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Europe, Facing Economic Pain, May Ease Climate Rules

On Wednesday, the European Union proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production after 2020. Instead, it substituted an overall European goal that is likely to be much harder to enforce.

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

Jeffrey E. Garten, the author of “World View: Global Strategies for the New Economy” and a former dean of the Yale School of Management, said that companies “cannot take a risk that the just-in-time system won’t function, because the whole global trading system is based on that notion.” As a result, he said, “they are going to have to have redundancies in the supply chain, like more warehousing and multiple sources of supply and even production.”

In a more regionalized trading world, economists say, China would probably end up buying more of the iron ore it needs from Australia and less from Brazil, and farming out an even greater proportion of its manufacturing work to places like Vietnam and Thailand.

“We’re focusing on the trade impact,” said Mr. Lin, a professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Peking University’s School of Physics. “Trade changes the location of production and thus affects emissions.”

“Dust, ozone and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins in California and other Western states,” the statement said.Black carbon is a particular problem because rain does not wash it out of the atmosphere, so it persists across long distances, the statement said. Black carbon is linked to asthma, cancer, emphysema, and heart and lung disease.

The study’s scientists also looked at the impact of China’s export industries on its own air quality. They estimated that in 2006, China’s exporting of goods to the United States was responsible for 7.4 percent of production-based Chinese emissions for sulfur dioxide, 5.7 percent for nitrogen oxides, 3.6 percent for black carbon and 4.6 percent for carbon monoxide.

Russia Presses Ahead With Plan for Gas Pipeline to Turkey

But in recent weeks, the Russian state-owned company Gazprom has shown signs that it is serious about proceeding with what it calls Turkish Stream.

Gazprom’s chief executive recently made it clear that Turkey is its new focus — and that if Europe wants more Russian gas then it will need to find its own way to tap into it.

The Broken Model Of The Eurozone

The North is competitive. The South is 20% overvalued.And I realized that's all you need to know about the eurozone and about why it will fail. Or has already failed, to put it more accurately. There's no other information required. Other than a bit of context, perhaps, to clarify.Before the euro and the eurozone, countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, would perform 20% or more lower economically than Germany or Holland would. And that was kind of alright, because periodically, their governments and central banks would revalue (devaluate) their currencies down against;

Of course, Germany hated this to an extent, since it made it harder for its industries to compete against Greek and Italian companies. Which may, by the way, well be a mostly hidden reason for them to push the eurozone on the Mediterranean.

A snapshot of Nigeria’s economy in 1990 gave little or no weight to fast-growing parts of the economy such as mobile telephony or the movie industry. At the time the state-owned telephone company had a few hundred thousand customers. Today the country has 120m mobile-phone subscriptions. On the old 1990 figures, the telecoms sector was less than 1% of GDP; it is now almost 9% of GDP. Motion pictures had not shown up at all in the old figures, but the industry’s size is now put at 1.4% of GDP.

The oil industry’s share of GDP is now put at just 14%, compared with 33% according to the old figures.

The estimated annual bauxite output of 1.4 million tonnes will mostly go to the alumina refinery in Romania, ensuring the necessary raw material for aluminium production in Slatina.

Most of the bauxite output will be supplied to the Vimetco's alumina refinery, Alum Tulcea, which reopened in 4Q 2009 following a complex upgrading programme, during which the Company replaced part of the existing equipment, to make production processes more efficient and to comply with European regulations for environment protection.

The agreement includes $1 billion for extraction and exports of bauxite to the UAE as well as a $4 billion aluminium refinery and a port, Mohamed Lamine Fofana, Guinea's minister for mines and geology told Reuters at a Guinea investors' conference in Abu Dhabi.The investment forms part of the UAE's expansion plans for its Emirates Global Aluminium business, set to become the world's fifth largest aluminium company by output next year.Emirates Global Aluminium was created from the merger of DUBAL and Emirates Aluminium (EMAL). The merged group has two aluminium plants in the UAE, one in Dubai and a second at Taweelah near Abu Dhabi.

In May 2013, Mubadala and DUBAL said they would jointly take over a Guinea Alumina Corp project in Guinea, acquiring 66.6 percent from BHP Billiton (BHP.AX) and Global Alumina.

Restarting Ukraine’s Economy

Ten IT-enabled business trends for the decade ahead

Manufacturing the future: The next era of global growth and innovation

Work Like a German

In the German job-share model (known as “Kurzarbeit”), if an employer cuts an employee’s hours so that income is reduced by more than 10 percent, the government compensates workers for a large portion of wages lost. This enables companies to cut costs during downturns without having to lay workers off.

For the long-term unemployed who take significantly lower-paying jobs (typically, at minimum-wage levels), the unemployment benefits could offer stop-loss insurance to put a floor under their losses.

Before the new government could go on the offensive, it needed to play defense. It fended off an attack on Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, the cornerstone of an economic policy that transformed Ireland from a financial backwater into a European hub for companies such as Pfizer Inc., the maker of Viagra, and Google Inc.

Two days after commencing his premiership, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, 62, became embroiled in what he called a Gallic spat with French President Nicolas Sarkozy after refusing to raise the tax rate in return for an interest-rate cut on aid.

“The attitude was: ‘You misbehaved and here’s what you have to do’,’”

Confronting big economic challenges

Japan: Lessons from a hyperaging society

Global flows in a digital age

Global flows in a digital age