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Category: Economics

In a sea of data there is a dwindling supply of vital economic data

In a sea of data there is a dwindling supply of vital economic data

The Wall Street Journal reports: In recent months, markets have been laser-focused on every scrap of economic data for evidence on whether inflation is coming down or a recession is approaching. Unfortunately, that data suffers from a growing problem: reduced responses from the people whose activity it seeks to measure. “There’s more data than there has ever been in the history of the world,” said Torsten Slok, the chief economist of Apollo Global Management Inc. “But the Fed has a…

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Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems

Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems

Alexandre Antonelli writes: I grew up in Campinas, a city in southeast Brazil. The apples there, cultivated from European varieties since the 1960s, tasted sweet. But, given the choice, I would always pick papayas grown in our garden. My father, who knew that growing a temperate fruit tree in a tropical country seldom worked, instead filled our garden with tropical ones, including two varieties of papaya. Meanwhile, drawing on knowledge from her Indigenous roots, my mother grew all sorts of…

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Shrinking population presents major implications for China, its economy and the world

Shrinking population presents major implications for China, its economy and the world

The New York Times reports: The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible. The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment that led to widespread famine…

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The U.S. may finally breach the debt ceiling. Here’s why that would be very bad

The U.S. may finally breach the debt ceiling. Here’s why that would be very bad

The New York Times reports: The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has Washington and Wall Street bracing for a revival of brinkmanship over the nation’s statutory debt limit, raising fears that the fragile U.S. economy could be rattled by a calamitous self-inflicted wound. For years, Republicans have sought to tie spending cuts or other concessions from Democrats to their votes to lift the borrowing cap, even if it means eroding the world’s faith that the United States…

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Complex supply chains may have appeared more than 3,000 years ago

Complex supply chains may have appeared more than 3,000 years ago

Science News reports: Long-distance supply chains, vulnerable to disruptions from wars and disease outbreaks, may have formed millennia before anyone today gasped at gas prices or gawked at empty store shelves. Roughly 3,650 to 3,200 years ago, herders and villagers who mined tin ore fueled long-distance supply chains that transported the metal from Central Asia and southern Turkey to merchant ships serving societies clustered around the Mediterranean, a new study finds. Remote communities located near rare tin deposits tapped into…

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Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance

Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance

Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel write: Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists, it has also provoked critics who suspect that the peddlers of innovation radically overvalue innovation. What happens after innovation, they argue, is more important. Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures,…

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Can Apple make the iPhone without China?

Can Apple make the iPhone without China?

Chris Miller writes: Long before it reached your home, even before its tiny components were pieced together in an assembly plant, your phone was already one of the most complex gadgets in the world. It is the product of a delicate supply chain whose every link is forged by competing business and political interests. That chain is starting to rattle and even break, as the global tech industry works to become less dependent on China. Earlier this month, Taiwan Semiconductor…

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‘A sea change’: Biden reverses decades of Chinese trade policy

‘A sea change’: Biden reverses decades of Chinese trade policy

Politico reports: After decades of U.S. efforts to engage China with the prospect of greater development through trade, the era of cooperation is coming to a screeching halt. The White House and Congress are quietly reshaping the American economic relationship with the world’s second-largest economic power, enacting a strategy to limit China’s technological development that breaks with decades of federal policy and represents the most aggressive American action yet to curtail Beijing’s economic and military rise. The new federal rules,…

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Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help

Jason Hickel et al, write: The global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed. This dynamic is driving climate change and ecological breakdown. High-income economies, and the corporations and wealthy classes that dominate them, are mainly responsible for this problem and consume energy and materials at unsustainable rates. Yet many industrialized countries are now struggling to grow their economies, given economic convulsions caused…

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State, local governments increasingly turn to zoning reforms

State, local governments increasingly turn to zoning reforms

Sarah Wesseler writes: Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States, and passenger vehicles — the cars most Americans rely on to meet their daily needs — account for more than half of transportation emissions. Conversations about reducing these emissions typically focus on electric vehicles. But increasingly, government officials across the country are aiming not just to get Americans into different kinds of cars, but to radically reduce the need to drive in the first place….

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Why America’s railroad operators refuse to give their workers paid leave

Why America’s railroad operators refuse to give their workers paid leave

Eric Levitz writes: For months, the world’s largest economy has been teetering on the brink of collapse because America’s latter-day robber barons can’t comprehend that workers sometimes get sick. Or so the behavior of major U.S. rail companies seems to suggest. Since last winter, railroad unions and the managers of America’s seven dominant freight-rail carriers have been struggling to come to an agreement on a new contract. The key points of contention in those talks have been scheduling in general…

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The yuan’s the new dollar as Russia rides to the redback

The yuan’s the new dollar as Russia rides to the redback

Reuters reports: Chinese entrepreneur Wang Min is delighted about Russia’s embrace of the yuan. His LED lights company can price contracts to Russian customers in yuan rather than dollars or euros, and they can pay him in yuan. It’s “win-win”, he says. Wang’s plans have been transformed by the conflict in Ukraine and the subsequent Western sanctions on Moscow that have shut Russia’s banks and many of its companies out of the dollar and euro payment systems. His contract manufacturing…

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How West Africa’s emerging megalopolis will shape the coming century

How West Africa’s emerging megalopolis will shape the coming century

Howard W French writes: It has long been said that no one knows with any certainty the population of Lagos, Nigeria. When I spent time there a decade ago, the United Nations conservatively put the number at 11.5 million, but other estimates ranged as high as 18 million. The one thing everyone agreed was that Lagos was growing very fast. The population was already 40 times bigger than it had been in 1960, when Nigeria gained independence. One local demographer…

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Deglobalization is a threat to climate action

Deglobalization is a threat to climate action

Raghuram G. Rajan writes: The deliberations at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) suggest that while policymakers realize the urgency of combating climate change, they are unlikely to reach a comprehensive collective agreement to address it. But there is still a way for the world to improve the chances of more effective action in the future: hit the brakes on deglobalization. Otherwise, the possibilities for climate action will be set back by the shrinkage of cross-border trade and…

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The wreckage of neoliberalism

The wreckage of neoliberalism

Chris Murphy writes: For millions of Americans—especially those who don’t live in the high-income urban mega-economies—it feels like life itself is unspooling. This sense of dislocation is what Donald Trump’s politics of grievance seized upon when he launched his campaign for the presidency in 2015. He offered easy scapegoats—immigrants, Muslims, and economic elites—to blame for the loss of meaning and economic autonomy felt by many Americans. He signaled an intent to break America apart from the world economy and the…

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The global economy is in chaos. Nobody’s coming to the rescue

The global economy is in chaos. Nobody’s coming to the rescue

Politico reports: America is driving the West’s response to the war in Ukraine. But U.S. officials are struggling to project a global response to a worldwide economic slowdown. A sense of dread surrounded meetings of finance ministers and central bankers in Washington this week, amid one of the most foreboding moments for the world economy in years. The list of worries was alarmingly long: stubbornly persistent inflation, crippling interest rates, panic around the worsening energy supply crisis, manic markets and…

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