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At its peak, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines company employed more than 65,000 Zambians and carried out services like water delivery and waste collection for five cities in the Copper Belt Province.

Mining employment has dropped to just 30,000, half of its glory-days peak, and the job of maintaining all that company housing and infrastructure has reverted back to the government.

The stats identify Switzerland as Zambia’s primary export market. This is not an indicator that Zambia hosts a thriving chocolate and suspenders sector, but rather that its copper trades are booked in the jurisdiction where they are least likely to be taxed.

Many of the mining companies pay just 0.6 percent royalties to Zambia, far below the already-meager industry standard of three percent.

This is Namwile Uzondile, the director of a rural health education project.

Last year Namwile conducted a survey of prostitutes here in Kitwe, and found that at least half of them had education certificates, but couldn’t find work. Most had been married off early, 15 or 16, and since then had either left their husbands or lost them to AIDS.

First, you go to the tribal chief. Ninety-four percent of the land in Zambia is customary or traditional, no one has a title to it. It’s not just sitting there, people are living on it, farming, grazing animals, it’s just technically under the control of a chief.

In Zambia most of the chiefs require a gift just to get a meeting. This might mean taking them lunch at a restaurant in Lusaka, or it could mean buying their daughter a car—it’s up to them.

Another reason Zambia lacks skills is that some parts of the workforce operate as cartels. Take lawyers. Zambia only has 1,000 of them, and they’re concentrated where the money is: Lusaka (government), Copper Belt (mining) and Livingstone (safari tourists).

Last year, only six lawyers were admitted to the bar out of 164 who took the exam. The year before that, it was 16 out of 145. Keep in mind, these aren’t people coming in off the streets. These are people who have a law degree.

More than 60 percent of Zambia’s government revenue comes from the copper mines.

Taxing all this informal activity would be costly in both resources and voter goodwill. In 2012, Zambia collected just $2.3 million in income taxes from its citizens.

It goes as high up as you want to follow it. Michael Sata, the president of Zambia, appointed his uncle the finance minister, his nephew the deputy finance minister, his niece the local government minister, and cousins as ambassador to Japan and chief justice.

Zambia’s cabinet has ballooned to 20 ministers and 47 deputy ministers, the largest in Africa. With salaries three to four times higher than opposition MPs and each ministerial post bundled with perks like a company car, free fuel, house servants, and mobile phone talk-time, you get the feeling politicians aren’t jumping from opposition into government on moral sentiment alone.

In 2011, Zambia spent a total of $4.3 billion running itself. Stretch that to cover every man, woman, and child, and it amounts to just $325 per person per year. That amount—less than a dollar per person per day—has to cover education, health care, infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign debt … everything.

Now she goes all NGO. “Little government capacity,” she says, is the nicest way to put it. “There are simply no systems for routine government services,” she says. Getting a license, a permit, certificates, approvals to start work, visas for expats to fly down here—nothing is in one place, nothing is fast or easy.

“Sometimes we have to pay for the inspectors to come to our mines,” Jane says.

The conversation goes like this: Jane tells the local certification body that she needs an inspector to sign off for a permit. The local certification body tells her that they would be happy to come out to the site, but they don’t have fuel for their cars, or enough petty cash to pay per diems. Jane offers to pay their costs, but only their costs, and the payments aren’t related to clearing the inspection.

The company has even paid the police to follow up on complaints or to investigate thefts. “They say, ‘We don’t have this in our budget’ or ‘We’ll need you to pay for it,’” Jane says. So the company fixes the police cars, covers their travel expenses, treats them to lunch.

“We tell them, ‘The company I work for, we’re not going to pay up.’ But at the end of the day, they know you’re on a short timeline, and they aren’t.”

Thomas’ family told him his nephews didn’t need to be in school. From their perspective, that’s not totally irrational. In a country with so few formal jobs and so much competition for getting them, I can see how spending hundreds of hours, thousands of kwachas, on education would seem superfluous. Thomas’ daughter wants to become a lawyer. You could almost forgive Thomas if he told her that the bar exam failure rate is more than 90 percent, so what’s the use?

International investors pledged $750 million last year to build infrastructure.

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

Almost everything is being subordinated to protect retirees.

“for how long will we continue to sacrifice investments in our nation’s children and youth ... to spend more and more on the aged?”

In a Pew poll, 87 percent of respondents favored present or greater Social Security spending; only 10 percent backed cuts. Results were similar for 18 of 19 programs, foreign aid being the exception.

Africa is losing more than $50bn (£33bn) every year in illicit financial outflows as governments and multinational companies engage in fraudulent schemes aimed at avoiding tax payments to some of the world’s poorest countries, impeding development projects and denying poor people access to crucial services.

