Global Economy

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The magic is in that head: GE has put a small heat pump up there, and the GeoSpring pulls ambient heat from the air to help heat water. As a result, the GeoSpring uses some 60 percent less electricity than a typical water heater. (You can also control it using your iPhone.)

The GeoSpring is an innovative product in a mature category

We really had zero communications into the assembly line there.”

The Myth of Industrial Rebound

On Germany’s coast, for example, an estimated $1.3 billion went into revitalizing ports and factories to serve the industry, creating about 10,000 jobs. But demand frequently drops off when projects stall, at times leaving factories in coastal towns like Cuxhaven, on Germany’s North Sea, sitting idle with hundreds of workers laid off.

Pupils in Finland, Korea, Japan and Canada consistently score much higher than their peers in Germany, Britain, America and France.

In each country, the Americans are startled by how hard their new peers work and how seriously they take their studies. Maths classes tend to be more sophisticated, with lessons that show the often fascinating ways that geometry, trigonometry and calculus work together in the real world.

Classrooms tend to be understated, free of the high-tech gadgetry of their schools back home. And teachers in every subject exhibit the authority of professionals held in high regard.

“Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”

Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building.

The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.

Seeds of domesticated squash found by scientists on the western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old, about twice the age of previously discovered cultivated crops in the region, new, more precise dating techniques have revealed.

The excavations also yielded peanut hulls and cotton fibers — about 8,500 and 6,000 years old, respectively

Their research also turned up traces of other domesticated plants, including a grain, manioc and unidentified fruits, and stone hoes, furrowed garden plots and small-scale irrigation canals from approximately the same period of time.

Tullock’s insight was that expenditures on lobbying for privileges are costly and that these expenditures, therefore, dissipate some of the gains to the beneficiaries and cause inefficiency. If, for example, a steel firm spends one million dollars lobbying and advertising for restrictions on steel imports, whatever money it gains by succeeding, presumably more than one million, is not a net gain. From this gain must be subtracted the one-million-dollar cost of seeking the restrictions. Although such an expenditure is rational from the narrow viewpoint of the firm that spends it, it represents a use of real resources to get a transfer from others and is therefore a pure loss to the economy as a whole.

For India in 1964, for example, Krueger estimated that government regulation created rents equal to 7.3 percent of national income; for Turkey in 1968, she estimated that rents from import licenses alone were about 15 percent of Turkey’s gross national product.

Lien Phat Ltd.'s factory,

Its supplies are imported. “I mainly take orders from international corporations, who give us materials and designs,” said Truong Thi Thuy Lien, the owner of Lien Phat. “Usually the clients will designate us to certain suppliers, most of them are in China.”

That ‘Made in U.S.A.’ Premium

Working with five local high schools and a career center in Aiken County, S.C. — and a curriculum nearly identical to the one at the company’s headquarters in Friedrichshafen — Tognum now has nine juniors and seniors enrolled in its apprenticeship program.

Since 2008, the number of apprentices has fallen by nearly 40 percent, according to the Center for American Progress study.

Some 330 types of apprenticeships are accredited by the government in Berlin, including such jobs as hairdresser, roofer and automobile electronics specialist. About 60 percent of German high school students go through some kind of apprenticeship program, which leads to a formal certificate in the chosen skill and often a permanent job at the company where the young person trained.

Indeed, recent data suggest that more than half of the acceleration in US growth is occurring on the tradable side, even though it accounts for only about one-third of the economy. And that contribution is probably an underestimate, because income generated on the tradable supply side produces income that becomes demand on the non-tradable side – a multiplier effect that crosses the tradable/non-tradable boundary.

the main problem is that public-sector investment remains well below growth-sustaining levels. The hard part of fully realizing potential growth is shifting the composition of domestic demand from consumption to investment without adding leverage. That means paying for it on the public-sector side, via taxes and a reduction in household consumption (and in wealth accumulation).

But such adjustments cannot happen in a monetary union, so unit labor costs are slowly re-converging via a protracted process of flat nominal wage growth and slowly declining real wages (a process that would be quicker with higher inflation in Germany and Northern Europe).

Greece’s Request for Loan Extension Is Rejected by Germany

Air France-KLM to Cut Investments by $680 Million

Harnessing the power of shifting global flows

The increasingly bizarre standoff between Greece and the Eurozone, explained

Germany holds up Greek bid for euro zone loan extension

What would it actually cost if Greece left the eurozone?