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“I definitely expect that things will get worse,” he said.

The European Union exported agricultural goods worth 11.8 billion euros, or $15.8 billion, to Russia last year, and sales have been rising at a rate of almost 15 percent a year.

The economic data and news that Russia was massing troops and military equipment on the Ukrainian border caused stock prices to fall across Europe on Wednesday.

Separately, the German Federal Statistical Office reported on Wednesday that new industrial orders in Germany fell 3.2 percent in June compared with May. Analysts had expected orders to increase.

For Italy, the deteriorating economy puts greater pressure on Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who less than a week ago promised not to impose any more government budget cuts and to invest in improving the country’s roads and other infrastructure. Such promises will be difficult to keep if slower growth, which usually translates into higher unemployment and lower corporate profits, limits tax receipts.A slower economy also endangers Italy’s ability to comply with eurozone rules on budget deficits.

Italy’s 2.1 trillion euro government debt equals 136 percent of its annual gross domestic product, the second-highest debt ratio in the eurozone, after Greece.

They said Italy’s problems stemmed more from its failure make changes needed to improve the performance of its economy.

The slow pace of structural reforms is worrisome,” said Paolo Manasse, a professor of macroeconomics at Bologna University. He said there was no sign of progress on necessary steps like selling off state-owned assets or overhauling the labor market or public pension system.

Between 1991 and 2012 the average annual increase in real wages in Britain was 1.5% and in America 1%, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mostly rich countries.

Real wage growth in Germany from 1992 to 2012 was just 0.6%; Italy and Japan saw hardly any increase at all.

And the dramatic dip in productivity growth after 2000 seems to have coincided with an apparent acceleration in technological advances as the web and smartphones spread everywhere and machine intelligence and robotics made rapid progress.

A second explanation for the Solow paradox, put forward by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (as well as plenty of techno-optimists in Silicon Valley), is that technological advances increase productivity only after a long lag.

John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and perhaps the foremost authority on American productivity figures, earlier this year published a study of productivity growth over the past decade. He found that its slowness had nothing to do with the housing boom and bust, the financial crisis or the recession. Instead, it was concentrated in ICT industries and those that use ICT intensively.

Once an online course has been developed, it can be offered to unlimited numbers of extra students at little extra cost.

For example, new techniques and technologies in medical care appear to be slowing the rise in health-care costs in America. Machine intelligence could aid diagnosis, allowing a given doctor or nurse to diagnose more patients more effectively at lower cost. The use of mobile technology to monitor chronically ill patients at home could also produce huge savings.

Health care and education are expensive, in large part, because expansion involves putting up new buildings and filling them with costly employees. Rising productivity in those sectors would probably cut employment.

The integration of large emerging markets into the global economy added a large pool of relatively low-skilled labour which many workers in rich countries had to compete with. That meant firms were able to keep workers’ pay low.

Productivity growth has always meant cutting down on labour. In 1900 some 40% of Americans worked in agriculture, and just over 40% of the typical household budget was spent on food. Over the next century automation reduced agricultural employment in most rich countries to below 5%,

A new paper by Peter Cappelli, of the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that in recent years over-education has been a consistent problem in most developed economies, which do not produce enough suitable jobs to absorb the growing number of college-educated workers.

"There's no risk to Polish clients," PGNiG spokeswoman Dorota Gajewska said, but added that it was forced to suspend its so-called "reverse flow" transfers to Ukraine.

The move caused the Russian ruble to plunge to another record low against the dollar on Thursday.

"It also can be seen as a kind of response to EU sanctions, targeting the smaller EU members in Moscow's former sphere of influence, not its larger Western partner." "But it's a risky policy, as it further undermines Moscow's credibility in Western Europe. It's not the best idea: either you're a reliable supplier of gas or you're not," he said.

Spain’s grid is barely connected to France so its wind farms cannot export their production when it exceeds domestic demand. Similarly, solar and wind energy from southern Italy is wasted because it is not effectively linked to the industrial north.

Full energy convergence needs more than interconnectors. Widely divergent electricity prices are often determined by national tax rates. Grids that can respond to demand further afield in a continent-wide “supergrid” will need more direct (rather than alternating) current infrastructure. While it took Spain and France more than three decades to build a 64.5km interconnection, some 52,000km of lines need to be built or upgraded across the continent.

Poland argues that Gazprom has confidential data on each country it deals with, knowing its gas prices and infrastructure vulnerabilities. It can then use this data to its advantage, pushing some countries into more onerous contracts than others.

The advantage of a hub would become more apparent when new supplies from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean are integrated into the market by means of the so-called southern corridor supply route.

Geoffrey Feasey of the European Network of Transmission Systems Operators for Electricity says one-third of the most vital projects to connect Europe are being held up by “permitting and public acceptance”.

There is nothing new in the need to address possible discrimination of imported electricity by Germany,” he said. “If consumers have to pay a surcharge on their consumption of both domestic and imported electricity but revenue from the surcharge is used to only finance domestic electricity producers, there is a risk that imported electricity is disadvantaged and made comparatively more expensive.”

There is even talk of Russia and China creating an alternative international payment system to replace the SWIFT system, which the US and Europe can use to impose financial sanctions against Russia.

But Putin is ambitious, and – like other autocrats in Central Asian nations – he may remain in power for decades to come. And, like it or not, even a Russia that lacks the dynamism needed to succeed in manufacturing and the industries of the future will remain a commodity-producing

superpower.

US President Barack Obama says that this is not the beginning of a new Cold War; current trends may soon suggest otherwise.

First and foremost, the eurozone countries’ decision to admit Greece to the single currency in 2002 was woefully irresponsible, with French advocacy deserving much of the blame.

Second, much of the financing for Greece’s debts came from German and French banks that earned huge profits by intermediating loans from their own countries and from Asia.

Third, Greece’s eurozone partners wield a massive stick that is typically absent in sovereign-debt negotiations. If Greece does not accept the conditions imposed on it to maintain its membership in the single currency, it risks being thrown out of the European Union altogether.

Another potential sticking point is Turkey itself. For one thing, the country obtains about 60 percent of its gas from Russia, a dependence the government is not necessarily eager to increase.

Industry analysts estimate that the cost of Turkish Stream would be about $10 billion for Gazprom, which so far has spent an estimated $4.7 billion on the Black Sea project.

Mr. Putin already publicly offered a 6 percent reduction to Turkey. But Ankara, which pays substantially more for Russian gas than Germany does, is pressing for a better deal.

The American tech sector has started thinking likewise. In some parts of Google, for instance, as many as 14 percent of employees do not have college degrees.

Eiso Kant, a 24-year-old Dutch entrepreneur — a veteran, by the conference’s standards — has settled in Madrid. He initially came to study at its IE University, but then started Tyba, an online job recruitment platform focused on start-up companies.

Aya Jaff, a 19-year-old, Iraqi-born German, set up an association to teach coding to young people, while herself completing a degree in computer sciences.