GB:s nya drag – för att kunna sälja klassikern Twister igen

Varje år drabbas en miljard människor av det som WHO kallar för ”försummade tropiska sjukdomar” – en halv miljon av dem dör. Men ett innovativt sätt att finansiera forskning och utveckling skulle både kunna rädda liv och minska fattigdomen i världen, skriver Foreign Affairs. I stället för att låta sina tillgångar investeras i till exempel amerikanska stadsobligationer – med en avkastning på mellan fyra och sex procent – skulle företag som Apple kunna finansiera forskning och i utbyte få patent på läkemedlen. How an Innovative Patent Law Could Incentivize R & D and Save Millions of Lives By Christopher B. Barrett 25 september, 2023 Every year, a set of illnesses that the United Nations and the World Health Organization have termed “neglected tropical diseases” affect more than a billion people and kill around half a million of them—most of whom subsist on less than $2 a day. Those who survive are often disabled or disfigured for life. Take schistosomiasis, which is caused by parasitic worms living in fresh water in the tropics. Every year, an estimated 200 million people are infected. The disease kills about 200,000 people each year; many more are left with damaged organs. But unlike malaria—which, because its mortality rate is so high, has been the focus of an enormous amount of private investment, foreign aid, and philanthropic giving—schistosomiasis has never been a global health priority. As a result, it attracts very little private or public investment. Eradication is now a possibility for malaria, thanks to new vaccines, but no schistosomiasis vaccine exists. A similar dynamic affects tropical agriculture. There are many crops that are important to diets and livelihoods in poorer countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but are not traded much internationally, such as millet, yam, and enset. Crops such as corn, wheat, and soy—which are cultivated, traded, and consumed in richer countries in heavy volumes—benefit from R & D in technologies that boost their resilience and productivity. Some of those gains spill over into the low-income world, but often with productivity losses due to differences in soils, pests, and climate. But the so-called orphan crops of the poorer world have been mostly ignored by investors, governments, and philanthropists. As a result, hunger and malnutrition are on the rise again in the developing world. Over three billion people today cannot afford a healthy diet, in part because of low agricultural productivity in poorer countries. Making progress on neglected tropical diseases, orphan crops, and other challenges specific to poorer countries would make a huge difference in reducing poverty, improving health and productivity, and increasing stability all over the world. There is no shortage of money to invest in R & D in these areas. Companies such as Apple and Alphabet each sat on $140 billion to $160 billion in cash at the end of 2022; add in only the rest of the firms listed in the S&P 500, and corporate cash on hand exceeds $2.5 trillion, the vast majority of it earning low returns, given prevailing interest rates. But for the most part, the private sector is sitting on the sidelines despite the fact that the average social return—the social, health, environmental, and economic value of a business or project—on investment in these research areas can be very high. According to estimates compiled for the World Health Organization, the average net benefit to affected individuals per dollar when invested in R & D in neglected tropical diseases is between $17 and $28. This reflects what happens when people are cured: they can resume their lives and their livelihoods, putting money back into their local economy. When CGIAR, an international agricultural research consortium, undertakes R & D on tropical agriculture, the average social return is roughly $10 per dollar invested. Meanwhile, most corporate cash is sitting in money market funds or in U.S. Treasury bills, yielding four to six percent interest. A massive gulf exists between these low private returns on companies’ cash holdings and the high social returns on R & D to address problems that plague poor countries. Why? Because poor people cannot afford to pay much, even for life-altering or even life-saving discoveries. Although people living on just two or three dollars a day can spend enough to cover firms’ manufacturing and distribution costs—which is why Unilever and Coca-Cola deliver profitably to remote, poor villages all over the world—they cannot afford the added margin that firms need to recoup significant upfront R & D costs. But consumers in rich countries can and do willingly absorb those markups to make R & D profitable, even on nonessential technologies such as video games, home electronics, or cosmetics. Even with huge numbers of people affected, the feasible price markups are simply too low for profit-seeking firms to justify to their shareholders large-scale R & D investment in solutions to poor people’s problems. As a result, the world misses out on R & D with very high societal returns. For those reasons, when it comes to neglected tropical diseases and orphan crops, the global market alone is not producing the best possible outcomes. And although rich countries and philanthropies could—and should—give more, their potential impact is limited compared to what the vast sums of private capital sitting on the sidelines could do. What the world needs is government intervention to create an incentive for private sector investment. Governments need a new tool to put all that money to work. An innovation in intellectual property law could make it lucrative for companies to invest in drugs and agricultural technologies for people who cannot afford to pay the full cost of the R & D. The idea is simple: if a company applied for a “benevolent” patent for a treatment for a neglected tropical disease or an orphan crop and promised to either release it into the public domain or provide global, nonexclusive, royalty-free, unrestricted access to it, the company could be granted not only a patent for that discovery but also an extension on an existing patent for a profitable “luxury” product. It wouldn’t even have to be a related product, nor a patent held by the original discoverer of the new, benevolent patent. For example, if a pharmaceutical company developed an innovative treatment for schistosomiasis, it could be granted an extension on a patent for a profitable drug that treats erectile dysfunction. Likewise, if a life sciences company applied for a patent for a genetically modified orphan crop that was more resilient than other variants to drought and pests, and also made it universally available royalty free, it could receive not just that patent but also an extension on an existing patent for lawn fertilizer. Now consider what could happen if the extension were transferable. In that case, a laboratory in Senegal working on developing an effective schistosomiasis vaccine could commit to, say, Apple, to transfer any future benevolent patent on the vaccine. In exchange, Apple would provide the lab in Senegal with the up-front funding needed to carry out research and clinical trials. If the vaccine proved safe and effective and thus won regulatory approval, Apple would own the patent. It would never have to produce the vaccine, but it would just have to let others produce it royalty-free or release the patent into the public domain. Apple wouldn’t profit from the manufacture, sale, or distribution of the vaccine. What it would get, instead, is an extension on an existing patent for one of its highly profitable electronic devices. That would create a powerful incentive for Apple—and for hundreds of other cash-rich companies—to invest in medical treatments and agricultural innovations for the poor at levels that could outstrip current aid and investment by orders of magnitude. This innovative tool could be called a “benevolent patent extension,” or BPE. It would use one of the most powerful elements of the market economy—the profit motive—to incentivize the kind of R & D investments that poorer countries need: ones tailored to the distinctive problems that poor people face. Regulators and lawmakers in the United States and elsewhere should urgently consider adopting such a measure. The lack of investment in solving the problems of tropical diseases and orphan crops reflects a larger disregard for the poor. Rich countries have never met a commitment that OECD member states made in 1970 to donate at least 0.7 percent of their gross national incomes as foreign aid. In 2022, only Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and Turkey met that target. Meanwhile, other rich countries, such as the United Kingdom, have sharply reduced their foreign aid since 2020. The United States, the largest global donor in aggregate financial terms, contributes just 0.2 percent of its gross national income. Poor countries receive plenty of rhetorical support from rich ones, but not a lot of money. As a result, there is a roughly $3.9 trillion gap between what rich countries are likely to give and what the world needs to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. To compensate, governments and especially multilateral development banks are increasingly trying to mobilize private finance for sustainable development, largely through guarantees and other financial leverage mechanisms, which grow ever more problematic with many low-income countries struggling to pay their existing external debts. In 2021, however, this amounted to just $40 billion in funding, the same amount provided in 2017. Traditional aid models are clearly not working. The question is how governments can create more powerful incentives that would induce private companies to invest their enormous cash holdings to help address the major problems afflicting the world’s poor. State-sponsored prizes have existed at least since Napoleon used them to incentivize the private invention of canning to preserve food safely. And, more recently, countries have tried some new ideas. In 2007, the U.S. Congress created priority review vouchers to help encourage development of drugs for neglected tropical diseases. This lets pharmaceutical companies that develop a treatment for one of 27 listed diseases jump to the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration review queue for some other drug, typically enabling them to bring the latter, more lucrative drug to market four to five months sooner. Those vouchers have sold for as much as $350 million. In 2010, a group of foreign aid agencies and the Gates Foundation made advanced market commitments, promising to buy pneumococcal vaccines for low-income countries in sufficient volume and at a high enough price to induce the private R & D that successfully led to the discovery of three new vaccines estimated to have saved 700,000 lives. And today, the European Union is considering a transferable exclusivity voucher to stimulate antimicrobial innovation. The hope is that an extra year of data exclusivity on some other medical product will make it worth companies’ while to pursue research to