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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.

How Jean Tirole’s Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy

He also said that industries should be regulated differently depending on their distinct characteristics.

You can think of Mr. Obama’s argument as falling into two categories (even if he didn’t say so): the reasons that overall economic growth may accelerate, and the reasons that middle- and low-income workers may benefit more from that growth than they have lately.

On the growth side of the ledger, both energy and education have been problems.

And the number of high-school and college graduates is rising. The financial crisis deserves some perverse credit, because it sent people fleeing back to school, much as the Great Depression did

Italy Falls Back Into Recession, Raising Concern for Eurozone Economy

Some economists argue that the region is already well into a so-called lost decade.

Analysts surmised that the strained relations with Russia as well as turmoil in the Middle East had undercut demand for Italian exports, in particular fashion and other luxury goods.

Germany’s Insistence on Austerity Meets With Revolt in the Eurozone

Ms. Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, are far more likely to stick to balancing Germany’s federal budget, “a very strange objective to announce in current circumstances,” Mr. Fratzscher, who is president of the German Institute of the Economy in Berlin, said in an interview.

While they may agree to increase spending on roads, bridges and other infrastructure in Germany, he added, the German leaders are not likely to back similar policies for France and Italy, which in Berlin’s view cannot afford it.

Europe risks ‘significant’ gas shortages this winter

Eastern European nations are working on ambitious plans to develop terminals to import liquefied natural gas but these will not be ready by the winter.

Weaning Europe From Russian Gas

European Union leaders at a summit meeting last week made a commitment to cut their dependence on Russian gas.

Russia gets about 14 percent of its entire export earnings from the gas it sells to other European countries.

IMF’s Olivier Blanchard says global recovery is still ‘weak’

“There is a strong case to be made for more public investment, for demand-side reasons in the short term, and supply-side reasons in the longer run,” says Mr Blanchard. The US and Germany are prime examples, Mr Blanchard said, of countries where there is a backlog of high-return infrastructure projects. He added that their governments should make the most of record-low borrowing costs and reap the large macroeconomic benefits that come from increasing demand.

The Greek Austerity Myth

Greece actually spends less on debt service than Italy or Ireland, both of which have much lower (gross) debt-to-GDP ratios. With payments on Greece's official foreign debt amounting to only 1.5% of GDP, debt service is not the country's problem.

The new Greek government's argument that this is an unreasonable target fails to withstand scrutiny. After all, when faced with excessively high debt, other European countries – including Belgium (from 1995), Ireland (from 1991), and Norway (from 1999) – maintained similar surpluses for at least ten years each, typically in the aftermath of a financial crisis.

In the short to medium run, increasing Greek competitiveness requires remedies targeted at specific binding constraints faced by exporters. A Greek program that identifies these constraints and proposes remedies would be much better economics than blind adherence to the troika's laundry list of structural reforms.

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 euro is in greater peril today than at the height of the crisis

Two years ago forecasters were hoping for strong economic recovery. Now we know it did not happen, nor is it about to happen.

Today the eurozone has no mechanism to defend itself against a drawn-out depression. And, unlike two years ago, policy makers have no appetite to create such a mechanism.

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.

Panama Adding a Wider Shortcut for Shipping

The gas flowing into Ukraine as of Monday was meant only to transit the country to Europe. “Gazprom supplies to Ukraine only the amount that has been paid for, and the amount that has been paid for is zero,” Gazprom’s spokesman, Sergei Kupriyanov, told reporters.

Gazprom, which has sought for the past decade to convince the Europeans that it is a reliable supplier and not an arm of Russian foreign policy, painted the dispute as strictly commercial.

Second, Gazprom has provoked economic ire in Europe over its plans to build an alternative gas route under the Black Sea for the company’s exclusive use, contradicting Europe’s open access laws. That has put the future of what is known as the South Stream pipeline in doubt.

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.

Gross trade accounting: A transparent method to discover global value chain-related information behind official trade data: Part 1

With the rapid increase in intermediate trade flows, trade economists and policymakers have reached a near consensus that official trade statistics based on gross terms are deficient, often hiding the extent of global value chains. There is also widespread recognition among the official international statistics agencies that fragmentation of global production requires a new approach to measure trade, in particular the need to measure trade in value-added. This led the WTO and the OECD to launch a joint “Measuring Trade in Value-Added” initiative on 15 March 2012, which is designed to mainstream the production of trade in value-added statistics and make them a permanent part of the statistical landscape.

All the estimation methods used in recent efforts to measure trade in value-added are rooted in Leontief (1936). His work demonstrated that the amount and type of intermediate inputs needed in the production of one unit of output can be estimated based on the input-output structures across countries and industries.

No Big Deal

Basically, old-fashioned trade deals are a victim of their own success: there just isn’t much more protectionism to eliminate.

Implicit protection of services — rules and regulations that have the effect of, say, blocking foreign competition in insurance — surely impose additional costs.

Is Europe's gas supply threatened by the Ukraine crisis?

more than a quarter of the EU's total gas needs were met by Russian gas, and some 80% of it came via Ukrainian pipelines. Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland soon reported gas pressure in their own pipelines was down by as much as 30%.

While it was eventually resolved through a complex deal that saw Ukraine buying gas from Russia (at full price) and Turkmenistan (at cut price) via a Swiss-registered Gazprom subsidiary

Taking the lead in October 2007, when it issued a $750 million Eurobond with an 8.5% coupon rate, Ghana earned the distinction of being the first Sub-Saharan country – other than South Africa – to issue bonds in 30 years.

Nine other countries – Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Angola, Nigeria, Namibia, Zambia, and Tanzania – followed suit. By February 2013, these ten African economies had collectively raised $8.1 billion from their maiden sovereign-bond issues, with an average maturity of 11.2 years and an average coupon rate of 6.2%. These countries’ existing foreign debt, by contrast, carried an average interest rate of 1.6% with an average maturity of 28.7 years.