Afternoon roundup

So many browser tabs before the rebooting can happen...

• In praise of the Auditor-General
• Economists flocking to Silicon Valley
• NZTA runs ads supporting local government candidates who support NZTA cycleways. It's win-win. But probably not win-win-win.
• The Character Protection Racket. See also: Mt Vic, Wellington. 
• Fuelling the Energy Transition - a report from Energy Resources Aotearoa, which includes some neat case studies on marginal abatement costs and carbon prices driving uptake of lower-carbon tech.
• Globalisation and regional energy markets
• Pattrick Smellie on the polytech reforms
• What AirNZ status do you have to hit to make sure that you don't get seated next to the violent Mongrel Mob guy with Nazi tattoos on his face who's shirtless because they asked him to take off his Mongrel Mob jacket and he wasn't wearing anything under it?

McDonald's vs McWorld

You can get great bibimbap just about anywhere. But you can only get a McDonald's bulgogi burger in Korea.

Jeb Boniakowski wants a giant McDonald's that carries all of its different global offerings. But if part of the point of travel is obtaining experiences you can't get elsewhere, and if we're not far off from being able to get everything everywhere,* the only force countering McWorld may well wind up being McDonald's regionalisation. And wouldn't that just piss off Naomi Klein. I say keep things as they are.**

Update: McDonald's should issue a special passport. Collect a stamp in your passport when you eat a country's special regional McDonald's dish. And some kind of prize for the person who collects the most stamps. You'd need to have a picture in the passport to stop folks' just mailing the passport to friends.

HT: Matthew Yglesias.

* Except for Ethiopean food in New Zealand. Why oh Why can't we set our immigration policy to give priority to underrepresented cuisines? [Update: Keith Ng tells me that this place is still open; I'd heard it closed. Hoorah!]

** Yes, part of my policy advice here is spite-based. Spite can be a reason.

Ikea-based globalization measures

This week's inbox brought a new "Index of Globalization" measure. New Zealand fared a bit worse than I expected - 78.3 points, well outside of the top 15, so I had a peek at the sub-indices.

Thirty-seven percent of the aggregate figure comes from "Social Globalization"; thirty-one percent of that figure is a measure of "cultural proximity" [11.5% of the overall score], forty-five percent of which is "Number of Ikea (per capita)". So that's a five percentage point reduction in New Zealand's overall score because we have no Ikea.

The highest "Cultural Proximity" score was Singapore, 2001: 97.4. New Zealand scored a 50.2; if we went from zero Ikea per capita to the top of the scale, we'd then have scored a 95.2. So it's not particularly puzzling that NZ scored very very badly on this measure.

You could say it's pretty silly to base 5% of a measure of overall globalization on the number of Ikeas in a country. But not having Ikeas does signal something relevant either about local demand or about how local planning authorities treat international firms, the latter likely as consequence of domestic competitors lodging anti-competitive complaints through the RMA about effects on traffic.

We also score relatively poorly in Political Globalization, undoubtedly affected by the smallish number of countries that reckon it worthwhile keeping embassies here and by that we participate in relatively few UN Security Council Missions. I'm less than convinced we ought to worry much about either of these.

But I was surprised that New Zealand scored poorly on measures of trade restrictions. If phytosanitary restrictions count as "hidden import barriers", then that could perhaps account for it. But our mean tariff rate is very low, taxes on international trade are a trivial part of current revenue unless they count excise-equivalent duty on imported alcohol and tobacco collected by Customs NZ as being tax on international trade, and there aren't really any capital account restrictions.

If I hear back from KOF on why they scored NZ poorly on trade restrictions, I'll update.