address the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance. But these policies all have important limitations due to limited public funding for the prize or purchase and to the limited domain of the vouchers. The private sector is also uncertain about whether states and philanthropies will maintain their commitments, especially through leadership changes. These programs are steps in the right direction, but the R & D funding that they will create will be a drop in the bucket compared to what the private sector could produce if it had the right incentives. The central idea of a BPE is to swap the considerable profitability of an established, patented product that is not essential to protecting an active and healthy life—think of your favorite new electronic device or a cosmetic treatment that you saw advertised on television—for the high social return of a discovery that benefits mainly people too poor to provide a profitable market. Such discoveries would be labelled “benevolent” because they generate high social gains but have negligible (or negative) commercial return. The way the process normally works that is an inventor seeks a patent from the government to guarantee that it alone controls the market for the patented product or process for a fixed period of time, typically 20 years. The monopoly markup the patent holder earns is the return on its earlier R & D investment that yielded the discovery. The standard motive for patenting is to secure that profitable, monopoly hold over the discovery. But that expires after a time, at which point competitor firms are free to enter the market, replicating the product or process using the publicly available patent filing, and thus charge a lower price, because the new entrant does not have to pay for the R & D costs behind the discovery. The twist with a BPE is that when filing for a patent on a benevolent discovery, an inventor could request the option to receive not only the patent but also a BPE that confers the right to extend the patent of some other, nonessential discovery still under patent. This would ensure no extensions and monopoly control of patents on life-saving drugs or essential devices or vaccines, only on luxury items that people have already demonstrated a willingness to buy at a marked up price while under patent. To be awarded the BPE, when filing for a patent the inventor would have to attest to a “public use” condition, that in the event of the award of a BPE, the inventor would either release the benevolent discovery to the public domain—that is, give up its patent—or provide global, nonexclusive, royalty-free, unrestricted use of it. If the company didn’t hold true to that pledge, it would immediately forfeit both the new patent and any existing one to which it applied the BPE, thereby releasing both discoveries into the public domain. The BPE option would trigger only if the public use condition remained satisfied and if the discovery’s safety and effectiveness were certified by an independent review authority, such as the Food and Drug Administration. Then the patent authority (in the United States, the Patent and Trademark Office) would extend the patent for a nonessential product of the owner’s choosing by a duration equivalent in expected revenue terms to the social value of the benevolent discovery. For example, imagine a lab develops an effective vaccine against Chagas disease, a potentially life-threatening illness that mainly affects people in rural Latin America, that generates an estimated $50 million in net societal benefits through saved and improved lives. The lab could request a BPE for a patent on a product that brings in $100 million per year in sales revenue, extending its monopoly hold for six months or the equivalent in net social benefits of the vaccine. The BPE would be tradable, so its value would not be restricted to that of an inventor’s existing patent portfolio. As a result, the BPE would substitute the (considerable) consumer surplus of high-income buyers of nonessential, patented products in any industry for the (modest) willingness and ability to pay of poor people who need vaccines or medical treatments against tropical diseases and semi-subsistence farmers seeking seed adapted to the tropics. Many nonessential patents generate profits of hundreds of millions of dollars annually, far beyond the realistic commercial market potential of any discovery related to neglected tropical diseases or orphan crops. With a BPE, however, the considerable value of extending by a few years a patent protection on, for example, a device for nonemergency plastic surgery or a nutraceutical would become the value of, say, an effective vaccine for leprosy, the disfiguring infectious disease that even today afflicts more than 100,000 people worldwide annually. Making the BPE a transferable, tradable asset would draw investors to even small, not-for-profit laboratories that own no patents but do pathbreaking work on the problems of the poor. BPEs would make discoveries of new treatments for obscure diseases and improvements for orphan crops valuable not only to the people who might access them and the companies that might develop them but also to a far broader world of firms and investors, who might pay huge sums to inventors for the right to extend their own nonessential patents. That’s why the cash holdings of Alphabet or Apple are relevant to the seemingly unrelated cases of orphan crops and neglected tropical diseases. One can imagine, for example, an investment firm financing research by a nonprofit African agricultural research institute and a U.S.-based agricultural firm working on advanced plant breeding, in exchange for the option to later purchase from them the resulting BPE, which could be worth millions, even billions of dollars. The public use condition on the new IP would ensure wide, low-cost availability of benevolent discoveries, while regulatory review and approval of the benevolent discovery and its valuation would minimize gaming of the system. Firms couldn’t make money off discoveries that proved unsafe or ineffective. An added benefit of inducing R & D investment in benevolent discoveries is that this would almost surely induce investment in R & D capacity and lead to funding for laboratories and scientific staff in low-income countries. Investments in scientific capacity in poorer countries would boost the scientific workforce and infrastructure in places that are short on both, generating considerable spillover benefits for productivity and broader economic growth, and in international scientific cooperation. The induced economic growth would also stimulate demand for exports from high-income countries. In this way, a policy tool to induce private investment in solving problems faced by poor, semi-subsistence farmers could yield dividends for European and North American farmers who can sell more to those distant communities as their living conditions improve. The history of two drugs illustrates the potential for this innovation to intellectual property law. Eflornithine was first developed as a cancer treatment, but it proved ineffective. But it was discovered to be highly effective in treating advanced trypanosomiasis, which is known as “sleeping sickness” and affects about 1,000 people every year in sub-Saharan Africa, causing them to sleep more and more until they fall into a coma, killing victims if left untreated. Eflornithine earned the nickname “the resurrection drug” and the World Health Organization categorized it as an essential medicine. The patent holder, the drug company Aventis, stopped producing eflornithine in 1995, however, because the meager commercial market made the drug unprofitable, threatening the drug’s availability. Miraculously, eflornithine production resumed just as the last remaining doses were running out after the discovery that a cream formulation of it was effective in removing unwanted facial hair on women. It is now used in the cosmetic product Vaniqa. R & D investments didn’t aim to discover a curative treatment for sleeping sickness. A drug that has saved perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives emerged only as a serendipitous discovery during an ill-fated pursuit of a lucrative cancer treatment, and remained in production only after a profitable market could be found for a luxury product in high-income countries. Ivermectin offers a parallel story. The world’s first endectocide—a drug to treat veterinary parasites—the drug launched in 1981 to treat parasites in livestock and pets. This blockbuster drug regularly yields billions of dollars in annual sales. Ivermectin subsequently proved extremely effective in treating tropical diseases such as onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis, which devastate and disfigure poor people around the world; as with eflornithine, the World Health Organization listed it as an essential medicine. But it is available to the people who desperately need it for their health and well-being only because people in rich countries buy it to treat their pets and commercial livestock. The lesson of eflornithine and ivermectin is that the great profit potential of patented luxury products for well-off consumers can finance discoveries that demonstrably improve the lives of the poor. The innovation of the BPE is to make the two discoveries separable, meaning that the same drug need not be both lifesaving and lifestyle-improving. The world’s poor would no longer need to rely on serendipitous discoveries of a dual-use drug. Instead, companies would extend their patents on a luxury product in exchange for spending to create a different drug or discovery that could improve the lives of millions around the world. In this way, BPEs could unlock vast amounts of private capital to tackle problems specific to the global poor. Any national government could introduce BPEs. It would require consultation by national regulatory and scientific bodies to agree on definitions of “benevolent” and “nonessential,” on protocols for public review of patent-protected products under either category, and on methods of social valuation of benevolent discoveries and of existing patents. Legislatures would then need to empower their patent offices to confer BPEs according to that guidance. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated both the world’s incredible ability to mobilize private sector funding and scientific expertise to develop lifesaving discoveries as well as the inequitable distribution of those gains. High-income countries quickly bought vast quantities of the best COVID-19 vaccines as soon as they became available; poorer countries had to wait in line. A relatively simple extension to existing IP law could begin to address these inequities. Through the development of BPEs, governments could use intellectual property to substantially boost private R & D investments to benefit the global poor, at negligible cost to taxpayers. Doing so would harness the power of capital by using one set of market forces to address the distortions caused by other market forces. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. Read the original article at Foreign Affairs.

