the money that lures. As the nomads say, “I don’t want a job, I want I want a lifestyle”.

PROs

1. IBM’s Smarter Workplace Institute found that remote workers tend to be happier, more productive, more engaged with their jobs and perceive their companies to be more innovative because of flexible work arrangements.

2. Remote workers are actually more focused. They are removed from office distractions, like meetings, ringing phones and office small talk. They also tend to remain in their jobs longer or are more loyal to the company, decreasing employee turnover. 

3. Allowing a portion of your staff remote options allows the company to utilise office space more efficiently, and also grow without adding expensive office space.

CONs

1. The notion of physically being together ensures there is constant, even if subliminal, communication throughout the day. A remote workforce would perhaps miss out on nuances of daily office exchanges.

2. How do you tax digital nomads, especially ones who work globally, without formal work permits, for multinational companies who provide services that are also global, or cloud-based? Labour laws for the new world of work will have to be overhauled.

3. A remote workforce requires a different style of management. The company culture will have to shift from a time-based, clock-watching culture to performance or output-based culture. When managers say they can’t trust whether or not their remote workforce will be productive if they are not on site, then I simply tell them that they’ve hired the wrong people."

https://www.acumenmagazine.co.za/articles/the-rise-of-the-digital-nomads-and-the-impact-they-ll-have-on-business-8263.html

Lifestyle

WeWork to Expand with USD4.4 billion funding from Japan, 2017.

Japan - The Wagyu Mecca

Halal Wagyu.
Wagyu vs Kobe Meat.
What makes wagyu the world's best beef?

Excerpt from an Interview 

"Let’s begin with the burning question: Are wagyu cows really getting massages, drinking beer and listening to classical music?

Federico: While it’s true that the cows are treated like members of the family, and I have in fact met one farmer who plays music for his wagyu, this is largely a misconception. The real key to their quality lies in the genetics, the high quality of food they are fed, and the fact that each farmer develops their own complex process to create the perfect size and shape of cow.

Hisato: Also, they have longer lifespans than ordinary cattle, which significantly improves flavour. Wagyu cows live for about 30 months, sometimes 35. American cows, by comparison, are slaughtered at 15-22 months."

https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/restaurants/what-makes-wagyu-the-worlds-best-beef

https://blog.halal-navi.com/id/7-fakta-menarik-tentang-daging-wagyu/

The Grade.

Fiverr Case Study on Gig Economy - Sloan School of Management, MIT

Here is an article published in  2019. On Fiverr and Skills Provision based on Network Perspective. 

The Abstract:

Understanding the Skill Provision in Gig Economy from a Network Perspective: A Case Study of Fiverr 

KEMAN HUANG, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA JINHUI YAO, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Sydney, Australia MING YIN, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, USA 

The recent emergence of gig economy facilitates the exchange of skilled labor by allowing workers to showcase and sell their skills to a global market. Despite the recent effort on thoroughly examining who workers in gig economy are and what their experience in gig economy are like, our knowledge on how exactly workers provide their skills in gig economy, and how worker’s strategies of providing and expanding skills relate to their success in gig economy is still lacking. In this paper, we conduct a case study on a prominent gig economy platform, Fiverr.com, to better understand the provision of skills on it through large-scale, data-driven analysis. In particular, we propose the concept of “skill space” from a network perspective to characterize the relationship between different skills by measuring how frequently workers provide different skills together. Through our analysis, we reveal interesting patterns in worker’s provision of skills on Fiverr. We then show how these patterns change over time and differ across subgroups of workers with different characteristics. In addition, we find that providing a set of skills that are highly-related with each other correlates with a better overall performance in gig economy, and when workers expand their skillsets, expanding to a new skill that is highly-related to the existing skills takes less time and is associated with better performance on the new skill. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for gig economy workers and platform in general. 

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Collaborative and social computing; 

Additional Key Words and Phrases: Gig economy; Skill Space; Skill Provision; Skill Expansion; Skill Relatedness

http://mingyin.org/paper/CSCW-19/skillnetwork.pdf

One of the Results.

2017 Perspective on Gig Economy - Stanford

Almost one-hour video by Professor Paul Oyer on Gig Economy. The last 10 minutes of Q& A is the most interesting. As one of the audience pointed out, the view presented is not quite balanced. If the speech is delivered during COVID-19 crisis,  some of the statements would take a different course. I think he summarises the up and down in the Gig economy well: "Flexibility vs. Instability."   The statistics are also interesting.

The Rise of Corporate Gigs

The Excerpt from the link below:

"But now a new set of people would emerge, and be called as CORPORATE GIGS.

These jobs will vary from its functionality like Human Resources Management, IT, Finance, Marketing and even Law.

It is estimated that around 5-7% of the employee base will be a part of the gig model in the traditional companies."

https://www.businessprocessincubator.com/content/gig-economy-a-new-trend-in-employment/

Digital Nomads and Gig Economy

I am writing a short feature on Gig workers for a newspaper online. Found this article talking about digital nomads. 

