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German exporters were major beneficiaries of this growth. German banks and financial institutions helped finance the growth.

Exports have provided the majority of Germany’s growth in recent years. Germany is heavily reliant on a narrowly based industrial sector, focused on investment goods—automobiles, industrial machinery, chemicals, electronics and medical devices. These sectors make up a quarter of its GDP and the bulk of exports.

Germany’s service sector is weak with lower productivity than comparable countries. While it argues that Greece should deregulate professions, many professions in Germany remain highly regulated. Trades and professions are regulated by complex technical rules and standards rooted in the medieval guild systems. Foreign entrants frequently find these rules difficult and expensive to navigate.

Mr. Weber, who is also a member of the European Central Bank’s governing council, said that the statistics reflected Ireland’s status as a financial center: much of what is recorded as claims on Ireland is in fact money funneled through Irish subsidiaries of German banks, and ultimately bound for elsewhere, Mr. Weber said. He said total German exposure was closer to $30 billion.

In both cases more than half of the exposure was to Ireland’s private sector, rather than lending to the government or Ireland’s beleaguered banks.

In Germany, Hypo Real Estate, a property and public sector lender owned by the government after a bailout, owed its near collapse largely to problems at Depfa, its subsidiary in Dublin. Last month Hypo transferred most of its troubled assets to a so-called bad bank that will slowly wind down the investments.

ECB President Mario Draghi, one of many policymakers gearing up for trouble after Sunday's vote in Greece, said his bank was ready to step in and fund any viable euro zone bank that gets in trouble.

French loans to Spanish banks plunged 34 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 compared with the previous quarter, according to the latest data from the Bank for International Settlements.

For Italian banks, French bankers cut their exposure by 16 percent. German banks have also been increasingly wary of their Italian and Spanish peers, reducing lending to them by about 19 percent last year

Crippled eurozone to face fresh debt crisis this year, warns ex-ECB strongman Axel Weber

Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff said the launch of the euro had been a "giant historic mistake, done to soon" that now requires a degree of fiscal union and a common bank resolution fund to make it work, but EMU leaders are still refusing to take these steps.

"People are no longer talking about the euro falling apart but youth unemployment is really horrific. They can't leave this twisting in wind for another five years," he said.

Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.

For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.

Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company

he world is now using a record amount of oil even though Europe and the United States are paring back.

is the mounting evidence produced by labor economists of just how important it is for current graduates to ignore the old-school advice of trying to get ahead by working one's way up the ladder. Instead, it seems, graduates should try to do exactly the thing the older generation bemoans — aim for the top.

starting at the bottom is a recipe for being underpaid for a long time to come.

A recent study, by the economists Philip Oreopoulos, Till Von Wachter and Andrew Heisz, "The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession" (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12159, April 2006. http://www.columbia.edu/~vw2112/papers/nber_draft_1.pdf), finds that the setback in earnings for college students who graduate in a recession stays with them for the next 10 years.

Children of immigrants complete more years of education than their native-born counterparts of similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

“Pretty much every human on earth can access all human knowledge,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist.

o how to measure the Internet’s contribution to our lives? A few years ago, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago and Peter J. Klenow of Stanford gave it a shot. They estimated that the value consumers gained from the Internet amounted to about 2 percent of their income — an order of magnitude larger than what they spent to go online. Their trick was to measure not only how much money users spent on access but also how much of their leisure time they spent online.

At the heart of the new global economy are what Prof Nolan calls “systems integrator” companies – businesses with dominant brands and superior technologies, which are at the apex of value chains that serve the global middle classes. These global businesses, in turn, exert enormous pressure on their supply chains, creating ever-rising consolidation there, as well.

Using data from 2006-09, Prof Nolan concludes that the number of globally dominant businesses in the manufacture of large commercial aircraft and carbonated drinks was two; of mobile telecommunications infrastructure and smart phones, just three; of beer, elevators, heavy-duty trucks and personal computers, four; of digital cameras, six; and of motor vehicles and pharmaceuticals, 10. In these cases, dominant businesses supplied between half and all of the world market. Similar degrees of concentration have emerged, after consolidation, in many industries

On Tuesday, a company appearing at the Amazon conference said it had run in 18 hours a project on Amazon’s cloud of computer servers that would have taken 264 years on a single server. The project, related to finding better materials for solar panels, cost $33,000, compared with an estimated $68 million to build and run a similar computer just a few years ago.

“It’s now $90 an hour to rent 10,000 computers,” the equivalent of a giant machine that would cost $4.4 million, said Jason Stowe, the chief executive of Cycle Computing, the company that did the Amazon supercomputing exercise, and whose clients include The Hartford, Novartis, and Johnson & Johnson. “Soon smart people will be renting a conference room to do some supercomputing.”

This year, Gartner calculated that A.W.S. had five times the computing power of 14 other cloud computing companies, including IBM, combined.

From this survey it appeared that the median German household had the lowest wealth of all Eurozone countries

The median households in countries like Belgium, Spain and Italy appear to be three to four times wealthier than the median German household. Even the median Greek household is twice as wealthy as the German one.

Germany’s decision to eliminate its nuclear plants led it to bring coal-fired power plants out of mothballs to make up the difference. Doing so was a viable option because coal demand in the United States has dropped sharply as American power plants have turned to less expensive gas, driving down the cost of American coal for export to global markets.

As a result, carbon dioxide emissions in Germany went up last year, not down

“Without shale gas, this would be a world where Russia would have very, very strong market power and there would be very strong dependency on gas supply from geopolitically risky regions in the Middle East, Iran and North Africa,” said Laszlo Varro, the director of the Gas, Coal and Power Markets Division of the International Energy Agency.

“It’s sad to note that the state of education is worse now than it was 20 years ago,

“How is it that a segment of our youth cannot realize their legitimate aspirations at professional, physical and social levels?”

They say that their education has left them ill-equipped for the workplace.

Why Do Americans Stink at Math?

The Americans might have invented the world’s best methods for teaching math to children, but it was difficult to find anyone actually using them.

In fact, efforts to introduce a better way of teaching math stretch back to the 1800s. The story is the same every time: a big, excited push, followed by mass confusion and then a return to conventional practices.

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.

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.

Germany Fights Population Drop

But undoing years of subsidies for traditional households is difficult. “Touching those is political suicide,” said Michaela Kreyenfeld of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany.

Many working mothers find themselves quickly pushed into poorly paid “mini” jobs — perhaps 17 hours a week for about $600 a month. More than four million working women in Germany, about a quarter of the female work force, hold such jobs.