1956 deklarerade Richard Nixon att fyradagarsveckan skulle bli verklighet i USA inom en ”inte alltför avlägsen framtid”. Först nu testas det på allvar av allt fler företag. Wall Street Journal har frågat de som tagit steget. Första lärdomen: kapa möten. Men lyckas man verkligen göra fem dagars jobb på 32 timmar? Enligt analysföretaget ActivTrak, som granskat 158 000 anställda på 1 900 företag, arbetar de med fyradagarsveckor även något färre timmar per dag – och lägger färre timmar på fokusarbete. Teorin är att de flesta ledningarna inte lyckats förnya sättet att arbeta på. – Det är inte för alla, konstaterar Natalie Breece vid klädföretaget ThredUp, som gjort en lyckad omställning. Fewer meetings, busier days and other ways to fit a week’s work into 32 hours By Vanessa Fuhrmans 25 September, 2023 Working less takes a lot of work. Just ask the companies trying four-day schedules. At ThredUp, an Oakland, Calif.-based online clothing reseller, moving its nearly 300 salaried employees to a Monday-to-Thursday week meant culling meetings, focusing on the most important work and curtailing lengthy email exchanges. The shorter week can get hectic, and work sometimes spills into Fridays, but employees say having more time to recharge is worth it. “It’s not for everybody,” said ThredUp’s chief people officer, Natalie Breece, who helped lead the transition. “It requires a constant evaluation of your own behaviors and your organization’s behaviors to move faster.” Once a workers’ pipe dream, the four-day, 32-hour workweek is gaining ground as hundreds of employers try the schedules and businesses rethink the conventional ways of work. The United Auto Workers made the shorter week a demand in its contract talks with Detroit automakers. Lawmakers in California, Massachusetts and other states have introduced bills aimed at pushing more businesses to adopt a four-day schedule. Most proposals are long shots but signify the appeal in policy circles. Organizations that have dipped a toe into shortened workweeks say it has resulted in happier, healthier staff, less turnover and a wave of interest from job applicants—usually with little to no loss in productivity. Yet working smarter, not harder, isn’t as easy as it sounds. Meeting bloat was one of ThredUp’s biggest targets as it gave the four-day week a test run before making it official early last year. Department heads cut meetings by roughly 20% after reviewing which were really necessary and which served mostly as progress reports. Managers and workers were trained on running more efficient huddles and volleying fewer emails. (One tip: Pick up the phone after three rounds of replies without a resolution.) Tuesdays were deemed “maker days,” devoted mostly to uninterrupted focus work. Learning to say no was an adjustment, Breece said. Some employees fretted whether they could get ruthless with their time. But with the whole staff tasked to be more disciplined, “it gives everybody space to say, ‘I am not going to join that,’” she said. Or, they can ask to trade updates or ideas as they happen, via Slack, email or other tools. Not everyone at ThredUp gets a four-day workweek. The nearly 1,500 hourly wage workers in its distribution centers have the option to work flexible shifts across three to five days. Last year, the company laid off 15% of its corporate, salaried workforce to help rein in costs. Still, voluntary turnover among corporate employees fell to 4% last year, less than half of what it was in 2020. More than half of new hires who were surveyed said the shorter workweek tipped the scale in their decision to join. And over 90% of employees, who the company says are meeting the same goals as before, said the four-day workweek has boosted their productivity. After the trial run, “at least two engineers said to me, ‘I’ll take a pay reduction to keep Fridays off,’” said Anton Naumenko, senior director of software engineering. Many four-day-week employers don’t appear to be operating more efficiently, though, according to data from ActivTrak, a maker of workforce analytics software. Gabriela Mauch, vice president of ActivTrak’s productivity lab, suspects that is because management hasn’t revamped the way teams work. Examining the activity of 158,000 employees at 1,900 companies, her team found those at companies with four-day schedules worked slightly fewer hours a day than those working five days. And the four-day workers spent less time on focus work or other productive activity. Scott Hendler tried a four-day workweek at his 16-person law firm in Austin, Texas, for a year and a half before returning to five days this year. Little changed about the way people worked, he said—the idea was simply to squeeze the five-day workload into four to have longer weekends. Courts were still open five days a week, and at least one or two people would be pulled in to work when something got scheduled on a Friday. Cramming a week’s work into four days was stressful for some staff. Hendler says he would like to make the schedule work. “I just don’t know how to put the theory into practice in a way that is productive,” he said. Henry Ford cut the standard workweek to five days from six in the 1920s on the premise that a more compressed schedule, along with assembly-line innovations, would make work more efficient. Since then, predictions that technological and economic advances would result in our working less haven’t borne out. As far back as 1956, then-Vice President Richard Nixon declared a four-day workweek would be reality for most Americans in the “not-too-distant future.” One reason shorter weeks remain out of reach, skeptics say, is that it is tough for large companies with customers and staff across time zones and countries to find a shortened schedule that works for all. A handful of big brand names such as Unilever and Samsung have experimented with a shorter week on a limited basis, but most adoptees are much smaller firms. Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, says it is doubtful most businesses can shed a fifth of the workweek and maintain productivity. “Whenever I talk to managers, they find the topic pretty insulting—they argue it implies they are completely wasting a day a week,” he said. A more viable approach for giving people more leisure time, he says, is to offer the option of four-day schedules, at four days’ pay. “But that’s not a new idea,” he added. “It’s called part-time work.” A four-day week holds less potential for businesses that already run a tight ship, according to Steve Glaveski, chief executive of Collective Campus, a corporate innovation and startup accelerator in Australia. Collective Campus briefly tested a four-day week a couple of years ago, after another experiment with a six-hour workday. With shorter days, staff had gotten more efficient by setting priorities, automating or outsourcing basic tasks and reserving large chunks of time for focused work. Glaveski wanted to see what would happen if they dropped Fridays, too. In a survey, the team scored their emotional well-being slightly higher than before. But productivity, measured by revenue, marketing leads and other metrics, dropped 20%. Four-day weeks—especially when workers are logging 8-hour-plus days—aren’t optimal, he said, citing research suggesting four hours is the maximum most people can spend in a deep-work, flow state. Focus tapers off fast after that. “With four eight-hour days, you’re still going to be spending a lot of that time on shallow work,” said Glaveski, who has written a book on working more productively. At first, condensing the workweek sounded illogical to some leaders at Qwick, an online staffing platform for the hospitality industry. It was late 2021 and the company—after laying off two-thirds of its employees in the initial Covid-19 lockdowns—was facing three times the business it normally had finding workers to staff now-bustling restaurants, stadiums and event spaces. Qwick’s staff was already overwhelmed working a five-day week, said Retta Kekic, the Phoenix-based company’s chief marketing officer. “The initial response was, whoa, this doesn’t feel natural,” Kekic said of the idea. “How are we going to keep growing and scaling if we’re working less?” Yet employees were burning out. Qwick spent 3½ months laying the groundwork, implementing a rolling, seven-day customer-support schedule and automating more processes. It canceled many meetings and streamlined others. More than a year into the experiment, Kekic said teams such as engineering and customer-support continue to meet their internal metrics each week. Applications to fill jobs at Qwick have more than doubled. To keep Monday through Thursday from feeling too intense, Qwick bosses break for lunch or organize occasional happy hours. After a decadelong career in technology, during which she would work from a coffee shop some Saturdays, Kekic said she occasionally has to remind herself not to message a colleague or her team on Fridays. For ThredUp’s Naumenko, working eight hours, four days a week doesn’t always go exactly as planned, either. Days sometimes start with a 7 a.m. call to his European teams so they don’t have to work late. Up against a project deadline or an outage, engineers may work into the three-day weekend, then take some of their unlimited vacation time to compensate, he said. He can’t imagine returning to a traditional five-day schedule. Having the extra time helped in setting up a new life in the U.S. after moving from Ukraine in January 2022, he said. His Fridays are now devoted to household chores, grocery runs and other errands. Or while the children are in school, he and his wife will go hiking or cycling. “It’s a different life also for our families,” he said.

