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So perhaps it comes as little surprise that, in the last five months, the country's Constitutional Court has struck down four government measures, including a tax on unemployment benefits and temporary trims in wages and pensions that the judges said were unfairly targeted at civil servants.

Last month the court ruled against a plan to steer redundant public employees into a retraining program and lay off those who aren't placed in new jobs after 12 months

Under the terms of its 2011 bailout, the government has until the end of this year to move 25,000 civil servants into a labor reserve—at reduced pay—that many view as a prelude to layoffs.

Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which has seven articles and 27 amendments, Europe's national charters tend to be lengthy and prescriptive, limiting the space for judicial interpretation. Portugal's has 296 articles, Italy's has 139 and Greece's has 120.

"The constitution can't set a series of obligations for a state that simply has no money to fulfill them,"

In the case of driving schools, the government offers only a limited number of exams each year, and these are doled out to the driving schools depending on their success rate the year before. That fact alone gives the old guard a virtual monopoly,

calling for an overhaul of the written test, which he says goes far beyond making sure that a person knows the rules of the road.

Some studies have concluded that the French are probably paying 20 percent more than they should for the services they get from regulated professions, which include notaries, lawyers, bailiffs, ambulance drivers, court clerks, driving instructors and more.

barriers to getting a license are so high that about one million French people, who should have licenses, have never been able to get them.

Mr. Kramarz said that it often costs 3,000 euros, or about $3,900, to get a license. But others said the average was closer to 1,500 to 2,000 euros.

Although students are required to take only 20 hours of driving lessons, most end up doing double that while they wait for a chance to take the test.

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.

“Do you believe that things are going to get better? If you do, you don’t want to be in Treasuries at 2.5 percent,” he said. “Some things don’t make sense to me. It’s frustrating.”

For all of 2013, gross domestic product increased by 1.9 percent, compared with 2.8 percent for 2012.

Orders and shipments of durable goods

were flat in 2013, and housing has weakened. February was the eighth consecutive month of declines in pending home sales, leaving them down 10.2 percent from 12 months earlier.

the industrial sector, which includes manufacturers of business equipment. Another preferred segment is banks; he expects them to flourish as interest rates rise and the gap widens between what they charge in interest and what they pay.

Mr. Morris encourages stock investors to buy American.

The country of 4.7 million people climbed seven spots to 102nd in the World Bank’s annual “Doing Business” report this year, lagging behind China, Vietnam and Namibia. Moody’s Investors Service lowered its outlook on Costa Rica to negative from neutral in September, citing a rising debt burden and widening budget deficit. Moody’s rates the country Baa3, putting it in the same category as Turkey and Iceland.

In a Bloomberg survey published last month, Costa Rica was ranked fourth behind Russia, Argentina and Ukraine on a list of countries confronting the biggest loss of investor confidence. The survey cited data including the rising cost of credit default swaps and the currency’s performance against the dollar.

California-based Intel, whose processors run more than 80 percent of personal computers shipped worldwide every year, originally chose to establish operations in Costa Rica after studying sites in Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, according to a 2000 case study by Harvard University’s Center for International Development. The company’s $600 million investment at the time represented about 4.2 percent of GDP, prompting the company’s then-Vice President Bob Perlman to say Intel’s arrival was like “putting a whale in a swimming pool,” according to the study.

n 2013, about 21 percent of Costa Rica’s exports of goods came from Intel, according to investment promotion agency CINDE

But the rosy outlook changed in late March, when Brink’s started calculating its sales using the recently created exchange rate of about 50 bolívares to the dollar

Companies have ways of chipping away at the locked-up profits, including charging higher fees to Venezuelan subsidiaries for goods and services provided by the parent corporation. But many foreign companies are stuck holding vast troves of bolívares that shrink in value each time there is a devaluation.

Procter & Gamble said in April that it had the equivalent of about $900 million in cash in this country and that it was taking a $275 million write-down as a result of applying the government’s intermediate exchange rate to its Venezuelan balance sheet. Colgate-Palmolive wrote down $174 million, while Ford wrote down about $316 million.

“All the companies knew there would be a loss because everyone knew there wouldn’t be dollars” available at the fixed exchange rate, said an executive with an American company in Venezuela who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We were trapped because the law here did not give you a way out.”

Stores are often out of basic products such as dish soap or corn flour. DirecTV has stopped taking on new customers because it cannot get the dollars to import more dish antennas.

Without dollars, car companies cannot import the parts needed to assemble vehicles; Ford and Toyota were forced to temporarily close their factories.

In yet another reflection of the currency restrictions, the government has refused to let airlines operating in Venezuela trade the bolívares they receive for ticket sales and other services here for dollars. The International Air Transport Association says that the airlines have more than $4 billion in revenues held up in the country, based on the government’s base exchange rate at the time the tickets were sold.

American Airlines says that it is owed $750 million by the country’s government.

Air travel was governed by inter-governmental deals that dictated which airlines could fly where, how many seats they could offer and, in many cases, what fares they could charge. The result was inefficiency and losses.

Low-cost carriers, such as SouthWest and Ryanair, introduced cut-throat rivalry on short-haul routes. Former flag-carriers struggled with the legacy of older fleets, large networks, uppity unionised workforces and vast pension liabilities. Low-cost carriers devastated their model of feeding short-haul passengers onto more lucrative long-haul services.

As well as stiff competition from their rivals, airlines face the problem that there is little competition in the industries that supply them. Two firms—Airbus and Boeing—provide the majority of the planes, and airports and air-traffic control are monopolies

But Slovenia’s predicament also arises from its history. It has been slower to dismantle public ownership than Europe’s other formerly communist countries. Most notably, the three biggest ban

“I don’t deal with the exporting process. I take the order and deliver the goods to the port” in Ho Chi Minh City, she said. “The rest lies with my clients.” <img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>

The labor cost on a notebook, which is about 4 to 5 percent of the retail price, is only slightly higher than the cost of shipping by air. Soon even that is likely to change because of the twin forces of lower manufacturing costs from automation and higher transportation costs from rising global activity.

Intel, which makes most of the processors, has plants in Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Israel, Ireland and China.

That plant was shut in 2001, when Gateway elected to save costs by manufacturing in China. Dell, which made its mark by developing lean manufacturing techniques in Texas, closed its showcase Austin factory in 2008 as part of a companywide move to manufacturing in China. A Dell factory in Winston-Salem, N.C., for which Dell received $280 million in incentives from the government, was shut in 2010 (Dell had to repay some of the incentives).