DR Congo: Cursed by its natural wealth

Last year Germany, not China, ran the world’s biggest current account surplus. And measured as a share of G.D.P., Germany’s surplus was more than twice as large as China’s.

Instead, however, Germany failed to make any adjustment at all; deficits in Spain, Greece and elsewhere shrank, but Germany’s surplus didn’t.

European Borders Tested as Money Is Moved to Shield Wealth

Russia is making increasing efforts to deter the biggest country in its former empire from looking west and to prod it into joining the rival, Kremlin-led Eurasian Customs Union instead.

The big difference in the EZ is that nations cannot go off the euro as they went off the gold standard

A major part of Lenin’s analysis, for instance, was devoted to the demonstration that Russia had become a quasi-colony as a result of the large scale capital imports, and that the foreign creditors in effect controlled Russia’s foreign policy.

The linkages of these issues can be summarized as a series of impossible trinities or trilemmas.

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.

Since Ghanaian students took the test in English (the so-called official language of Ghana), those whose first language is non-English are at great disadvantage.

In some of the participating countries grade eight teachers have university education in mathematics, even some at the post- graduate level; while in others the teachers have an equivalent of two years university education in mathematics. In Ghana, a grade eight mathematics teachers may not have such a background in mathematics.

This narrative ignores one critical fact: Every irresponsible borrower is enabled by an irresponsible lender.

“Following the introduction of the euro,” he said, “a large amount of capital flowed into the countries which are now at the center of the crisis, such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus.” What he didn’t say was how much of that capital flowed from Germany. In the second quarter of 2010, German banks had more assets in Greece than banks from any other country except France. They had more assets in Ireland than banks from any other country except the U.K. And they had more assets in Spain than banks from any other country, period.

Before the euro, when Germans saved, their current account balance rose, and with it, the value of the deutsche mark. After 2002 you could save in euros in Dortmund, and without currency risk your bank would invest in euros abroad

The federal government would give Foxconn tax breaks, subsidized loans and special access through customs and lower tariffs for imported parts if it started assembling Apple products in Brazil, where Foxconn was already producing electronics for Dell, Sony and Hewlett-Packard.

Apple products remain expensive; the latest iPad, for instance, costs about $760 in Brazil, compared with $499 in the United States. But because those devices are made in Brazil and lower tariffs are charged on parts used to assemble them, Foxconn and Apple are pocketing larger shares of the profits, analysts say, offsetting the increased costs of building outside China.

To train its new American engineers, Nissan flew workers to its Zama factory in eastern Japan. There the Nissan officials, assisted by English-speaking Japanese workers called “communication helpers,” imparted the intricacies of the company’s production techniques to the Americans.

Early on, Nissan guarded against quality concerns by not relying on parts from American suppliers. Most components were either shipped from Japan or produced by Japanese companies that set up operations nearby.

Gradually, American parts makers were allowed to bid on supply contracts. Even that came amid arm-twisting by Congress, which passed a law in 1992 requiring auto makers to inform consumers of the percentage of parts in United States-made cars that came from North America, Asia or elsewhere.

Since its first pickup truck rolled off the line here on June 16, 1983, Nissan has produced more than seven million vehicles in the United States. It now employs 15,000 people in this country. It makes more than a half-million cars, trucks and S.U.V.’s a year, with the plant in Smyrna building six models, including the soon-to-be-produced, all-electric Nissan Leaf.

Could the Japanese car companies achieve the same quality using American workers?

including currency fluctuations that made exporting more expensive. The final push came from American anger as imports grabbed one-fourth of the United States market.

Japanese and other foreign companies account for more than 40 percent of cars built in the United States, employing about 95,000 people directly and hundreds of thousands more among parts suppliers.

The United States gained these jobs through a combination of public and Congressional pressure on Japan, “voluntary” quotas on car exports from Japan and incentives like tax breaks that encouraged Japanese automakers to build factories in America.

The government could also encourage domestic production of technologies, including display manufacturing and advanced semiconductor fabrication, that would nurture new industries. “Instead, we let those jobs go to Asia, and then the supply chains follow, and then R&D follows, and soon it makes sense to build everything overseas,” he said. “If Apple or Congress wanted to make the valuable parts of the iPhone in America, it wouldn’t be hard.”

Several developments helped to restore calm. The European Central Bank (ECB) president, Mario Draghi, vowed to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro, and quickly institutionalised that pledge by establishing the ECB's "outright monetary transactions" programme to buy distressed eurozone members' sovereign bonds.

And, even if such adjustment is not occurring as fast as Germany and other core eurozone countries would like, they remain willing to provide financing, and governments committed to adjustment are still in power.

For starters, potential growth is still too low in most of the periphery, given ageing populations and low productivity growth, while actual growth – even once the periphery exits the recession, in 2014 – will remain below 1% for the next few years, implying that unemployment rates will remain very high.