Globala BNP kan halveras till 2070 på grund av klimatkrisen, enligt en ny rapport från brittiska Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. De har använt ett slags omvänt stresstest som räknar baklänges från en hittills odefinierad temperatur då världens ekonomi troligtvis skulle upphöra att fungera. Det är en radikal modell, men den kommer förmodligen närmare sanningen än de gängse, skriver Financial Times. Företag och investerare underskattar konsekvent klimatkrisens finansiella påverkan. Det beror på att de har fokuserat på kostnaden för övergången till fossilfritt men tagit mindre hänsyn till de fysiska effekterna av klimatkrisen, skriver tidningen. Förändrade havsnivåer, temperaturer, vattenbrist eller eldsvådor ritar om ekonomin för hela branscher och samhällen. The costs of inaction on global warming are potentially vast and often not sufficiently factored in to asset values. By Vanessa Houlder and Nathalie Thomas

Financial Times, 17 August 2023 The world is reeling from record-breaking heatwaves, wildfires and rainfall. Devastating floods have ravaged northern China. Wildfires have ripped through Canada, southern Europe and, in recent days, the Hawaiian island of Maui. The human toll from these disasters, which experts say are becoming more common and more intense due to human-induced climate change, can be counted first of all in the thousands of lives lost. But it can also be measured in the economic value destroyed, and potentially created, as governments shift policies to contain or mitigate the climate crisis. In a world that is rapidly becoming more vulnerable to extreme weather events, outdated assumptions about asset values also need recalibrating. The big danger is of a “climate Minsky moment”, the term for a sudden correction in asset values as investors simultaneously realise those values are unsustainable. So far, businesses and investors have paid less attention to the physical effects of climate change and more to the costs and risks of decarbonising, as the world tries to limit the rise in average global temperatures. The former is discussed half as frequently as the latter in US corporate disclosures, according to the Brookings think-tank. Equities have not priced in climate change risks, research by the IMF and others has repeatedly shown.  The perceived remoteness of risks such as sea level rises is one explanation. Another is the formidable difficulty of mapping interactions between the economy and greenhouse gas emissions. Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus, who began modelling climate change as far back as 1975, describes this as the thorniest problem of all. Assessing abatement costs is “simple stuff” by comparison, he says.  Vast computing power is trying to solve the conundrum. The data group Cambridge Econometrics and Ortec Finance recently crunched numbers for Singapore’s GIC. The sovereign wealth fund’s long-term investment horizon — and the city-state’s vulnerability to flooding — make it unusually mindful of climate risks. It wanted to know how a portfolio composed of 60 per cent global equities and 40 per cent bonds would fare under varying climate policies. In a “net zero” scenario involving ambitious decarbonisation, cumulative returns over 40 years were 10 per cent lower than a baseline that assumed no climate change. The most pessimistic outcome was a “failed transition” that put the world on course for a rise of more than 4C from pre-industrial levels by 2100. Cumulative returns were then nearly 40 per cent lower than the baseline, though some feel the outcome could be much worse than that given the unknowable levels of disruption that such a rise might trigger. Investors “may be surprised by the underperformance” of the hypothetical portfolio, says GIC. The message is clear: investors ignore long-term climate risks at their peril. Agriculture is among the most vulnerable sectors. Morgan Stanley estimated in a report last year that at least 44 per cent of wheat, 43 per cent of rice, 32 per cent of maize and 17 per cent of soyabean production comes from at-risk areas. Climate change-induced disasters could put at least $314bn of annual production in jeopardy. Companies that produce detailed analysis of climate risks are increasingly alert to the potential for sharp increases in commodity prices. Unilever estimates that extreme weather events could increase palm oil prices by 12-18 per cent by 2050, depending on the extent to which rising temperatures can be limited, and other food and commodities ingredients by 14-21 per cent. The impact would be unevenly spread. Some cold countries might become more productive. The cultivation of certain crops has already migrated northwards, to cooler climates. Warmer temperatures helped Russia to become the world’s top wheat exporter last decade. Prior to the Ukraine war, scientists named it and Canada as new global agricultural frontiers. Climate change has enabled vineyards in regions such as the UK and Denmark. Food insecurity is exacerbated by water shortages. Agriculture accounts for about 70 per cent of freshwater consumption globally, although in regions such as Asia it can be higher. Already 2bn people lack access to clean, safe drinking water. By 2030, demand for freshwater is forecast to exceed supply by 40 per cent. Areas that once took water for granted are coming to terms with shortages. “For us in Europe, water scarcity was something that affected others and now it’s hitting us,” says Vinçent Caillaud, chief executive of water technologies at Veolia, the French water group. Industry is also reliant on dwindling water resources. Moody’s estimates that as much as half of the chemical sector’s global assets are exposed to water stress. German industry’s use of the Rhine for cooling and transport has been repeatedly jeopardised by droughts. Low water levels in 2018 cut profits at chemical giant BASF by €250mn. Too much water can cause as much havoc as too little. Around a fifth of computer and electronics factories in Asia are in flood-prone areas, according to Moody’s. ON Semiconductors shut one production site hit by disastrous 2011 Thailand floods because of “excessive” reconstruction costs. Preventive action lowers risks. The world’s largest contract chipmaker, TSMC, has raised the foundations of newly built fabrication plants in Taiwan by two metres. Of all the climate risks, flooding is most straightforward to analyse. But that does not mean it is priced in. Recently published research suggested that US residential properties exposed to flood risk are overvalued by between $121bn and $237bn. In some counties bordering the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, properties are likely to be overvalued by more than 10 per cent on average, their owners falsely comforted by out-of-date federal flood maps and government-subsidised insurance.  Wildfires are another source of mounting anxiety. They were recently highlighted by Dave Burt, one of the “Big Short” investors who correctly anticipated chaos in the US subprime mortgage market in the 2000s. In evidence to a Senate committee, he said insurance premiums for wildfire protection were just $1.5bn in 2021; damages were six times bigger. A move by insurers to close that gap could result in a drop of up to $495bn in property values, he said.  Once cyclones and chronic risks such as drought, heat and sea-level rises are factored in, San Francisco emerges as one of the areas most economically exposed, according to a Moody’s assessment. Idaho’s state capital, Boise, and Nashville, Tennessee are among the safest. Such forecasts provide an insight into likely migration patterns within the US in the second half of this century. The consequences for the Bay Area’s sky-high real estate values and its tax base will be significant.  