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In Japan, for instance, an environmental engineer has attributed a mysterious pestilence that is killing trees on Yakushima Island to pollutants from China.

But the proportion of China’s exports that are made in China has risen steadily in recent years as many companies move more of their supply chains, instead of just having final assembly work done here.

The country accounts for over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Even assuming that China’s population does not grow at all over the next 30 years, that the energy efficiency of its economy increases at a faster pace than most developed and developing countries and that it manages to decarbonize its energy sources faster than pretty much anybody else, China would still be emitting a lot more carbon in 2040 than it does today, according to E.I.A. calculations.

Can the United States or anybody else do anything to speed China down a low-carbon path?

The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued in April, suggested several ways to allot responsibilities. If one starts counting in the 18th century and counts only emissions from industry and energy generation, the United States is responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gases that humanity has put into the air. China, by contrast, is responsible for 10 percent.But if one starts counting in 1990, when the world first became aware that CO2 was a problem, and includes greenhouse gases emitted from changes in land use, the United States is responsible for only 18 percent, and China’s share rises to 15 percent. Rich and poor countries, unsurprisingly, disagree on the proper measure. Photo

Not everybody will meet their Copenhagen pledges. Japan, which unplugged its nuclear energy after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, will fall behind. So will Canada and Australia, whose new conservative governments have lost interest in the pledges of their predecessors.

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).

Nikos Chountis, Greece's deputy foreign minister, said on Tuesday that Russia and China had already offered financial support to the country.

Cyprus has already caused a political storm by offering to expand Russian access to its ports and airfields – including “military facilities” - though it has stopped short of offering full military bases.

American, European and Chinese regulators have put in effect energy-efficiency rules that phase out the use of incandescent bulbs. Big multinationals that make light bulbs like Philips, Osram and General Electric have responded by embracing light-emitting diodes, which use one-fifth of the electricity of incandescent bulbs and half the electricity of fluorescent bulbs.

Many Chinese producers also have a poor and worsening reputation for quality, which may hurt them in the long term.

The industry, for instance, is highly segmented.

Lighting accounts for about 6 percent of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, and LEDs have the potential to steeply reduce them.

Prices have fallen by nearly half in the last year for low-end, low-wattage LEDs made in China, and by 15 to 20 percent for the higher-wattage versions made elsewhere, buyers and manufacturing executives said.

“We do not buy Chinese LEDs,” said Mike Pugh, the procurement director at Xicato in San Jose, Calif., a large provider of indoor lighting systems for retailers and hotels. “We just can’t take that chance.”

Xicato instead buys LEDs from multinationals like Cree of Durham, N.C.; Philips Lumileds, based in San Jose, Calif.; and Osram Opto Semiconductors of Regensburg, Germany.

Three-quarters of China’s electricity still comes from burning coal, which contributes to severe air pollution as well as global warming.

She earns $500 a month plus medical benefits and free food and lodging in an air-conditioned dormitory where employees sleep four to six i

the solar and LED industries in China received huge loans at low interest rates from state-owned banks following directives from Beijing

In the areas that are sound, it is mainly that TPP members will probably have to approach the US norms faster than desirable, and possibly faster than they can effectively administer. But there are also areas in which the TPP is not in the interests of most non-US members.

However, it is generally accepted that TTIP is more important to Europe than to the US, which greatly strengthens the US’s hand in negotiations.

it is widely accepted that the deeper intra-European integration fostered by the Single Market initiative was a major contributor to European prosperity between 1992 and 2007

he US has strongly promoted Investor-State Dispute Arbitration in which foreign-owned private firms can seek settlements against governments for taking actions that are not prohibited by the agreements but which reduce the value of investments that the firms have made in member countries.

For states that do not have a lot of, say, social or environmental legislation at the time TPP is signed, Investor-State Arbitration threatens to make progress in these dimensions difficult.

This reads very much like an agreement to cooperate to make sure that outcomes in the trading system are as the US and EU want them – and with around half of world GDP between them and a further 15% in the rest of TPP, it suggests that the choice facing other will be capitulation vs. exclusion. I fear the latter.

Champions of the multilateral system must be much more explicit about its virtues and value – and among these I include Europe (middle-sized countries with a strong belief in negotiated outcomes and order) and China (which has been a massive beneficiary of open markets and non-discrimination to date).

urope had better get on with an internally driven liberalisation, especially of services and utilities markets, to stimulate the recovery quite independent of the outside pressures of a trade negotiation;

The team eliminated 1 out of every 5 parts. It cut the cost of the materials by 25 percent.

the team cut the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.

Time-to-market has also improved, greatly.

four weeks on the boat from China and one week dockside to clear customs.

Total time from factory to warehouse: 30 minutes.

there is an inherent understanding that moves out when you move the manufacturing out. And you never get it back.”

At the end of the day, they say, ‘If we were doing this for the U.S. market, we should never have gone to China in the first place.’ ”

But the logic of onshoring today goes even further—and is driven, in part, by the newfound impatience of the product cycle itself.

Just a few years ago, the design of a new range or refrigerator was assumed to last seven years. Now, says Lou Lenzi, GE’s managers figure no model will be good for more than two or three years.

If one is only interested in estimating the domestic value-added embedded in a country’s or sector’s gross exports, applying Leontief’s insight is sufficient. However, for many economic and policy applications, one also needs to quantify other components in gross exports and their structures. In such circumstances Leontief’s original insight is not sufficient, as it does not provide a way to decompose intermediate trade flows across countries into various value-added terms according to their final absorption,

Our gross trade accounting framework in fact allows one to further decompose each of the four major parts of gross exports above into finer components with economic interpretations

By the gross statistics, presented in column 1 of Table 1, the trade is highly imbalanced – Chinese exports to the US ($176.9 billion in 2011) are five times that of US exports to China ($35.1 billion in 2011). If we separate exports of final goods and of intermediate goods (reported in columns 2a and 2b of Table 1), we see that most of the Chinese exports consist of final goods, whereas most of the US exports consist of intermediate goods.

In other words, the US exports rely overwhelmingly on its own value-added (only 2.1% from China and 5.8% from other countries in 2011), whereas the Chinese exports use more foreign value-added, especially value-added from third countries (with 3.2% from the US and 23.1% from Japan, Korea, and all other countries).

As a consequence of these differences in the structure of value-added composition, the China–US trade balance in this sector looks much smaller when computed in terms of domestic value-added than in terms of gross exports.

By identifying which parts of the official data are double counted and the sources of the double counting, our gross trade accounting method provides a transparent way to bridge official trade statistics (in gross terms) and national accounts (in value-added terms) consistent with the System of National Accounts standard.