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Which Corporate Taxation for America?

The current system, all agree, is deeply flawed: the corporate tax rate is too high by global standards, and the corporate tax base is too narrow, owing to numerous credits, deductions, and special provisions that distort economic decisions.

The problems in India were cultural, bureaucratic and practical.

Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.

In 2012, the M.I.T. Forum for Supply Chain Innovation and the publication Supply Chain Digest conducted a joint survey of 340 of their members. The survey found that one-third of American companies with manufacturing overseas said they were considering moving some production to the United States, and about 15 percent of the respondents said they had already decided to do so.

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.

Intel to downsize Costa Rica operations, several media sources report

Intel reportedly plans to move its manufacturing operation to Asia and lay off 1,500 employees, according to “well-placed” sources in the company, reported the newspaper El Financiero.

Microprocessors are Costa Rica’s primary export. Over 20 percent of Costa Rica’s exports in 2013 were microprocessors, worth some $2.4 billion, according to statistics from the Foreign Trade Ministry (COMEX).

For several months, IBM has been seeking to sell its chip-manufacturing operations

The most likely buyer is GlobalFoundries, a large contract chip manufacturer, the person said, for a price of probably less than $2 billion.

Ms. Rometty stated that while IBM’s priorities were in fields like data analytics and cloud computing, and it had agreed to sell its industry-standard computer server business to Lenovo of China for $2.3 billion, she added: “But let me be clear — we are not exiting hardware.”

The subcommittee said that Apple had “exploited a difference between Irish and American tax residency rules” but had not broken any laws.

Among the ideas under consideration are strict rules for defining where a company has a permanent presence and measures to limit the practice of so-called transfer pricing — the shunting of profits and losses between subsidiaries by disguising them as internal corporate payments for goods or, as is increasingly common, for copyright or patent royalties.

Global flows in a digital age

Now, one in three goods crosses national borders, and more than one-third of financial investments are international transactions. In the next decade, global flows could triple,

we find that countries with a larger number of connections in the global network of flows increase their GDP growth by up to 40 percent more than less connected countries do. The penalty for being left behind is rising.

“You get these occasional disconnects and start asking who’s right and who’s wrong,” said Daniel Morris, global investment strategist at TIAA-CREF.

“We think the equity market is right,” he said. “If that’s the case, bond yields are too low.”

“We’re constructive about the future and think all this intervention is going to work, but how much is priced in” to the stock market? So much, in his view, that “we’ve been selling into the strength,” he said.

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.

As clunky Soviet-era factories and mines have become more efficient or gone out of business, Ukraine’s domestic gas consumption has dropped nearly 40 percent over the past five years, cutting its imports from Russia in half, according to a report by Sberbank Investment Research.

Domestic consumption might drop further if Ukraine trims the generous subsidies it gives households using natural gas, although so few households are paying their bills that it might not matter. “People will go from not paying the lower price to not paying the higher price,” said Thane Gustafson, senior director of Russian energy for the consulting firm IHS CERA.

Even if residential customers paid up, the Ukrainian state energy company, Naftogaz, would lose money on those sales

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.

Hewlett-Packard, which turns out over 50 million computers a year through its own plants and subcontractors, makes many of its larger desktop personal computers in such higher-cost areas as Indianapolis and Tokyo to save on fuel costs and to serve business buyers rapidly.

The reason is not hard to fathom. Hobbled by severe damage to private and public-sector balance sheets, and with policy interest rates at or near zero, post-bubble economies have been mired in a classic “liquidity trap.” They are more focused on paying down massive debt overhangs built up before the crisis than on assuming new debt and boosting aggregate demand.

The sad case of the American consumer is a classic example of how this plays out. In the years leading up to the crisis, two bubbles – property and credit – fueled a record-high personal-consumption binge. When the bubbles burst, households understandably became fixated on balance-sheet repair – namely, paying down debt and rebuilding personal savings, rather than resuming excessive spending habits.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph

US consumers have pulled back as never before.

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.