Globally, the movement of people away from hard-hit areas is likely to be on a far bigger scale. More than 20mn people a year on average have been displaced by extreme weather-related events since 2008. By 2050, as many as 1.2bn could be uprooted by climate change, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace think-tank. Sovereign bonds are already registering the financial consequences of these trends. Nations facing a greater projected change in physical risks pay higher spreads for long-term debt financing, according to the IMF. It suggests that bond investors have more incentive to price in climate risks because a creditor country’s physical infrastructure assets are more likely to be directly affected. A simulation of the effect of climate change on sovereign credit ratings for 109 countries suggested that climate-induced sovereign downgrades could happen as early as 2030, according to new research by economists from UEA and Cambridge university. China and India are among those facing the biggest reductions in creditworthiness. Damage will be mitigated by defences. Dykes have successfully protected the Netherlands, much of which is below sea level. Spending $50bn a year on flood defences for coastal cities could reduce expected losses of $1tn to some $60bn in 2050, researchers calculate. The wealthier the region, the better the chance of adequate defences. S&P recently upgraded Miami bonds to AA on this basis, even though the city expects the sea level to rise by up to 21 inches by 2070. Climate-savvy investors and entrepreneurs are spotting opportunities as industries and countries look to adapt. Innovations to mitigate the impact of future water shortages are an important theme. Gradient, a Boston-based business that has designed novel ways to treat industrial wastewater, became the first water tech start-up to achieve a $1bn valuation this year. Desalination — the removal of salt from sea and other saline water — at present covers just 1 per cent of global freshwater demand. The market is expected to grow by nearly 9 per cent annually between 2022 and 2027, according to consultancy Technovia. Industries such as mining are exploring its use. So too are countries such as the UK, France and Italy that have not yet used desalination on a significant scale. “Water scarcity and the [climate] situation that has crystallised over the last couple of years are pushing the deployment of these technologies,” says José Díaz-Caneja, chief executive of Spanish conglomerate Acciona’s water business.  But costs remain relatively high, and efficiency is low. One cubic metre of desalinated water can cost between 40 cents and $1 compared with 10-25 cents for the same measure of normal tap water. Its use for irrigation is limited as much agricultural land is far from coastal areas where desalination plants are located. Crop science is also attracting greater political and investor attention. Previously sceptical European countries are warming to gene-edited varieties engineered to withstand extreme temperatures and drought. Examples include a short corn requiring less water, which Germany’s Bayer hopes to introduce to markets such as the US this decade. Brussels has proposed loosening restrictions on some gene-edited crops. A change in EU rules is likely to lead to more research, according to Geoff Graham, vice-president of seed product development at Corteva. Service industries will be forced to adapt. The evacuation of thousands of visitors from Greek islands ravaged by wildfires this summer was a stark reminder of how extreme heat threatens the tourism industry. For some tropical destinations such as the Maldives, rising global temperatures pose an existential threat. For southern Europe, intolerable summer temperatures will force writedowns of hotels and resorts in countries including Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Portugal, France and Greece.  Southern destinations will try to minimise losses by marketing spring and autumn holidays, but the European Commission is surely underestimating impacts when it asserts that a massive 4C rise in global temperatures would reduce tourism demand in the Greek islands by just 9 per cent. Demand in cooler destinations such as the west of Wales could increase by as much as 16 per cent, the EC adds.  Hoteliers and tour operators will expand cruise lines, which can flex itineraries around weather conditions, along with hotel capacity in northern Europe. The head of tour operator Tui suggested this month that destinations such as Belgium would become more popular. Skilful adaptation would soften the blow from climate change. It is rarely accounted for in climate models but is one reason to hope that the most bearish financial forecasts are too pessimistic. Yet many models also omit factors that could make the outcomes far worse than predicted. Many assume that climate change does not slow gross domestic product growth. They do not take account of mass migration. Climate tipping points, such as thawing permafrost or an ocean circulation collapse, are rarely included.  More fundamentally, the past is an unreliable guide to the future. Modellers typically use a quadratic function to plot the relationship between damages and temperatures. Some 2 per cent of output would be lost at 3C of warming, while 8 per cent of output would be lost at 6C of warming, according to Nordhaus’s 2016 model. There is great uncertainty about the potential effects of such large rises, but even so the credibility of those predictions looks weak. It makes more sense to conduct a reverse stress test, argues a new report from the UK’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. This involves working backwards from an as-yet undefined temperature at which the world’s economy would plausibly cease to function. Using this logic, the report’s authors suggest that half the world’s GDP could be destroyed as early as 2070. There is a cavernous gap between such cataclysmic forecasts and the modest impacts anticipated by pension funds and listed companies in their climate risk reporting. Consider, for example, the risk assessments regularly carried out for Shropshire county council, a local authority in the UK. As recently as 2020, it reported that its annualised portfolio returns would be hit by just 0.1 per cent over 30 years even as the world hurtled towards 4C of warming. There is growing unease that existing climate models may be providing a false sense of security. The UK Pensions Regulator recently raised concerns over scenario impacts that “seem relatively benign and appears to be at odds with established science”. Last November the Financial Stability Board warned that the scenarios used to assess risks to the financial system may understate climate vulnerability.  An abrupt correction of asset values is possible once markets recalibrate the likely impacts of climate change, says the Carbon Tracker think-tank founder Mark Campanale. University College London professor Steve Keen also predicts such a “Minsky moment” and warns it will be “unpleasant, abrupt and wealth-destroying”. There are powerful arguments why financial institutions should pay closer attention to the physical risks of climate change. Doing so might reduce the chance of sudden shocks and reinforce the case for mitigation. Moreover, it would improve the allocation of resources, deter building in flood zones and incentivise spending on climate-resilient infrastructure. Focusing on the physical effects of poorly mitigated climate change might seem defeatist. But time is fast running out to decarbonise the economy. Investors have begun to price in the decarbonisation challenge. They need to start counting the considerable costs of inaction, too. ©The Financial Times Limited 2023. All Rights Reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.

