Category: Economics

Categories
Economics Liberty

[686] Of levy on CD-R

I had wanted to blog about the Music Council of Malaysia’s call for a levy on blank CD-R earlier. For some reason however, it slipped off my mind. Thanks to an article in The Star today, it came back to me. I think, if you’ve been reading enough of my stuff, you know what I’ve to say. For those that don’t, I’m don’t share the same table with the Music Council.

The Music Council, according to an article in The Star, states that:

…it had asked for the levy because it is concerned over the loss in revenue to the music industry whenever customers make copies of music CDs (see In.Tech, Dec 8). It believes that two out of three CD-Rs sold in the country are used for copying audio-visual material.

The Recording Industry Association of Malaysia claimed that such ‘home recordings’ are a serious problem for the industry.

The nature of the issue is almost similar to protectionism. Yet, this case isn’t quite about competition because the music and CD-R aren’t very comparable. But the bottomline is, an industry is trying to make their product relatively more competitive to some other good not by increasing the quality of their good but instead by forcing the other good’s cost to go up. In the end, it’s nothing more than an interest group with protectionism in mind.

Earlier, Malaysian telcos dealers and distributors have requested the certain Malaysian authority to restrict competition because competition hurts their profit.

By saying that I disagree with the levy, I’m not saying I accept piracy. Duplicating copyrighted media without permission, as much as I hate to admit it, is plain stealing. Still, accussing everybody that uses CD-R is involved in piracy is unfair. Imposing blanket levy is even more unfair.

What the music industry needs is a stronger anti-piracy enforcement, not protectionism. In fact, I’d rather see stakeholders in the music industry to initiate legal actions against those involved in piracy, like what the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been doing against illegal file sharers for the past few years in the US. Legal actions won’t introduce market frictions, unlike levying. At least in the long term.

p/s – for the whole morning, I couldn’t access my own site. I couldn’t access a few other sites like Screenshots either.

pp/s – turned out it wasn’t just me. There was a network outage near Putrajaya yesterday. (via)

Categories
ASEAN Economics

[681] Of India’s deal is no FTA

India must be dreaming. It wants a free trade treaty with ASEAN but at the same time wants too many stuff excluded from the FTA. What was India thinking? Did they think they can bully us into it?

I’m glad to know that ASEAN, represented by Malaysian trade minister, gives India a solid no today. I think India hasn’t realized that ASEAN doesn’t take shit.

No FTA is better than one-sided FTA. ASEAN deserves a better deal.

Categories
Economics Politics & government

[680] Of Pengkalan Pasir and Malaysian general election in 2008: hypothesis testing

So, Barisan Nasional won Pengkalan Pasir with a slim margin. A recount confirmed BN’s victory. But does this mean PAS in deep shit? More precisely, if this by-election acts as a signal for the next Malaysian general election, does this mean support for Barisan Nasional’s growing in Kelantan?

Quite hard to say. Let’s see some statistics to see how hard it is.

First of all, we know from the New Straits Times that the first count showed that BN received 7419 votes, PAS 7290, Ibrahim Ali 414 and there were 160 spoiled votes. In total, 15283 votes.

Now, let’s assume two things to make life simpler.

Kick Ibrahim Ali out of our equation, like how he was kicked from UMNO. And then, we shoved all the spoiled votes into Ibrahim Ali’s throat before we kick him. That leaves us a total of 14709.

Thanks to the two assumptions, now we have only BN and PAS to worry about. The assumptions help making things easier since it allows us to use bootstrapping method – the easiest way to get a standard error. Bootstrapping gives us a standard deviation of roughly 0.5 with 60.64 for SE.

Now, my hypothesis is that the difference between BN and PAS – a difference of 129 votes – is zero. That makes t = 129/60.64, which makes t about 2.13. t is as in the t-distribution.

Using t-test, the hypothesis at 25% significance level is rejected.

However, at 10% and lower significance levels, the hypothesis is significant. Doesn’t necessarily mean it must be accepted but it can’t be rejected.

So, did anybody win outright statistically? I don’t know. It’s likely the answer is no. More importantly, if this is a signal of things to come in 2008, Pengkalan Pasir is a crystal ball with industrial defect.

Anyway, given this entry is written at 2 AM, you might be reading crap with bad statistics. Hah!

