Net International Investment Position (NIIP) 2011

The Net International Investment Position data for 2011 was retrieved from the IMF.

All countries with a (either positive or negative) balance larger than USD 100 billion are shown graphically:

Positive balance countries (data in USD billion). Top 5 are Japan, China, Germany, Switzerland and Hong Kong.

Negative balance countries (data in USD billion). Bottom 5 are United States, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Italy (surprising to see commodity exporters like Australia and Brazil with such negative balances).

Complete table (data in USD billion). The data is not consistent in itself as the total is about USD 1.5 trillion negative (a number of countries have no data but it is highly unlikely that they would add USD 1.5 trillion).



PS Chile has a balance of negative 24 billion.

Employment Population Ratio 15-64 for OECD and BRICS countries

We have retrieved the employment participation rate from the OECD site and plotted the following five graphs:

• Ranking of countries (all OECD countries with more than 5 million population plus BRICS) by total employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
• Ranking of countries by male employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
• Ranking of countries by female employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
• Ranking of countries by difference of male to female employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
• Change of employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) between 2011 and 2001 (data for India is not available)

Large (more than 50 million population) OECD countries are colored green, medium (5 to 50 million population) blue and BRICS countries red. Countries are shown with their two digit ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes.

Top 3: Switzerland, China, Netherlands

Bottom 3: South Africa, Turkey, India

Top 3: Switzerland, China, Japan

Bottom 3: South Africa, Hungary, Spain

Top 3: Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark

Bottom 3: Turkey, India, South Africa

Top 3: Finland, Sweden, Denmark

Bottom 3: India, Turkey, Mexico

Top 3: Chile, Germany, Poland

Bottom 3: US, Portugal, China

Surprises:

• Switzerland with highest employment to population to population ratios by a wide margin also for females
• Hardly any change in terms of employment to population ratio in Greece or Spain during the last ten years

From Chile´s perspective it is nice to see big improvement in the last ten year, but still much to be done with current ranked in the third quartile in terms of male employment and bottom quartile regarding female employment.

Finally a word of caution: employment data is normally survey based and significant differences with other data sources (say social security) are likely.

Business English

Following a blog post in the Economist, I stumbled across another post from the same publication and finally came across an EF publication which compares English proficiency across many countries. Results are in line with expectation with Scandinavia ranked very high (including the Dutch as honorary Scandinavians) and Central Eastern Europe as high (including also Singapore and Malaysia). Chile is not doing very well, I must say, with very low English proficiency (ranked 39 out of 54).

Earliest National Day Celebration Events

In case you ever wanted to know which countries celebrate the earliest events in their national holiday, here is a list for those countries commemorating events which occurred before 1800 (source mostly Wikipedia).

Year	Country	Celebrated Event
660 BC	Japan	Coronation Day First Emperor Jimmu
301	San Marino	Independence from the Roman Empire
461	Ireland	Death of St. Patrick
1291	Switzerland	Alliance against the Holy Roman Empire
1492	Spain	Columbus Discovers America
1523	Sweden	Election of Gustav Vasa as King of Sweden
1580	Portugal	Death of National Poet Luís de Camões
1776	United States	Declaration of Independence from Great Britain
1788	Australia	Founding of Sydney
1789	France	Storming of the Bastille
1791	Poland	Constitution of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

The list does not include sub-national territories where Scotland (70), England (303), Wales (589), Faroe Islands (1030), Minorca (1287), Catalonia (1714) and Sardinia (1794) also celebrate events before 1800.

Apologies if I have missed any event in the above list.

German Billionaires: Data Reconciliation

We  looked at the billionaire's lists available from Forbes and MM (Manager Magazin behind paywall, the 2010 list is available in Wikipedia) and compared the entries. To convert the numbers in Manager Magazin we used a exchange rate of EURUSD = 1.30.

Most strikingly the Forbes list is much smaller (55 entries with a total of USD 251.3 billion) than the MM list (156 entries with a total of 482.4 billion)

The differences in more detail are as follows:

• Five entries with a total wealth of USD 12.1 billion (according to Forbes) are not recorded in the MM billionaire list:
• Three entries (Schoeller, von Opel, Thurn und Taxis) appear in MM but significantly below the USD 1 billion threshold
• Ludwig Merckle is recorded with with USD 5.3 billion in Forbes, while there is significant valuation uncertainty after the near collapse of the group in 2008/2009, the group has successfully deleveraged und is probably worth above USD 1 billion
• Finally Vladimir Iorich (according to Forbes Russian born, German nationality and Swiss residence) is neither recorded by MM nor by the Bilanz list of billionaires resident in Switzerland)
• The Herz family is recorded with five entries in Forbes (Michael, Wolfgang, Günter, Daniela, Ingeburg), while MM only has the two family entries (one for Günter and Daniela and another one for Ingeburg and her children)
• 109 entries with a total wealth of USD 248.6 billion (according to MM) are not recorded in the Forbes list:
• Two entries with a net worth of more than USD 10 billion (Dieter Schwarz with Lidl and Kaufland, Reimann family with Reckitt Benckiser and Coty)
• Six entries with a net worth between USD 5 and 10 billion (Oetker family with Oetker Group, Braun family with B. Braun Melsungen, Jacobs family with Barry Callebaut and Adecco, Knauf family with Knauf Gips, Peter Thiel with early investments in Paypal, Facebook, Zynga and Linkedin, Liebherr family with Liebherr Group)
• 32 entries with a net worth between USD 2 and 5 billion
• 69 entries with a net worth netween USD 1 and 2 billion
• Finally 47 names are recorded on both lists (Forbes and MM) with a total wealth of USD 233.8 billion according to MM and USD 239.2 billion according to Forbes. Despite total wealth for these entries matching nicely, for individual records the differences are more significant as shown in the graph below:

Obviously putting together billionaire lists is a difficult tasks especially when it comes to valuation of private companies. Nevertheless the overall differences are quite striking. When German billionaires are recorded at 156 instead of 55, the number of German billionaires exceeds those of China or Russia and its per capita number increases from 6.4 to 18.3 (exceeding the US level of 13.2) billionaires per 10 million population.

In a future post we will look the billionaires resident in Switzerland, where Bilanz has 131 entries (USDCHF exchange rate 0.95) compared to Forbes with only nine entries. Obviously one major source of differences for this list can be easily explained in terms of Forbes' nationality criteria versus Bilanz residency criteria.

Major Foreign Holders of US Treasury Securities

The US treasury produces a handy list of major foreign holders of US securities which can be found here. As  of September 30, 2012 the total was USD 5.5 trillion up from USD 5.0 trillon on December 31, 2012.

The distribution between the major foreign holders is shown in the following graph (total USD 5.5 trillion):

The countries fall within one or more of the following categories:

• financial centers
• strong export nations
• participant in competitive quantitative easing and currency devaluation

When looking at the change for the first three quarters in 2012 against the absolute value the following picture emerges (Asian countries in green and Latin American countries in yellow).

The increase of Switzerland and Japan are notable while China and the Oil Exporters remained at a stable level.