Next outsourcing destination : Africa

Looks like my earlier blurb (23 Aug 2003) about Africa being the next new outsourcing destination is rapidly becoming true.

news.com :

After looking on for years as Asia cashed in on the outsourcing boom, Africa is now aggressively seeking its piece of the action.

Datamonitor, a consulting company that follows outsourcing, estimates that there are 54,000 call-center jobs in the most advanced countries in Africa out of a total of 6 million such jobs worldwide. But the 54,000 figure only includes South Africa and the countries of North Africa, not emerging call centers in places like Ghana and Kenya.

"There's a lot of potential in Africa," said Peter Ryan, an analyst at Datamonitor. "India, the Philippines and Canada are relatively mature, and that means wages and real estate are higher. So companies are asking, 'Are there other locations?'"

South Africa is far ahead of the rest of the continent, with an estimated 500 call centers employing about 31,000 people. South Africa boasts that the accents of its workers are neutral enough to fool English speakers everywhere. It also has the same time zones as parts of Europe, making doing business easier ... [continued]

(2005-02-04 17:42:37 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

Vertical Suburbia in Singapore

Here's Jim Kunstler's reply to my query in its entirety (after permission to do so) :

lowem:

I've got a question : I wonder, is the super-dense vertical suburbia where I live (Singapore, over 6000 people/sq km) any better or worse than America's horizontal suburban sprawl?

Jim Kunstler:

Let me try to unravel this question, since I do not know how the skyscrapers are deployed on the terrain in Singapore.

First, the skyscraper -- really any building opver seven stories -- is a product of the cheap energy age. While it is a good thing to make cities dense, the skyscraper tends to represent hypertrophy, excessive growth. One can't fail to notice, for example, that much of central Paris and London provide a very rich cosmopolitan experience at seven stories or less. I think we must regard the skyscraper as a still-experimental building type. It is only about 100 years old. It has existed because of conditions made possible by fossil fuels. It remains to be seen how well they will function in a world of fossil fuel scarcity.

Personally, I believe the advanced nations will have trouble with their electric grids in the decades ahead. In North America this will be due to our depleting supply of natural gas, combined with the difficulty of getting Liquid Natural Gas from distant sources. The political difficulty of re-starting a comprehensive nuclear power program here in America suggests that, at the very best, there will be a decade-long delay in building new nuclear generation plants. I think this bodes rather darkly for New York City, a city constructed almost entirely of tall buildings. I can't imagine they will work very well with the electric supply sporadically cutting off.

lowem:

Thanks for your prompt and insightful reply. May I quote you on the peakoil.com forums? :)

Should blackouts occur, well, I live on a low floor, fortunately. Too bad for the neighbours on the 15th floor, or in other estates, 40th floor, and the upcoming 50-floor dwellers of "Duxton Plain" are sure gonna have fun doing some exercise : http://www.ura.gov.sg/competition/results.html

I'd suppose it's all a matter of how frequent and how long the blackouts are. When the gas stations, water pumps and other pieces of critical infrastructure stop working, that's when it will start to get hairy ..

Guess it means that both vertical and horizontal suburbia have got their own sets of problems.

Back to the basic problems, then, of population & "growth"..

Jim Kunstler:

Sure, go ahead.

I also think the natural gas situation will redound on the skyscraper issue. We're getting to a critical point with our North American gas supplies. You can't not run the furnaces in a 20 story apartment building for 36 hours in February.

Oil Crisis Down Under

Bill Powers wrote on financialsense.com :

While Australia's natural resource-based economy has enjoyed tremendous growth along with the rebound in commodity prices worldwide, the country's oil production continues to decline at a staggering pace. The country's production peaked at 805,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd) in 2000 and only averaged 490,000 bopd in the first 10 months of 2004 (Source: US Department of Energy). I expect Australia's oil production to continue to drop further in 2005 due to the lack of major new projects scheduled to come online. In this issue, I will examine many of the reasons behind Australia's precipitous oil production decline, how the country is coping with the issue and most importantly, what it means for energy investors ... [continued]

See also :

1. China may have peaked 3Q2004 (20050125)
2. Peak Gas, Canada (20041224)
3. Peak Oil, Oman (20041207)
4. Norway about to peak (20041029)
5. Peak Oil, Australia (20040711)
6. "North Sea production ... peaked in 1999" (20040607)
7. Indonesia Becomes A Net Crude Oil Importer (20040520)

(2005-02-04 10:41:22 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

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