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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

It’s hard to imagine now, but for more than three decades after World War II financial crises of the kind we’ve lately become so familiar with hardly ever happened.

But the best predictor of crisis is large inflows of foreign money: in all but a couple of the cases I just mentioned, the foundation for crisis was laid by a rush of foreign investors into a country, followed by a sudden rush out.

Had the ECB operated from the outset under a rule prohibiting it from accepting SGP-noncompliant countries’ debt as collateral, the entire eurozone sovereign-debt problem might have been avoided.

the expansion in the US took place at the federal level, where spending today amounts to 24% of GDP, compared to just 1.2% of GDP for the European Union budget.

The point is that the enforcement mechanism would be truly automatic: market interest rates would provide the discipline that bureaucrats in Brussels cannot.

Of course, the eurozone cannot establish a blue-bond regime without first solving the problems of debt overhang and troubled banks. Otherwise, the plan itself would be destabilizing, because almost all countries would immediately be in the red.

Mr Rogoff said Europe is squandering the "scarce resource" of its youth, badly needed to fortify an ageing society as the demographic crunch sets in.

"If these latent technologies are not realised, Europe will wake up like Rip Van Winkel from a long Japan-like slumber to find itself a much smaller part of the world economy, and a lot less important."

Pierre Nanterme, chairman and chief executive officer of Accenture, said Europe is losing the great battle for competitiveness, and risks a perma-slump where debt burdens of 100pc of GDP prevent governments breaking free by investing in skills and technology.

Sir Martin said the eurozone is pursuing a reverse "Phillips Curve" - the trade off between jobs and inflation - as if it were testing "what level of unemployment it is prepared to tolerate for zero inflation".

Mr Rogoff said debt write-downs across the EMU periphery "will eventually happen" but the longer leaders let the crisis fester with half-measures, the worse damage this will do to European society in the end.

He said Europe is falling further behind as the US basks in cheap energy and pours funds into cutting-edge technology. "A lot is at stake. If in 12 to 24 months no radical steps are taken to break the curse, we might have not just five, ten, but twenty years of a low-growth sluggish situation in Europe," he said.

"People are no longer talking about the euro falling apart but youth unemployment is really horrific. They can't leave this twisting in wind for another five years," he said

On February 10, Appliance Park opened an all-new assembly line in Building 2—largely dormant for 14 years—to make cutting-edge, low-energy water heaters. It was the first new assembly line at Appliance Park in 55 years—and the water heaters it began making had previously been made for GE in a Chinese contract factory.

In the 1960s, as the consumer-product world we now live in was booming, the Harvard economist Raymond Vernon laid out his theory of the life cycle of these products,

Amana, for instance, introduced the first countertop microwave—the Radarange, made in Amana, Iowa—in 1967, priced at $495. Today you can buy a microwave at Walmart for $49 (the equivalent of a $7 price tag on a 1967 microwave)—and almost all the ones you’ll see there, a variety of brands and models, will have been shipped in from someplace where hourly wages have historically been measured in cents rather than dollars.

Even as recently as 2000, a typical Chinese factory worker made 52 cents an hour.

First and foremost, the eurozone countries’ decision to admit Greece to the single currency in 2002 was woefully irresponsible, with French advocacy deserving much of the blame.

Second, much of the financing for Greece’s debts came from German and French banks that earned huge profits by intermediating loans from their own countries and from Asia.

Third, Greece’s eurozone partners wield a massive stick that is typically absent in sovereign-debt negotiations. If Greece does not accept the conditions imposed on it to maintain its membership in the single currency, it risks being thrown out of the European Union altogether.