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“Do you believe that things are going to get better? If you do, you don’t want to be in Treasuries at 2.5 percent,” he said. “Some things don’t make sense to me. It’s frustrating.”

For all of 2013, gross domestic product increased by 1.9 percent, compared with 2.8 percent for 2012.

Orders and shipments of durable goods

were flat in 2013, and housing has weakened. February was the eighth consecutive month of declines in pending home sales, leaving them down 10.2 percent from 12 months earlier.

the industrial sector, which includes manufacturers of business equipment. Another preferred segment is banks; he expects them to flourish as interest rates rise and the gap widens between what they charge in interest and what they pay.

Mr. Morris encourages stock investors to buy American.

The goal is to be able to ship gas to Ukraine at an annual rate of more than three billion cubic meters by the time the heating season begins in the autumn, increasing the flow to up to 10 billion cubic meters annually by next spring. Last year Ukraine imported nearly 30 billion cubic meters of gas, according to a recent report by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Part of his message is that, even though gas demand in Europe has been weak because of sluggish economies, imports from Russia actually rose last year by about 16 percent as other sources of supply including Norway and Algeria declined. Europe, he warned, is simply not prepared to do without gas from Russia.

But with the gradual introduction of more competitive pricing in the European markets, the gas business has become much less attractive for ENI and other big gas middlemen. They are stuck with high-priced long-term contracts to a handful of suppliers like Gazprom and Sonatrach, the Algerian state-owned company, while their customers are able to secure gas at often lower spot market prices — assuming the gas is flowing.

The pipeline would be a major new source of Russian gas for energy-hungry Europe. But European Union authorities have become deeply skeptical about the South Stream plan, seeing it as just another way of making Europe more dependent on Russian energy.

hose outages in 2006 and 2009 are a top reason that the European Union had already been trying to chip away at Europe’s dependence on Russia even before the Crimea annexation.

That is partly because powerful Eastern European countries like Poland argue that such clean-energy policies would impede their ability to reduce Russian dependence by mining more coal or developing their own shale gas resources.

nd this month, the European Commission issued rules aimed at reducing the subsidies that governments use to support the wind and solar industries,

If one is only interested in estimating the domestic value-added embedded in a country’s or sector’s gross exports, applying Leontief’s insight is sufficient. However, for many economic and policy applications, one also needs to quantify other components in gross exports and their structures. In such circumstances Leontief’s original insight is not sufficient, as it does not provide a way to decompose intermediate trade flows across countries into various value-added terms according to their final absorption,

Our gross trade accounting framework in fact allows one to further decompose each of the four major parts of gross exports above into finer components with economic interpretations

By the gross statistics, presented in column 1 of Table 1, the trade is highly imbalanced – Chinese exports to the US ($176.9 billion in 2011) are five times that of US exports to China ($35.1 billion in 2011). If we separate exports of final goods and of intermediate goods (reported in columns 2a and 2b of Table 1), we see that most of the Chinese exports consist of final goods, whereas most of the US exports consist of intermediate goods.

In other words, the US exports rely overwhelmingly on its own value-added (only 2.1% from China and 5.8% from other countries in 2011), whereas the Chinese exports use more foreign value-added, especially value-added from third countries (with 3.2% from the US and 23.1% from Japan, Korea, and all other countries).

As a consequence of these differences in the structure of value-added composition, the China–US trade balance in this sector looks much smaller when computed in terms of domestic value-added than in terms of gross exports.

By identifying which parts of the official data are double counted and the sources of the double counting, our gross trade accounting method provides a transparent way to bridge official trade statistics (in gross terms) and national accounts (in value-added terms) consistent with the System of National Accounts standard.

Shell is working with Gazprom on natural gas extraction in Russia; Exxon has a multibillion dollar exploration partnership with Rosneft, a major oil producer controlled by the Russian government, and BP owns nearly 20 percent of Rosneft.

"Shell and Exxon have physical assets in Russia," said Gheit. "But pound-for-pound, BP has the biggest exposure in Russia." Although BP may have the most to lose from an economic tug-of-war between Moscow and the West, tough lessons that BP learned in Russia—through a defunct partnership with Rosneft called TNK-BP—also make BP best equipped for any future fallout, said Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy.

Spiro said that several German firms have also steeled themselves for possible fallout from friction between the Russia and the West. "German companies are huge here," said Spiro, naming BASF, energy firm RWE, and Siemens as companies with operations in Russia. BASF is working to finalize a deal with Gazprom that would give it a stake in Siberian oil fields; RWE has reached a preliminary deal to sell its natural gas subsidiary to Russian billionaires Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, and Siemens has a partnership with state-run railroad monopoly Russian Railways. Late last month, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser made a trip to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at his residence and voice support for a "trusting relationship" with Russian companies.

We know that if the West's resolve starts to crumble, it will almost certainly start in Germany,

"That's the canary in the coal mine."

"It starts with Germany and works its way down," said Hogan. "They have the most trade back-and-forth, and Germany gets the highest percentage of its energy from Russia."

Alcoa owns aluminum fabrication facilities in Russia, and Boeing has a design center in Moscow, as well as a joint venture with VSMPO-Avisma, the world's largest titanium producer.

Members of the Russian parliament have also proposed charging international payments companies like Visa and Mastercard with pre-emptive "security fees," with the stated aim of preparing for future financial disruptions.

As US coal demand declines, more US coal is going to Europe, where low CO2 prices and high gas prices are increasing the competitiveness of coal in the power generation system.

As in all developing countries, farmers in Africa are flocking to the cities. And yet, as a recent study from the Groningen Growth and Development Center shows, rural migrants do not end up in modern manufacturing industries, as they did in East Asia, but in services such as retail trade and distribution. Though such services have higher productivity than much of agriculture, they are not technologically dynamic in Africa

Xinshen Diao of the International Food Policy Research Institute has shown that this growth was led by non-tradable services, in particular construction, transport, and hotels and restaurants. The public sector dominates investment, and the bulk of public investment is financed by foreign grants. Foreign aid has caused the real exchange rate to appreciate,

Studies show that very few microenterprises grow beyond informality, just as the bulk of successful established firms do not start out as small, informal enterprises.

Because burning natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, this technology has helped the United States reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the lowest level since the mid-1990s

The economy emerged from recession in the second quarter, unemployment dropped for six months in a row, and house prices in Dublin are rising again. The yield on 10-year bonds is down to 3.5 percent, lower than Italy and Spain.

Noonan then ramped up his efforts to broker a deal on banking debt. He had a consistent line: it was payback time. The government hadn’t imposed losses on senior bank bondholders, preventing contagion spreading across the euro region from the Irish banking crisis.

Banks used the cash to buy sovereign debt

“The Germans disagree all the time until the very end, and then they agree,” he said. “Once you realize that, you keep talking, you keep chipping away.”