Nigeria’s crude oil exports, mineral production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa, and timber sales from Liberia and Mozambique are all sectors where trade mispricing occurs.

The bulk of Africa’s illicit transfers originated from west Africa, where 38% of all funds leaving the continent were generated. Profit-making activities in north Africa accounted for 28% of the flows, while southern Africa, central Africa and eastern Africa each made up about 10%, the report showed.

Maybe Draghi’s policies can buy time for deeper “structural changes” in the periphery, although quite what those are and what difference they would make in the near term remains elusive

More likely, a shift in ECB policies would make the European situation uglier. For one, Draghi would essentially be conceding fiscal dominance, demonstrating that if governments run budget deficits, they can count on the central bank to finance them.

Perhaps Draghi is planning the same game with fiscal authorities that the Banca d’Italia used to play with Italian politicians in the 1980s and early 1990s -- keep interest rates low enough to prevent fiscal collapse, yet high enough to keep fiscal prudence as a priority. Make no mistake about it, inflation or not, this is a strategy of high real interest rates.

In 2005 its government brought in fertiliser subsidies. It reported a maize crop of 3.4m tonnes in 2006-7, up from 2.6m tonnes the year before. The aid lobby said this justified the subsidies and the budget support which enables them to be paid for.

But Nigeria's debt was largely accumulated under civilian governments,

The World Bank president, Paul D. Wolfowitz, announced on Friday an important step toward providing $37 billion in debt relief to 17 of the poorest countries, most of them in Africa. He said he had enough votes from donor countries on the board of the International Development Association, the bank arm that provides very low interest loans, to approve the measure.

The 17 countries will begin receiving the relief, worth close to $1 billion a year over 40 years, on July 1. They are Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

Why should Japanese politicians risk infuriating their farmers when any agreement can be torn up on Capitol Hill?

Europe’s leaders will now doubt America’s commitment, given how feebly Mr Obama has fought for fast-track. Trade sceptics, such as French farmers, are drooling. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, who is already furious about American spying, may decide that a trade deal is not worth battling for.

He seldom mentions, for example, that cheap imports help the poor by cutting their shopping bills, and so reduce inequality of consumption.

The country accounts for over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Even assuming that China’s population does not grow at all over the next 30 years, that the energy efficiency of its economy increases at a faster pace than most developed and developing countries and that it manages to decarbonize its energy sources faster than pretty much anybody else, China would still be emitting a lot more carbon in 2040 than it does today, according to E.I.A. calculations.

Can the United States or anybody else do anything to speed China down a low-carbon path?

The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued in April, suggested several ways to allot responsibilities. If one starts counting in the 18th century and counts only emissions from industry and energy generation, the United States is responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gases that humanity has put into the air. China, by contrast, is responsible for 10 percent.But if one starts counting in 1990, when the world first became aware that CO2 was a problem, and includes greenhouse gases emitted from changes in land use, the United States is responsible for only 18 percent, and China’s share rises to 15 percent. Rich and poor countries, unsurprisingly, disagree on the proper measure. Photo

Not everybody will meet their Copenhagen pledges. Japan, which unplugged its nuclear energy after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, will fall behind. So will Canada and Australia, whose new conservative governments have lost interest in the pledges of their predecessors.

American, European and Chinese regulators have put in effect energy-efficiency rules that phase out the use of incandescent bulbs. Big multinationals that make light bulbs like Philips, Osram and General Electric have responded by embracing light-emitting diodes, which use one-fifth of the electricity of incandescent bulbs and half the electricity of fluorescent bulbs.

Many Chinese producers also have a poor and worsening reputation for quality, which may hurt them in the long term.

The industry, for instance, is highly segmented.

Prices have fallen by nearly half in the last year for low-end, low-wattage LEDs made in China, and by 15 to 20 percent for the higher-wattage versions made elsewhere, buyers and manufacturing executives said.

Lighting accounts for about 6 percent of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, and LEDs have the potential to steeply reduce them.

“We do not buy Chinese LEDs,” said Mike Pugh, the procurement director at Xicato in San Jose, Calif., a large provider of indoor lighting systems for retailers and hotels. “We just can’t take that chance.”

Xicato instead buys LEDs from multinationals like Cree of Durham, N.C.; Philips Lumileds, based in San Jose, Calif.; and Osram Opto Semiconductors of Regensburg, Germany.

Three-quarters of China’s electricity still comes from burning coal, which contributes to severe air pollution as well as global warming.

She earns $500 a month plus medical benefits and free food and lodging in an air-conditioned dormitory where employees sleep four to six i

the solar and LED industries in China received huge loans at low interest rates from state-owned banks following directives from Beijing

“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.