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A brawl involving as many as 2,000 workers forced Foxconn to close its Taiyuan plant in northern China late on Sunday, and left a number of people needing hospital treatment.

The Taiyuan plant, which employs about 79,000 workers, makes parts for automotive electronics and assembles various electronic devices, according to Woo. Other staff sources said it makes parts for and assembles Apple's new iPhone 5, released last week.

Wages in the developed world have fallen in real terms for the second time since the banking crisis, continuing the long-term trend of workers being made to cope on a smaller share of national income.Steep falls in pay packets in eastern Europe and a wage freeze across the richest western countries, including the UK, sent monthly salaries into reverse in 2011 after taking inflation into account, said the International Labour Organisation.

Mexico's senate has approved a wide-reaching labour reform bill in the biggest shakeup of the country's job market in more than four decades.

The bill, which the government said will create up to 400,000 jobs a year, contains a raft of measures, including changes that would make it easier for firms to hire and fire workers and shorten labour disputes. However, parts of the bill that sought to make unions more transparent were cut back.

Under the new measures, work contracts will be more flexible, enshrining trial periods and initial training contracts in labour laws. Regulations will be tightened on outsourcing of personnel, while the minimum wage will rise from an hourly to a daily rate.The reform strengthens the rights of working women, including outlawing gender-based discrimination and helping mothers plan their work schedules. Unions will have to publish their regulatory statutes on the ministry of labour's website, but many of the tougher measures – including rules to force them to show how they manage members' fees – were dropped.

Jayati Ghosh says aid from Britain benefits the UK more than it does India, and makes a negligible difference to relieving poverty. She discusses India's rapid growth and its social and economic inequality, and calls for an economic strategy that focuses on secure employment

China's factory activity shrank again in December as demand at home and abroad slackened, a purchasing managers' survey showed on Friday.

"While the pace of slowdown is stabilising somewhat, weakening external demand is starting to bite," said Qu Hongbin, China economist at HSBC.

China's once turbo-charged economy is on track to slow for a fourth successive quarter, easing further from the first quarter's 9.7% annual growth rate with economists expecting the final three months of the year to have slipped below 9.5%.

The global economic landscape has evolved dramatically since 2000: developing and emerging economies have been driving global growth, new sources of development finance have mushroomed and the diversification of actors, instruments and delivery mechanisms has continued. Transformations in the poverty map and new forces on the supply side of development finance are challenging the international development architecture. This paper aims to stimulate debate on the future of this architecture. The authors project that, by 2025, the locus of global poverty will overwhelmingly be in fragile, mainly low-income and African, states, contrary to current policy preoccupations with the transitory phenomenon of poverty concentration in middle-income countries. Moreover, a smaller share of industrialised country income than ever before will potentially close the remaining global poverty gap, although direct income transfers are not yet feasible in many fragile country contexts. Against this backdrop, new institutions, business models and practices are challenging long-established ‘aid industry’ actors. Agencies providing development finance for improved social welfare, for mutual self-interest in growth and trade and for the provision of global public goods will find that, in each area, disruptors to their programmes may force a change in positioning.

Brazil, which has more people of African descent than any other country outside of Africa itself, is assertively raising its profile again on the continent, building on historical ties from the time of the Portuguese empire.

The charm offensive is paying off in surging trade flows between Brazil and Africa, growing to $27.6 billion in 2011 from $4.3 billion in 2002.

Some of Brazil’s biggest inroads, predictably, are in Portuguese-speaking countries like Angola, where the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht ranks among the largest employers, and Mozambique, where the mining giant Vale has begun a $6 billion coal expansion project.