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Early work on optimum currency areas by Robert Mundell had emphasised the symmetry or asymmetry of disturbances hitting different regional economies as a key criterion on which to gauge their suitability for sharing a common currency.

We now know that Kenen flagged a problem for which the Eurozone could have been better prepared. With an outsized capital-goods producing sector, Germany benefitted from a strong positive shock as a result of China’s emergence onto the global stage, given the Chinese economy’s voracious appetite for capital goods.

He has threatened to veto any new budget that does not at least freeze spending,

“Europeans who are attached to the European Union are now in a minority.” Fifty-two percent of those surveyed said they felt little or no attachment, up seven percentage points since 2010. In Britain, only 27 percent felt attached to the union.

Ahead of this week’s negotiations, at least seven countries, mostly those that contribute more to Europe’s coffers than they get back in farm subsidies and other payments, have already warned that they may veto a budget that does not give them a better deal. Among these is Austria, where, according to Mr. Ehrenhauser, who sits on the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee, “there is a critical mass building against the European Union.”

In fact, some economists view the German reform narrative as a myth

Wage restraint was instead a function of weak demand after the collapse of the reunification-fueled construction boom in the mid-1990s.

Even if one accepts the story, economists also point out that Germany undertook its labor-market reforms when the winds of the world economy were extremely favorable. The global economy was growing, and China and other emerging economies were sucking in machine tools and other capital goods in which German manufacturers excelled.

The communist Derg junta was ousted in 1991 and five years later only 27.5% of school-aged children received primary education; today that figure stands at over 85%, according to the World Bank.

In August 2005 the government embarked on an ambitious expansion plan, simultaneously building 13 universities across the country at a cost of $550m, paid for out of the education budget.

Ten more universities are under construction, all of which have already begun to admit students, increasing even further the country's higher education capacity.

“The rise of industrial big data is moving at twice the speed of other big data. That’s a great opportunity.” said William Ruh, the head of global software at G.E. “There’s all kinds of experiences that we’re going to create.”

The other is a kind of application software to help power companies figure out how to best build out and operate their turbines. By October, G.E. hopes to have similar applications out for railway, mining, and oil and gas companies.

Effectively, G.E. is taking the data-driven tools and strategies used by Google and Facebook to the much larger global economy.

On Tuesday, a company appearing at the Amazon conference said it had run in 18 hours a project on Amazon’s cloud of computer servers that would have taken 264 years on a single server. The project, related to finding better materials for solar panels, cost $33,000, compared with an estimated $68 million to build and run a similar computer just a few years ago.

“It’s now $90 an hour to rent 10,000 computers,” the equivalent of a giant machine that would cost $4.4 million, said Jason Stowe, the chief executive of Cycle Computing, the company that did the Amazon supercomputing exercise, and whose clients include The Hartford, Novartis, and Johnson & Johnson. “Soon smart people will be renting a conference room to do some supercomputing.”

This year, Gartner calculated that A.W.S. had five times the computing power of 14 other cloud computing companies, including IBM, combined.

Since its first pickup truck rolled off the line here on June 16, 1983, Nissan has produced more than seven million vehicles in the United States. It now employs 15,000 people in this country. It makes more than a half-million cars, trucks and S.U.V.’s a year, with the plant in Smyrna building six models, including the soon-to-be-produced, all-electric Nissan Leaf.

Could the Japanese car companies achieve the same quality using American workers?

including currency fluctuations that made exporting more expensive. The final push came from American anger as imports grabbed one-fourth of the United States market.

The federal government would give Foxconn tax breaks, subsidized loans and special access through customs and lower tariffs for imported parts if it started assembling Apple products in Brazil, where Foxconn was already producing electronics for Dell, Sony and Hewlett-Packard.

Apple products remain expensive; the latest iPad, for instance, costs about $760 in Brazil, compared with $499 in the United States. But because those devices are made in Brazil and lower tariffs are charged on parts used to assemble them, Foxconn and Apple are pocketing larger shares of the profits, analysts say, offsetting the increased costs of building outside China.