Excerpt:

A fast-growing sub-population of gig providers are now made up of highly skilled knowledge workers who get engaged and paid as subject matter experts for a particular product or service. Since most knowledge work can be carried out virtually these gig providers can be engaged purely via digital channels. Since all happen cloud-based (= online) the gig providers are location independent, and since they are getting paid on a per-project basis it doesn’t matter if they work in pajamas from their bedroom halfway across the globe, or from a cafe at the beach. The main limiting factor is not a location but reliable internet access, hence the term ‘digital nomads’.

https://drfrankpeter.com/digital-transformation/future-of-work-digital-nomads-gig-economy/

Digital Nomads

Uber, the Poster Child of Gig Economy

Here is a very positive outlook on Gig Economy, written by the President of Nu Skin.

Excerpt:

"Attacking the gig economy for its imperfections is like blaming roads for having potholes. Rather than tear up the way, why not patch it with things like portable retirement savings programs? The gig economy isn't perfect, and it may never be. But it's helped millions of people around the world build a better life, and to us, that's reason enough to invest in it."

https://www.nuskin.com/content/corpcom/en_US/thesource/successdrivers/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-gig-economy.html

A Malay Article:

https://www.bharian.com.my/berita/nasional/2020/06/696052/segmen-baharu-kerja-ekonomi-gig-mampu-tangani-isu-pengangguran

The Muamalat Newsletter, June 2020

The Newsletter of the Faculty of Economics and Muamalat, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia. I was one of the Editors in the very first edition many years ago. 

The December edition will be published end of 2020. Please feel free to contribute on any topic.

Permainan Video, Jati Diri dan Aspek Ekonomi

Artikel menarik di Tinta Minda, BERNAMA. Ada tiga buah buku yang dicadangkan. Banyak maklumat terkini berkaitan permainan video dan terdapat 10 tips berguna untuk dimanafaatkan.

Petikan rencana:

"Ketika mengupas tentang letusan platform media sosial yang mendefinisikan kehidupan belia hari ini, kita tidak boleh terlepas daripada menyingkap sejarah kejayaan Facebook pada 2006. Manakala jika membicarakan tentang letusan inovasi telefon pintar, kita tidak dapat lari daripada memulakan perbincangan dengan menyorot tahun pelancaran Apple Iphone pada 2007."

.https://www.bernama.com/bm/tintaminda/news.php?id=1871617

Angry Birds 2

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is a mobile multiplayer online battle arena developed and published by Moonton. Released in 2016, the game has become popular in Southeast Asia and was among the games chosen for the first medal event esports competition at the 2019 Southeast Asian Games in the Philippines.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Healing Global Economy Post COVID-19

An article in the IMF Blog. 

An Excerpt:

“The networked problems of our time are amenable to networked solutions,” writes Ian Goldin, making the case for international cooperation not only among governments but also in civil society and business. Joseph Stiglitz argues for rewriting the rules of the economy to protect workers and the environment, calling for greater global and national solidarity. Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff, and others consider ways to handle a coming wave of debt restructuring for the poorest countries. Kevin Watkins urges debt relief for the poorest countries, including by converting debt liabilities into investments that protect children. Other contributors focus on the role of new technologies, climate, and public health, including vaccine development. Finally, the IMF’s Ratna Sahay and coauthors grapple with race and racism in the economics profession, recognizing that addressing biases begins at home."

I particularly like the reference to the baritone Singer Cohen. You should listen to "Dance to the end of Love" by him and do a little research on why the song was written. 

In the words of songwriter Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

https://blogs.imf.org/2020/09/01/healing-the-fractures-of-the-global-economy/

Latest Statistics on Informal Economy in Malaysia

Here is an article that summarises the Informal Economy, including gig workers, in Malaysia. The data is up to 2019. Informative and the future of Gig economy is indeed promising.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341041223_The_demise_of_formal_employment_-_A_literature_update_on_informality

Different Shades of Crises

Prof. Carmen Reinhart, appointed as Vice President and Chief Economist at World Bank Group effective June 2020, is one of the leading expert in global crisis. Her areas of expertise are international capital flows, finance, and macroeconomics, and she has published extensively on economies in Asia and Latin America, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-09-13/crisis-next-time

Carmen Reinhart

A Modal Shift from Road to Rail

High Speed Train and Thailand's Trans-Asean Bullet Train. Partly, in anticipation of the ageing society. Less burden to the environment as well.

https://www.ihra-hsr.org/_pdf/Mr.Nakorn_Chantasorn.pdf

Kedah Rubber City

A project in Kedah. The expected outcome is new products that could be marketed worldwide. 

https://www.bharian.com.my/bisnes/lain-lain/2020/02/653227/kedah-rubber-city-dijangka-tarik-pelaburan-rm10-bilion

Building Leishenshan Hospital in 10 Days

Willpower and resilience in the face of adversity. Chinalisation vs. Globalisation.

A short video below showing the process.

Virus Crisis, Sukuk & an Epic Rebound

 I like the author's opinion on the "Epic Rebound." Will borrow the term in my next project.

https://www.gulf-times.com/story/659664/Virus-crisis-makes-2020-a-difficult-year-for-sukuk