Global Economy

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.

U.S. and European Job Markets Take Different Paths

Martin Wolf’s ‘The Shifts and the Shocks’

Nobel economists say policy blunders pushing Europe into depression

Russia shuts four McDonald's restaurants in Moscow

To be sure, Russia has shut only four out of 435 McDonald's outlets across the country and said the move was temporary, pending further checks.

McDonald's in April closed its three restaurants in Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula that Russia annexed a month earlier, citing "the suspension of necessary financial and banking services." Those restaurants remain closed. At the time, a Russian nationalist politician called for all McDonald's outlets to be closed and for demonstrations outside restaurants.

How Owensboro tobacco grew a possible miracle drug to treat Ebola

These are the companies abandoning the U.S. to dodge taxes

Europe Toughens Stance against Putin

As such examples suggest, political identity has shifted to something less civil and more primordial.

When sectarian or ethnic minorities have ruled countries – for example, the Sunnis of Iraq – they typically have a strong interest in downplaying sectarianism or ethnicity. They often become the chief proponents of a broader, civic concept of national belonging, in theory embracing all peoples. In Iraq, that concept was Ba’athism. And while it was more identified with the Sunni minority than with the Shia majority, it endured for decades as a vehicle for national unity, albeit a cruel and cynical one.

Sectarianism thus came to frame Iraqi politics, making it impossible to organize non-sectarian parties on the basis of, say, shared socioeconomic interests. In Iraqi politics today (leaving aside the Kurds), seldom does a Sunni Arab vote for a Shia Arab, or a Shia for a Sunni. There is competition among Shia parties and among Sunni parties; but few voters cross the sectarian line –

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.

EU energy market: Pipe dream

A more competitive market also means importing new sources of gas from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as building terminals for liquefied natural gas.

France’s nuclear industry was also reticent about cheap renewable energy streaming into the French grid on an uncertain timetable.

For several months, IBM has been seeking to sell its chip-manufacturing operations

The most likely buyer is GlobalFoundries, a large contract chip manufacturer, the person said, for a price of probably less than $2 billion.

Ms. Rometty stated that while IBM’s priorities were in fields like data analytics and cloud computing, and it had agreed to sell its industry-standard computer server business to Lenovo of China for $2.3 billion, she added: “But let me be clear — we are not exiting hardware.”

Profits Vanish in Venezuela After Currency Devaluation

The country’s high inflation — currently around 60 percent a year — has also meant that the prices in bolívares that companies charge for many goods and services have risen sharply.

Now companies are feeling the pain from a series of currency devaluations over the last year and a half. Photo

June 23, 2014 4:42 pm Q&A: The US Export-Import Bank

Dubai, Once a Humble Refueling Stop, Is Crossroad to the Globe

Five years ago, the global credit crisis brought Dubai near bankruptcy. But the city has recovered its drive, helped partly by a $10 billion bailout from neighboring Abu Dhabi, and a return of investors from the Middle East and Eastern Europe

Dubai’s success has rattled its rivals, particularly airlines in Europe and the United States, which have complained that traffic was being siphoned from their hubs.

Growth in Global Trade Is in Ideas, Not Stuff

Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

Technological change The last Kodak moment?

Search Rise of the Robots

The most valuable part of each computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with robots, according to my colleague Quentin Hardy. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.

Robots mean that labor costs don’t matter much, so you might as well locate in advanced countries with large markets and good infrastructure (which may soon not include us, but that’s another issue)

A European Energy Executive’s Delicate Dance Over Ukraine

Major Western oil companies like BP and Exxon Mobil have extensive exploration deals in Russia that they fear could be jeopardized if the United States and European Union impose stiffer sanctions on the Putin regime.

“This is by far the toughest time for European energy security that I have seen,” said Mr. Scaroni. “This issue might stop the supply of Russian gas.”