Den brittiska livsmedelsjätten Unilever, som bland annat äger den tidigare svenska glasstillverkaren GB, rapporterar försäljningssiffror för andra kvartalet som överträffar förväntningarna.

Den brittiska livsmedelsjätten Unilever, som bland annat äger den tidigare svenska glasstillverkaren GB, rapporterar försäljningssiffror för andra kvartalet som överträffar förväntningarna.

Européer får allt mindre kvar i plånboken på grund av en åldrande befolkning, kvardröjande effekter från pandemin, kriget i Ukraina och en rad andra faktorer, skriver Wall Street Journal. Löneökningarna har minskat, konsumtionen sjunker och ekonomin försvagas i många länder. Samtidigt försöker hushållen anpassa sig och göra uppoffringar i krisen. Bank of Englands chefsekonom Huw Pill varnade britterna i våras att de måste acceptera att de är fattigare och sluta eftersträva högre löner, som riskerar att driva på inflationen. – Ja, vi har det alla sämre ställt, konstaterade han. An aging population that values its free time set the stage for economic stagnation. Then came Covid-19 and Russia’s war in Ukraine. By Tom Fairless

The Wall Street Journal, 17 July 2023 Europeans are facing a new economic reality, one they haven’t experienced in decades. They are becoming poorer. Life on a continent long envied by outsiders for its art de vivre is rapidly losing its shine as Europeans see their purchasing power melt away. The French are eating less foie gras and drinking less red wine. Spaniards are stinting on olive oil. Finns are being urged to use saunas on windy days when energy is less expensive. Across Germany, meat and milk consumption has fallen to the lowest level in three decades and the once-booming market for organic food has tanked. Italy’s economic development minister, Adolfo Urso, convened a crisis meeting in May over prices for pasta, the country’s favorite staple, after they jumped by more than double the national inflation rate. With consumption spending in free fall, Europe tipped into recession at the start of the year, reinforcing a sense of relative economic, political and military decline that kicked in at the start of the century. Europe’s current predicament has been long in the making. An aging population with a preference for free time and job security over earnings ushered in years of lackluster economic and productivity growth. Then came the one-two punch of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s protracted war in Ukraine. By upending global supply chains and sending the prices of energy and food rocketing, the crises aggravated ailments that had been festering for decades. Governments’ responses only compounded the problem. To preserve jobs, they steered their subsidies primarily to employers, leaving consumers without a cash cushion when the price shock came. Americans, by contrast, benefited from inexpensive energy and government aid directed primarily at citizens to keep them spending. In the past, the continent’s formidable export industry might have come to the rescue. But a sluggish recovery in China, a critical market for Europe, is undermining that growth pillar. High energy costs and rampant inflation at a level not seen since the 1970s are dulling manufacturers’ price advantage in international markets and smashing the continent’s once-harmonious labor relations. As global trade cools, Europe’s heavy reliance on exports—which account for about 50% of eurozone GDP versus 10% for the U.S.—is becoming a weakness. Private consumption has declined by about 1% in the 20-nation eurozone since the end of 2019 after adjusting for inflation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based club of mainly wealthy countries. In the U.S., where households enjoy a strong labor market and rising incomes, it has increased by nearly 9%. The European Union now accounts for about 18% of all global consumption spending, compared with 28% for America. Fifteen years ago, the EU and the U.S. each represented about a quarter of that total. Adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, wages have declined by about 3% since 2019 in Germany, by 3.5% in Italy and Spain and by 6% in Greece. Real wages in the U.S. have increased by about 6% over the same period, according to OECD data. The pain reaches far into the middle classes. In Brussels, one of Europe’s richest cities, teachers and nurses stood in line on a recent evening to collect half-price groceries from the back of a truck. The vendor, Happy Hours Market, collects food close to its expiration date from supermarkets and advertises it through an app. Customers can order in the early afternoon and collect their cut-price groceries in the evening. “Some customers tell me, because of you I can eat meat two or three times per week,” said Pierre van Hede, who was handing out crates of groceries. Karim Bouazza, a 33-year-old nurse who was stocking up on half-price meat and fish for his wife and two children, complained that inflation means “you almost need to work a second job to pay for everything.” Similar services have sprung up across the region, marketing themselves as a way to reduce food waste as well as save money. TooGoodToGo, a company founded in Denmark in 2015 that sells leftover food from retailers and restaurants, has 76 million registered users across Europe, roughly three times the number at the end of 2020. In Germany, Sirplus, a startup created in 2017, offers “rescued” food, including products past their sell-by date, on its online store. So does Motatos, created in Sweden in 2014 and now present in Finland, Germany, Denmark and the U.K. Spending on high-end groceries has collapsed. Germans consumed 52 kilograms of meat per person in 2022, about 8% less than the previous year and the lowest level since calculations began in 1989. While some of that reflects societal concerns about healthy eating and animal welfare, experts say the trend has been accelerated by meat prices which increased by up to 30% in recent months. Germans are also swapping meats such as beef and veal for less-expensive ones such as poultry, according to the Federal Information Center for Agriculture. Thomas Wolff, an organic-food supplier near Frankfurt, said his sales fell by up to 30% last year as inflation surged. Wolff said he had hired 33 people earlier in the pandemic to handle strong demand for pricey ecological foodstuffs, but he has since let them all go. Ronja Ebeling, a 26-year-old consultant and author based in Hamburg, said she saves about one-quarter of her income, partly because she worries about having enough money for retirement. She spends little on clothes or makeup and shares a car with her partner’s father. Weak spending and poor demographic prospects are making Europe less attractive for businesses ranging from consumer-goods giant Procter & Gamble to luxury empire LVMH, which are making an ever-larger share of their sales in North America. “The U.S. consumer is more resilient than in Europe,” Unilever’s chief financial officer, Graeme Pitkethly, said in April. The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the U.S., according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every U.S. state except Idaho and Mississippi, according to a report this month by the European Centre for International Political Economy, a Brussels-based independent think tank. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the U.S. and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today, the report said. On the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, businesses are lobbying for more flights to the U.S. to increase the number of free-spending American tourists, said Maria Frontera, president of the Mallorca Chamber of Commerce’s tourism commission. Americans spend about €260 ($292) per day on average on hotels compared with less than €180 ($202) for Europeans. “This year we have seen a big change in the behavior of Europeans because of the economic situation we are dealing with,” said Frontera, who recently traveled to Miami to learn how to better cater to American customers. Weak growth and rising interest rates are straining Europe’s generous welfare states, which provide popular healthcare services and pensions. European governments find the old recipes for fixing the problem are either becoming unaffordable or have stopped working. Three-quarters of a trillion euros in subsidies, tax breaks and other forms of relief have gone to consumers and businesses to offset higher energy costs—something economists say is now itself fueling inflation, defeating the subsidies’ purpose. Public-spending cuts after the global financial crisis starved Europe’s state-funded healthcare systems, especially the U.K.’s National Health Service. Vivek Trivedi, a 31-year-old anesthesiologist living in Manchester, England, earns about £51,000 ($67,000) per year for a 48-hour workweek. Inflation, which has been about 10% or higher in the U.K. for nearly a year, is devouring his monthly budget, he says. Trivedi said he shops for groceries in discount retailers and spends less on meals out. Some colleagues turned off their heating entirely over recent months, worried they wouldn’t be able to afford sharply higher costs, he said. Noa Cohen, a 28-year old public-affairs specialist in London, says she could quadruple her salary in the same job by leveraging her U.S. passport to move across the Atlantic. Cohen recently got a 10% pay raise after switching jobs, but the increase was completely swallowed by inflation. She says friends are freezing their eggs because they can’t afford children anytime soon, in the hope that they have enough money in future. “It feels like a perma-freeze in living standards,” she said. Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, warned U.K. citizens in April that they need to accept that they are poorer and stop pushing for higher wages. “Yes, we’re all worse off,” he said, saying that seeking to offset rising prices with higher wages would only fuel more inflation. With European governments needing to increase defense spending and given rising borrowing costs, economists expect taxes to increase, adding pressure on consumers. Taxes in Europe are already high relative to those in other wealthy countries, equivalent to around 40-45% of GDP compared with 27% in the U.S. American workers take home almost three-quarters of their paychecks, including income taxes and Social Security taxes, while French and German workers keep just half. The pauperization of Europe has bolstered the ranks of labor unions, which are picking up tens of thousands of members across the continent, reversing a decadeslong decline. Higher unionization may not translate into fuller pockets for members. That’s because many are pushing workers’ preference for more free time over higher pay, even in a world of spiraling skills shortages. IG Metall, Germany’s biggest trade union, is calling for a four-day work week at current salary levels rather than a pay raise for the country’s metalworkers ahead of collective bargaining negotiations this November. Officials say the shorter week would improve workers’ health and quality of life while at the same time making the industry more attractive to younger workers. Almost half of employees in Germany’s health industry choose to work around 30 hours per week rather than full time, reflecting tough working conditions, said Frank Werneke, chairman of the country’s United Services Trade Union, which has added about 110,000 new members in recent months, the biggest increase in 22 years. Kristian Kallio, a games developer in northern Finland, recently decided to reduce his working week by one-fifth to 30 hours in exchange for a 10% pay cut. He now makes about €2,500 per month. “Who wouldn’t want to work shorter hours?” Kallio said. About one-third of his colleagues took the same deal, although leaders work full-time, said Kallio’s boss, Jaakko Kylmäoja. Kallio now works from 10 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. He uses his extra free time for hobbies, to make good food and take long bike rides. “I don’t see a reality where I would go back to normal working hours,” he said. Igor Chaykovskiy, a 34-year-old IT worker in Paris, joined a trade union earlier this year to press for better pay and conditions. He recently received a 3.5% pay increase, about half the level of inflation. He thinks the union will give workers greater leverage to press managers. Still, it isn’t just about pay. “Maybe they say you don’t have an increase in salary, you have free sports lessons or music lessons,” he said. At the Stellantis auto factory in Melfi, southern Italy, employees have worked shorter hours for years recently due to the difficulty of procuring raw materials and high energy costs, said Marco Lomio, a trade unionist with the Italian Union of Metalworkers. Hours worked have recently been reduced by around 30% and wages decreased proportionally. “Between high inflation and rising energy costs for workers,” said Lomio, “it is difficult to bear all family expenses.”

