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Although the Arctic provides a shorter route around the world than the traditional course through warmer waters, it is not necessarily cheaper.

The ships were expensive to build and operate,

Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags

After years in which a combination of fiscal pressures and a complacent trust in the alliance’s protection may have led them to drop their guard,

many countries are building from a very limited ability and remain years away from fielding anything resembling a formidable force against a military as large as Russia’s.

But an equally alarming source of the decline, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Vidal said, is the explosive increase in American farmland planted in soybean and corn genetically modified to tolerate herbicides. The American Midwest’s corn belt is a critical feeding ground for monarchs, which once found a ready source of milkweed growing between the rows of millions of acres of soybean and corn. But the ubiquitous use of herbicide-tolerant crops has enabled farmers to wipe out the milkweed, and with it much of the butterflies’ food supply.

It’s true that the U.S. economy has grown faster than that of Europe for the past generation. Since 1980 — when our politics took a sharp turn to the right, while Europe’s didn’t — America’s real G.D.P. has grown, on average, 3 percent per year. Meanwhile, the E.U. 15 — the bloc of 15 countries that were members of the European Union before it was enlarged to include a number of former Communist nations — has grown only 2.2 percent a year. America rules!

Or maybe not. All this really says is that we’ve had faster population growth. Since 1980, per capita real G.D.P. — which is what matters for living standards — has risen at about the same rate in America and in the E.U. 15: 1.95 percent a year here; 1.83 percent there.

Broadband, in particular, is just about as widespread in Europe as it is in the United States, and it’s much faster and cheaper.

As King struggled with the crisis, he concluded that the biggest vulnerability was the solvency of the banking system itself. The crash wasn’t just a liquidity squeeze caused by toxic assets; the problem was that big banks around the world were undercapitalized and, in many cases, insolvent.

King pushed the banks to recapitalize and, later, to accept more regulation. This upset a financial elite that, as King says, was the only sector of the British economy that had escaped the market revolution of the Margaret Thatcher years.

the monthly base salary of the most senior bloc officials is 18,370 euros, or $24,830.

European Union officials generally pay low taxes,

The central bank chief is coming under increasing pressure because he can't quite bring himself to embrace the concept of quantitative easing, the latest fashion in the world of finance. It involves central bankers engaging in the large-scale purchase of bonds issued by their governments and other securities, thereby injecting huge sums of money into the financial system. In this way, they hope to stimulate the domestic economy and keep their own currencies cheap, thereby strengthening exports.

The US central bank, the Federal Reserve Bank, has also been printing money to a previously unimaginable extent since the financial crisis. Calling its efforts QE 1 and QE 2, the Fed has pumped more than a trillion dollars into the US economy.

The country is in the process of "boldly rebuilding" monetary policy, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared. Indeed, the Japanese yen has lost 12 percent of its value against the dollar in the last two months.

The immediate consequences of Greece leaving or being forced out of the euro area would certainly be devastating. Capital flight would intensify, fuelling depreciation and inflation. All existing contracts would need to be redenominated and renegotiated, creating financial chaos. Perhaps most politically devastating, fiscal austerity might actually need to intensify, since Greece still runs a primary deficit, which it would have to correct if EU and International Monetary Fund financing vanished.

But this process would also produce a substantially depreciated exchange rate (50 drachmas to the euro, anyone?) And that would set in motion a process of adjustment that would soon reorient the economy and put it on a path of sustainable growth. In fact, Greek growth would probably surge, possibly for a prolonged period, if it adopted sensible policies to rapidly restore and sustain macroeconomic stability.

Just look at what happened to the countries that defaulted and devalued during the financial crises of the 1990s. They all initially suffered severe contractions. But the recessions lasted only one or two years. Then came the rebound. South Korea posted nine years of growth averaging nearly 6 percent. Indonesia, which experienced a wave of defaults that toppled nearly every bank in the entire system, registered growth above 5 percent for a similar period; Argentina close to 8 percent; and Russia above 7 percent. The historical record shows clearly that there is life after financial crises.

