Global Economy

Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags

After years in which a combination of fiscal pressures and a complacent trust in the alliance’s protection may have led them to drop their guard,

many countries are building from a very limited ability and remain years away from fielding anything resembling a formidable force against a military as large as Russia’s.

Midsize Cities in Poland Develop as Service Hubs for Outsourcing Industry

Part of Poland’s edge derives from the fact that it has yet to join the euro currency union. Its currency, the zloty, has been relatively stable against the world’s reserve currencies in the last year.

(The public sector, employing about a quarter of Poland’s 15.7 million workers, is still the country’s largest source of jobs.)

Deepening divide over Elbe dredging

The Marco Polo, for example, carries 16,000 containers and has a draft (the vertical distance between waterline and ship's keel) of 16 meters. Given present river depths and tides, such ships can only enter Hamburg at certain times and when not fully loaded.

Tidal range is a prime cause for erosion, which previous river dredging, as well as waves generated by passing ships, have exacerbated

How Much Do People Forget?

In Runquist’s 1983 study, the best learning method produced average forgetting at 34%, whereas all the other learning methods produced average forgetting of 78%

Africa losing billions from fraud and tax avoidance

In total, the continent lost about $850bn between 1970 and 2008, the report said. An estimated $217.7bn was illegally transferred out of Nigeria over that period, while Egypt lost $105.2bn and South Africa more than $81.8bn.

African Union’s (AU) high-level panel on illicit financial flows and the UN economic commission for Africa (Uneca).

Germany is the eurozone’s biggest problem

Tullock’s insight was that expenditures on lobbying for privileges are costly and that these expenditures, therefore, dissipate some of the gains to the beneficiaries and cause inefficiency. If, for example, a steel firm spends one million dollars lobbying and advertising for restrictions on steel imports, whatever money it gains by succeeding, presumably more than one million, is not a net gain. From this gain must be subtracted the one-million-dollar cost of seeking the restrictions. Although such an expenditure is rational from the narrow viewpoint of the firm that spends it, it represents a use of real resources to get a transfer from others and is therefore a pure loss to the economy as a whole.

For India in 1964, for example, Krueger estimated that government regulation created rents equal to 7.3 percent of national income; for Turkey in 1968, she estimated that rents from import licenses alone were about 15 percent of Turkey’s gross national product.

What Happened to Argentina?

Cuba for sale: ‘Havana is now the big cake – and everyone is trying to get a slice’

Hewlett-Packard, which turns out over 50 million computers a year through its own plants and subcontractors, makes many of its larger desktop personal computers in such higher-cost areas as Indianapolis and Tokyo to save on fuel costs and to serve business buyers rapidly.

Volkswagen May Buy Back Diesel Cars It Can’t Fix

Global flows in a digital age

Global flows in a digital age

AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY IN TENNESSEE

Greece Needs the Euro

June 15, 2015 2:00 pm DownloadQ&A: a third way for Greece in the form of a parallel currency

Greece’s Debt Due: What Greece Owes When

Greece’s Debt Due

Finland's Problem Is The Same As Greece's; Neither Should Be In The Euro As Krugman Says