Glassjätten GB:s ägare Unilever har svartlistats av Ukraina. Nu stämmer tv-profilen Edward Blom in i kritiken mot företaget och manar till bojkott av GB, skriver Expressen. I ett inlägg på Instagram skriver Blom att det är ”beklämmande att åka runt i Sverige och se folkmordsclownen överallt” och att väst borde bojkotta allt som har med Ryssland att göra. Unilevers pressansvariga Maria Starebron skriver i ett mejl till Expressen att man förstår att det finns krav om att bolaget ska lämna Ryssland. ”Men för företag som Unilever, som har en betydande fysisk närvaro i landet, är det inte helt okomplicerat att lämna”, skriver hon vidare.

Svenska glassjätten GB Glace ägs av brittiska bolaget Unilever som har verksamhet i Ryssland trots kriget i Ukraina.  Nu riktar tv-profilen Edward Blom hård kritik mot företaget, uppmanar till bojkott – och kallar den klassiska Glassgubben för ”folkmordsclown.” – GB är genom sitt moderbolag Unilever svartlistat av Ukraina för att det verkar och betalar skatt i Putinryssland, säger han.

Under måndagen svartlistades Unilever av myndigheterna i Ukraina. Bolaget äger 400 varumärken världen över och många av dem är välkända i Sverige – däribland GB, Magnum, Pepsodent och Knorr. 

Lista: Här är 17 Unilever-varumärken som säljs i Sverige

Unilever omsätter miljardbelopp årligen

Unilever Sverige AB omsatte drygt 3,2 miljarder under 2021. Samma år hade bolaget tillgångar på 726 miljoner, varav 615 miljoner var omsättningstillgångar och 111 miljoner var anläggningstillgångar.

Enligt siffror från Alla Bolag som Nyheter24 tagit del av har bolaget legat på samma stabila omsättning sedan åtminstone 2012.

Unilevers Sverige-vd Arleta Skurczynska tjänar lyxlön

Vd för Unilever Sverige AB är Arleta Skurczynska, 44. Hon håller låg profil i media och figurerar inte med bild på Unilevers hemsida.

Uppgifter från Skatteverket som Nyheter24 tagit del av visar att Skurczynska hade en fastställd förvärvsinkomst på 1 738 500 kronor under 2022. 

Det ger henne en månadslön på hela 144 875 kronor, om man fördelar summan lika på tolv. Samma år hade Arleta Skurczynska ett överskott av kapital på drygt 64 000 kronor.