In 2008-09, there was a collapse of global trade. We were all very surprised. Output was not doing well, but the collapse in global trade was enormous. We realized at the time that the elasticity of trade with respect to global output was not 1, as you might think, but more like 3 to 4. So this explained it. And then it recovered like crazy.

This is still true. If global output goes down by 1%, global trade goes down by 3% to 4%.

What Europe needs to do:

Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum

These are headed for Mexico, to Navistar’s stamping plant there.Continue reading the main story

Now, they are trying to respond, making lighter, stronger steel in a bid to retain one of their most important customers, the automakers.

The Global Economy’s Tale Risks

Fluctuations in the world’s economies are largely due to the stories we hear and tell about them. These popular, emotionally relevant narratives sometimes inspire us to go out and spend, start businesses, build new factories and office buildings, and hire employees; at other times, they put fear in our hearts and impel us to sit tight, save our resources, curtail spending, and reduce risk. They either stimulate our “animal spirits” or muffle them.

The output gap for the world’s major advanced economies, as calculated by the IMF, remains disappointing, at -3.2% in 2013, which is less than half-way back to normal from 2009, the worst year of the global financial crisis, when the gap was -5.3%.

Adjustment is the key to ending the eurozone crisis. The optimists are saying that this process of regaining competitiveness is now taking place.

This judgment is profoundly wrong.

In other words, the eurozone is adjusting at the expense of the rest of the world.

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.

Comparing the first half of 2007 and the first half of 2013, real GDP contracted by an accumulated 1.3 per cent in the eurozone, 5.3 per cent in Spain and 8.4 per cent in Italy.

In the same period investment was down by an accumulated 19 per cent in the eurozone – and 38 per cent in Spain and 27 per cent in Italy. Between the first quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2013, employment fell 17 per cent in Spain and 2 per cent in Italy.

Italy is stuck with a combination of an unsustainable high level of public debt and no productivity growth. It has essentially two options to adjust – become like Germany, or leave the eurozone. The country is unable to do the first, and unwilling to do the latter

Last year Ukraine consumed about 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, most of it imported from Russia, while producing about 19 billion cubic meters, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Shale gas technologies are altering the geopolitics of energy from Russia to the Middle East. Three territories — Russia, Iran and Qatar — hold about half the conventional reserves of natural gas. But shale is found in many other places, including India, China, Australia and in Eastern Europe, undercutting the power of the oil sheikhs and the Kremlin.

Ukraine, despite producing some domestic gas by conventional extraction, remains highly dependent on Russia’s Gazprom, which cut off its supplies in 2006 and 2009 in pricing disputes. As a result, Ukraine pays exceptionally high prices for natural gas,

As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up

Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at M.I.T., said, “This is the biggest challenge of our society for the next decade.”

Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 are among the most skilled in the world, according to a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Younger Americans are closer to average among the residents of rich countries, and below average by some measures.

With the dexterity of thieves stripping a vehicle for parts, they remove each van’s engine, bumpers, tires, drive shaft, fuel tank and the exhaust system.

Next, the crews pack everything into steel freight containers, which begin a journey by river barge and cargo ship to Ladson, S.C., near the port of Charleston. There, American teams put the vans back together again.

It would be more efficient to ship the vans in one piece, of course. But with current trade rules, efficiency is seldom the goal.

Germany and EU row over energy subsidies

The dispute relates to the billions of euros of German public subsidies deployed to promote the energiewende shift to renewables while at the same time shielding heavy industry from the costs

Germany plans to generate up to 60 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035, as part of a radical shift in energy supply which involves a complete exit from nuclear power. The expansion of clean energy has been encouraged by a generous system of subsidies paid to renewables operators. These have been funded by surcharges that have left Germany with some of the highest household electricity bills in Europe.

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.