Economic Conditions and Trends
Covid Workers in China Clash With Police Over Unpaid Wages, Layoffs
After China’s abrupt reversal of “zero Covid” restrictions, the nation’s vast machinery of virus surveillance and testing collapsed, even as infections and deaths surged. Now, the authorities face another problem: Angry pandemic-control workers demanding wages and jobs. In the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing, hundreds of workers locked in a pay dispute with a Covid […]
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How Western Goods Reach Russia: A Long Line of Trucks Through Georgia
KAZBEGI CHECKPOINT, Georgia — Each day, a caravan of trucks stretches for miles along a mountain highway in Georgia, near the border with Russia. Each day, the line seems to get longer. The trucks wait for days with their cargo — car parts, industrial materials, chemicals, even the paper for tea bags — to cross […]
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How Argentines Cope With Inflation That’s 64% and Rising
As countries across the world try to cope with rising prices, there is perhaps no major economy that understands how to live with inflation better than Argentina. The country has struggled with rapidly rising prices for much of the past 50 years. During a chaotic stretch in the late 1980s, inflation hit a nearly unbelievable […]
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Germany, Facing Energy Crisis, Gives Nuclear Another Look
LANDSHUT, Germany — When Angela Merkel pulled the plug on nuclear power after the Fukushima meltdown, she set Germany on a course to become the only leading industrial nation to abandon atomic energy in the world. The economic engine of Europe planned instead to fuel itself through a transition to renewable energies with cheap Russian […]
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Who’s to Blame for a Factory Shutdown: A Company, or California?
VERNON, Calif. — Teresa Robles begins her shift around dawn most days at a pork processing plant in an industrial corridor four miles south of downtown Los Angeles. She spends eight hours on her feet cutting tripe, a repetitive motion that has given her constant joint pain, but also a $17.85-an-hour income that supports her family. […]
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Germans Tip-Toe Up the Path to Energy Savings
AUGSBURG, Germany — Wolfgang Hübschle went into city government expecting a simple life, planning things like traditional festivals replete with lederhosen. Instead, these days he has the unpopular task of calculating which traffic lights to shut off, how to lower temperatures in offices and swimming pools — and perhaps, if it comes to it, pulling […]
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Bangladesh Seeks I.M.F. Loan as Inflation Rocks South Asia
DHAKA, Bangladesh — Just a week after introducing scheduled power outages in response to the soaring cost of fuel in Bangladesh, the government said it was seeking help from the International Monetary Fund, joining two other nations in South Asia to do so in recent months. Government officials said the country was running low on […]
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Global Central Banks Ramp Up Inflation Fight
Central bankers around the world are lifting interest rates at an aggressive clip as rapid inflation persists and seeps into a broad array of goods and services, setting the global economy up for a lurch toward more expensive credit, lower stock and bond values and — potentially — a sharp pullback in economic activity. It’s […]
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Economy Is at Risk of Recession by a Force Hiding in Plain Sight
This past week brought home the magnitude of the overlapping crises assailing the global economy, intensifying fears of recession, job losses, hunger and a plunge on stock markets. At the root of this torment is a force so elemental that it has almost ceased to warrant mention — the pandemic. That force is far from […]
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