GREAT BRITAIN

GREAT BRITAIN

Times of London on Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s response to recent events: For a man who has a reputation for not letting colleagues get a word in edgeways, Gordon Brown has become a convert to the virtues of saying nothing. As though under police arrest, he has exercised his right to remain silent.

Mr. Brown interrupted his holiday in Scotland to do social work, to coach sport at a local school, to grant an interview to his local paper. But then something mildly diverting happens such as Scotland repatriating to Libya the only person convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, and England’s cricket team regaining the Ashes in a Lazarus-like recovery to form that the prime minister can only dream about and Mr. Brown decides that he is the strong, silent type after all.

Reflecting on the command of communication skills he displayed on his infamous YouTube address to the nation, he chose to say nothing. It took him a day to summon the words to toast England’s Ashes triumph when, if he were truly that tongue-tied, a simple “Congratulations” would have done. It was not until Aug. 25 that he cleared his throat (only a little) on Lockerbie.

This from a man who had instant views on the death of Michael Jackson (“very sad”); who, on hearing of Susan Boyle’s breakdown, hoped that the Britain’s Got Talent singer was “OK because she is a really, really nice person”; who “was deeply saddened to hear the news” of (British reality TV star) Jade Goody’s death.

But Libya? This is an occasion when a long silence looks like the smart option only if you cannot think of a good enough answer.

JAPAN

Asahi Shimbun of Tokyo on improving social security: Fixing the troubled social security system and rebuilding the weakened social safety net have emerged as major topics on the campaign trail.

It is important to combine these proposals in an organized way into a multilevel approach to improve the economic viability of households. It is clearly time to promote efforts to develop a comprehensive policy agenda to achieve what can be called “livelihood security.”

In the area of employment, calls are growing within both the ruling and opposition camps for institutionalizing an emergency program to subsidize living expenses for people undergoing job training. There can be no livelihood security without job stability. Programs to support people seeking job opportunities should be enhanced.

In the area of education, the parties have made a variety of proposals in their election manifestoes, such as making public senior high schools practically tuition-free and the creation of a grant scholarship program. Making education available to anybody is essential for reversing the trend toward increasing poverty and economic inequality.

All the political parties owe the public detailed explanations about their visions for the future of livelihood security.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Khaleej Times of Dubai, on the Obama administration: The Obama administration’s decision to probe cases of prisoner abuse by the CIA in its secret prisons around the world deserves to be widely welcomed.

The move, coming as it does within days of its decision to open U.S. prisons in Iraq to the Red Cross, signals that the administration is keen to break from the long years of abuse of human rights and rule of law under the Bush administration.

At the same time, President Barack Obama has ordered changes in future interrogations, bringing in agencies besides the CIA under the direction of the FBI and to be supervised by his own national security adviser. The administration has pledged that questioning would be controlled by the Army Field Manual, with strict rules.

All the U.S. government employees, whether the CIA, FBI or mercenaries like Blackwater, have to be brought under the rule of law, if President Obama wants to see his country’s image as the land of the free restored.

INDIA

Hindu of Madras, on the global economy: Since the current global recession is fundamentally different from run-of-the-mill recessions, the turnaround will not be simple. Nor will it be easy this time to fix supply and demand side problems of the global economy. Conventional approaches such as easy monetary policy and exchange rate depreciation will have to be used in conjunction with other policy measures for an extended period. In its latest report, the International Monetary Fund, which from the beginning has been less pessimistic than the World Bank and other global institutions, says that although the recovery has started, sustaining it will require “delicate rebalancing” acts both within and across countries. On the supply side, financial intermediation the allocation of resources that is central to growth will be impaired in many developed countries. Their financial systems have been rendered partly dysfunctional. In emerging economies, capital flows that have decreased sharply may not revive fully in the next few years. On the demand side, even though the global economy will very likely resume its trend growth rate, the growth will not be strong enough to reduce unemployment at least in the near-term. Besides, all recovery forecasts are predicated on a combination of fiscal stimulus and inventory restocking by firms rather than on strong private consumption and spending on fixed investments.

Sooner or later, fiscal stimulus will have to be phased out and inventory adjustment will come to an end. Global recovery can be sustained by two rebalancing acts. First, there has to be a shift from public to private spending. Secondly, aggregate demand across countries needs to be rebalanced, with a shift from domestic to foreign demand in the United States and a reverse shift from foreign to domestic demand in the rest of the world, especially Asia. The rebalancing as visualized may not take place easily. Looking to the immediate future, there ought to be a reasonable degree of coordination among countries to sustain the nascent recovery.