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At the Time Warner Center, anEnclave of Powerful Russians

Citi Cuts Costa Rica Growth Forecast After Firings

Hours later, BofA said it would be exiting operations in Costa Rica, Guadalajara, Mexico and Taguig, Philippines, without saying how many jobs would be lost. Costa Rica’s foreign investment agency said the BofA move would result in 1,500 layoffs.

“This is a strong call to the country to keeps tabs on things like the rising cost of electricity, telecommunications, wages and social guarantees.”

The clothing needs to be labeled correctly so that it travels smoothly through a large retailer’s distribution centers

The process requires formidable numbers of skilled workers who can oversee quality control as well as labeling and shipping of garments.

Africa’s Structural Transformation Challenge

As researchers at the African Center for Economic Transformation in Accra, Ghana, put it, the continent is “growing rapidly, transforming slowly.”

Fewer than 10% of African workers find jobs in manufacturing, and among those only a tiny fraction – as low as one-tenth – are employed in modern, formal firms with adequate technology. Distressingly, there has been very little improvement in this regard, despite high growth rates. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa is less industrialized today than it was in the 1980’s. Private investment in modern industries, especially non-resource tradables, has not increased, and remains too low to sustain structural transformation.

Working with five local high schools and a career center in Aiken County, S.C. — and a curriculum nearly identical to the one at the company’s headquarters in Friedrichshafen — Tognum now has nine juniors and seniors enrolled in its apprenticeship program.

Since 2008, the number of apprentices has fallen by nearly 40 percent, according to the Center for American Progress study.

Some 330 types of apprenticeships are accredited by the government in Berlin, including such jobs as hairdresser, roofer and automobile electronics specialist. About 60 percent of German high school students go through some kind of apprenticeship program, which leads to a formal certificate in the chosen skill and often a permanent job at the company where the young person trained.

European Debt Crisis Navigator A list of resources from around the Web about the European debt crisis as selected by Journalist's Resource, a project of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard.

The Eurozone Crisis: How Banks and Sovereigns Came to Be Joined at the Hip International Monetary Fund, November 2011

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.

Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon

There is something ridiculous about a tax system that encourages an American company to invest abroad rather than in the United States. But that is what we have.

“The fundamental problem we have in trying to tax corporations is that corporations are global,” says Eric Toder, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “It is very, very hard for national entities to tax entities that are global, particularly when it is hard to know where their income originates.”

Some international companies hate that idea, of course. They warn that we would risk making American multinational corporations uncompetitive with other multinationals, and perhaps encourage some of them to change nationality.

Mr. Weber, who is also a member of the European Central Bank’s governing council, said that the statistics reflected Ireland’s status as a financial center: much of what is recorded as claims on Ireland is in fact money funneled through Irish subsidiaries of German banks, and ultimately bound for elsewhere, Mr. Weber said. He said total German exposure was closer to $30 billion.

In both cases more than half of the exposure was to Ireland’s private sector, rather than lending to the government or Ireland’s beleaguered banks.

Taxpayers will bear the cost, but they may never find out how much. The bad bank, known as FMS Wertmanagement, has no plans to release financial statements, according to Soffin, the German government organization that oversees bank rescues.

In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.”

Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)

To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.

In the latest example, Portugal's Constitutional Court on Thursday shot down the government's attempts to improve the country's competitiveness by making it easier for companies to shed workers—as demanded under the terms of the country's international bailout. The court ruled against the measures because, it said, they went against the principle of firing workers only when there was just cause.

Courts have been able to thwart some attempts to shrink the state bureaucracy or make the labor force more flexible.

Portugal's 1976 constitution calls for "opening the path to a socialist society." It obliges the state to promote employment, move toward free health and education services and even develop "centers of rest and holiday" for workers.

Foreign dividends transferred to an ETVE are not taxed in Spain if their recipient paid corporate tax in the country of the dividends' origin, and the money can then be moved to the U.S. and many other countries without incurring withholding tax. ExxonMobil used its ETVE to receive dividends from its Luxembourg profit center and then transfer them tax-free to the U.S

Cyprus had developed its financial center over three decades ago by having double taxation treaties with a number of countries, the Soviet Union for example. That means if profits are booked and earned and taxed in Cyprus, they are not taxed again in the other country. Russian deposits are there because Cyprus has a low corporate tax rate, much like Malta and Luxembourg, which annoys some people in Europe.

In addition, Cyprus has a legal system based on English law and follows English accounting rules

This government took a country with excellent fiscal finances, a surplus in fiscal accounts, and a banking system that was in excellent health. They started overspending, not only for unproductive government expenditures but also they raised implicit liabilities by raising pension promises, and so forth.

This narrative ignores one critical fact: Every irresponsible borrower is enabled by an irresponsible lender.

“Following the introduction of the euro,” he said, “a large amount of capital flowed into the countries which are now at the center of the crisis, such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus.” What he didn’t say was how much of that capital flowed from Germany. In the second quarter of 2010, German banks had more assets in Greece than banks from any other country except France. They had more assets in Ireland than banks from any other country except the U.K. And they had more assets in Spain than banks from any other country, period.

Before the euro, when Germans saved, their current account balance rose, and with it, the value of the deutsche mark. After 2002 you could save in euros in Dortmund, and without currency risk your bank would invest in euros abroad

“It’s sad to note that the state of education is worse now than it was 20 years ago,

“How is it that a segment of our youth cannot realize their legitimate aspirations at professional, physical and social levels?”

They say that their education has left them ill-equipped for the workplace.