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Mighty Mexico: How a pauper nation became an OECD giant
Mexico, living in the shadow of its Group of Seven NAFTA partners, Canada and the US is not poor relation widely supposed.
Far from it. By any standard Mexico is a major economic powerhouse, even putting itself ahead of China in living standards, having had a membership in the rich-man's club, the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
What's more, Mexico has 15 companies in the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world's largest companies.
Mexico's labour force is 52.8 million with a per capita income of US$16,900 a year, double that of China's. The OECD and WTO both rank Mexican workers as the hardest-working in the world in terms of the amount of hours worked. Unemployment rates are also the lowest of all OECD members at 3.2 per cent.
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Menace of safety: Reshaping trucking proves to be tricky job for Americans
There has been an ongoing war against trucking in the western world in favour or railways, barges and short sea - anything in fact, but those noisy, smelly do what they like, when they like, ubiquitous masculine brutish things called trucks that pollute the world.
Females make up 47 per cent of American workers, yet only make up six per cent of truck drivers. Movies such as "Every Which Way But Loose", "Smokey and the Bandit", "Breaker! Breaker!" and "White Line Fever" glorify trucking and the freedom of the open road.
While most appealing to adventurous young men, it is an industry that excludes everyone else and unsettles the settled society it serves - irritating unions, health and safety lobbyists, local industry protectionists, feminists, environmentalists and regulators.
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US presidential strategy in trade negotiations from Mexico to China
The purpose of US President Donald Trump's bullying bluster in North American Free Trade (NAFTA) talks is reportedly an appeal to his political base of working men and their wives.
While this is true, it is also more than that. It lays down a barrage of testy complaint, providing an air of suspicion in which he is free to cast a forensic eye over all. No longer is there any pretense of making nice, going along to get along or being diplomatic. It's all up-front, blunt and personal.
Given the Pavlovian nature of the western media which predictably howls in dismay, news of tough talking Trump trade negotiators' threats of severe tariffs and quotas is instantly conveyed to the president's political base in headlines and soundbites.
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Can the Great Circle Route again deliver what it did in yesteryear?
In the beginning there was the Great Circle Route that followed the curvature of the earth from Europe to North America running from UK-North Continent south of Greenland and into the St Lawrence River to the head of inland navigation at Montreal, from where goods were transshipped to a hinterland from New York to Chicago by rail and river craft and later by truck.
West coast Vancouver surpassed Montreal as Canada's largest port in the 1970s. Not that Montreal had ever been the main source of Asian imports, but with the every changing priorities in global shipping, what is true today might not be true tomorrow.
Thus, the idea of a container terminal at Quebec City, 250 kilometres downstream from Montreal, once tried in by CP Ships in 1969, has again been revived, this time brought to life by the advent of mega ships. While Montreal started Canada's role in the maritime container revolution the year before with the country's first quayside gantry crane to serve two 500-TEU cellular containerships, the Manchester Challenge and the Manchester Concorde. But times have changed since, and not to Montreal's advantage.
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