Heh. I myself am not convinced with the statistics; the hypothesis testing in particular looks odd. I’ve done this before extensively but I haven’t touched real statistics in a long time. So, you are more than welcomed to check them up or even refined them to include Ibrahim Ali and the spoiled votes.

Categories
Economics Sports

[677] Of greedy protectionists within Malaysian telcos industry

When limited members of a society benefit from restricted competition at others’ expense, it’s all too possible that a protectionist is lurking somewhere, menacingly. According to The Star yesterday:

Prepaid mobile phone users may no longer enjoy the convenience of buying their top-up cards at sundry shops and coffeeshops.

The Energy, Water and Communications Ministry is considering barring telecommunications companies from appointing such stores as retail agents for the cards.”

Minister Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaik said the move was vital to protect the business of telecommunications distributors and dealers.

This is no doubt a protectionist’s wet dream.

Think about it.

If the government enacts the restriction, on one hand, the would be adversely affected business owners would lose legitimate future income – reduction in wealth – to the groups that are lobbying the government to restrict competition. In simpler term, it’s called stealing. Theives steal and those lobbyists are downright robbers.

We, the consumers on the other hand, would have to purchase these cards from few selected sellers. That means consumers have to put forth extra effort – another word for cost – in order to search and purchase a good.

Worse, these sellers would monopolize a market niche when they aren’t supposed to under efficient conditions. Meanwhile, it might be true that the consumers won’t have to fork extra cash to make a purchase with the new ruling, but a loss in convenience is a loss in consumers surplus.

The government mustn’t let this new, unfair ruling come into being. The telcos distributors and dealers are merely thinking about their profits and absolutely not about the market efficiency. Neither do they care for other individuals and groups with honest wants and needs.

For these reasons, that restriction mustn’t be imposed. Free market must reign supreme, for fairness’ sake, in the name of the people.

One more thing – if the lobbyists’ side can’t stand the heat, they should get out of the kitchen.

p/s – Ajax is currently in deep shit, again. But this win helps a lot.

Categories
Conflict & disaster Economics Environment Politics & government

[664] Of Karam Singh Walia for president!

Mr. Karam Singh Walia, by all standards, is definitely Malaysia’s most well-known environmental journalist. Almost every week, it seems almost everyday to me, a less-than-popular Malay idiom will come out of his mouth with his hands flying in the air relentlessly, comically.

For at least five years now, he has been highlighting all the little local environmental issues on Malaysian air. By little, by no way do I mean insignificant. In fact, he’s the one that is doing more to green’s cause than anybody else that I could think of at the moment. More importantly, he is perhaps one of the few that are fostering green grassroots in the country.

According to World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) Malaysia, two of his notable works are:

Of particular note, in October 2000, Karam’s coverage of Cameron Highlands placed highland forest conservation issues firmly in the public eye. His efforts in Cameron Highlands resulted in the Federal Cabinet’s freeze on development in the highlands. Subsequently, a special Cabinet Committee on Co-ordination of Highlands and Islands was formed to help plan and manage developments of highlands and islands in the country.

In 2002, Karam took up the issue on the threats to the Bukit Gasing green belt in Petaling Jaya. There was an immediate response from the government and within 24 hours of the first newscast, Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur had promised to gazette its part of the hill as a protected area.

A net search reveals that he has won several awards. Last year according to WWF-Malaysia further, the Sultan of Perak, which is the organization patron, conferred Mr. Karam Singh Walia with Patron’s Award last year.

So, yeah, if there is to be a green party in Malaysia, I’ll nominate Karam Singh Walia as the party’s president!

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

Yeah! And the __earthinc welcomes Mr. Annan back from his prolonged vacation over the Pacific. He’ll be visiting Pengkalan Pasir soon to investigate current influx of aliens into the area. Rumors have it that these aliens have more than doubled human population there. Worse and to many’s horror, these aliens, allegedly, are stealing people’s genital in the open!

p/s – damn. should end this entry with a pantun?

pp/s – whoa! Zarqawi, that alleged Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, might be dead! (via Iraq The Model via Pito’s Salas via Technorati).

If the leak is confirmed, what an achievement it is – it hasn’t been too long since Southeast Asian bomber was killed in Indonesia. This might demoralize all those terrorists. Osama Bin Laden, the real wanted man, is still somewhere out there, however.

Then again, which GM workers care about Zarqawi and all the hocus-pocus when GM plans to cut 30,000 jobs, eh?