Russia Steps Up Economic Pressure on Kiev

Russia is now asking close to $500 for 1,000 cubic meters of gas, the standard unit for gas trade in Europe, which is a price about a third higher than what Russia’s gas company, Gazprom, charges clients elsewhere. Russia says the increase is justified because it seized control of the Crimean Peninsula, where its Black Sea naval fleet is stationed, ending the need to pay rent for the Sevastopol base. The base rent had been paid in the form of a $100 per 1,000 cubic meter discount on natural gas for Ukraine’s national energy company, Naftogaz.

Mr. Yatsenyuk raised the pressing need to build an interconnector pipe allowing for a so-called reverse flow from the European Union into the Ukrainian gas system. “We need reverse flows of gas from the European Union to support Ukraine’s energy security,” Mr. Yatsenyuk said.

How Jean Tirole’s Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy

He also said that industries should be regulated differently depending on their distinct characteristics.

Technology isn’t working

Technology isn’t working

n the 1970s the blistering growth after the second world war vanished in both Europe and America. In the early 1990s Japan joined the slump, entering a prolonged period of economic stagnation.

Weaning Europe From Russian Gas

European Union leaders at a summit meeting last week made a commitment to cut their dependence on Russian gas.

Russia gets about 14 percent of its entire export earnings from the gas it sells to other European countries.

The gas flowing into Ukraine as of Monday was meant only to transit the country to Europe. “Gazprom supplies to Ukraine only the amount that has been paid for, and the amount that has been paid for is zero,” Gazprom’s spokesman, Sergei Kupriyanov, told reporters.

Gazprom, which has sought for the past decade to convince the Europeans that it is a reliable supplier and not an arm of Russian foreign policy, painted the dispute as strictly commercial.

Second, Gazprom has provoked economic ire in Europe over its plans to build an alternative gas route under the Black Sea for the company’s exclusive use, contradicting Europe’s open access laws. That has put the future of what is known as the South Stream pipeline in doubt.

Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has been grappling with the effects of a slowdown in sales of personal computers that use its microprocessor chips. The company has also been slow to build a sizable business in chips for smartphones and tablets.

Brian Krzanich and Renee James —appointed last May as Intel's chief executive and president, respectively—have been studying Intel operations and concluded that reducing the assembly and test operations in Costa Rica made most economic sense, said Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman. "We have to be more efficient and effective," he said. Most of Intel's chips are fabricated in the U.S., Ireland or Israel and then sent to other companies to be encapsulated in packaging and tested. Those chores now handled in Costa Rica will be moved to existing Intel operations in Malaysia, Vietnam and China, Mr. Mulloy said.

Europe’s dangerous addiction to Russian gas needs radical cure

“It really boils down to this: no nation should use energy to stymie a people’s aspirations,” Mr Kerry said in Brussels, just as Russia’s Gazprom raised the price it charges Ukraine for gas.

Bernstein Research has calculated that to do so, Europe needs to eliminate 15 bcm of residential and industrial gas demand, invest $215bn and incur $37bn of annual costs in the form of higher-priced energy. That works out as $160 for every single person in Europe.

Rent-seeking” is what economists call a special type of money-making: the sort made possible by political connections. This can range from outright graft to a lack of competition, poor regulation and the transfer of public assets to firms at bargain prices. Well-placed people have made their fortunes this way ever since rulers had enough power to issue profitable licences, permits and contracts to their cronies.

Capitalism based on rent-seeking is not just unfair, but also bad for long-term growth.

It identifies sectors which are particularly dependent on government—such as mining, oil and gas, banking and casinos—

Seeds of domesticated squash found by scientists on the western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old, about twice the age of previously discovered cultivated crops in the region, new, more precise dating techniques have revealed.

The excavations also yielded peanut hulls and cotton fibers — about 8,500 and 6,000 years old, respectively

Their research also turned up traces of other domesticated plants, including a grain, manioc and unidentified fruits, and stone hoes, furrowed garden plots and small-scale irrigation canals from approximately the same period of time.

“Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”

Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building.

The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.

Although the Arctic provides a shorter route around the world than the traditional course through warmer waters, it is not necessarily cheaper.

The ships were expensive to build and operate,