Europe

More stories

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in Economy

    Fragile Global Economy Faces New Crisis in Israel-Gaza War

    by

    A war in the Middle East could complicate efforts to contain inflation at a time when world output is “limping along.”The International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that the pace of the global economic recovery is slowing, a warning that came as a new war in the Middle East threatened to upend a world economy already reeling from several years of overlapping crises.The eruption of fighting between Israel and Hamas over the weekend, which could sow disruption across the region, reflects how challenging it has become to shield economies from increasingly frequent and unpredictable global shocks. The conflict has cast a cloud over a gathering of top economic policymakers in Morocco for the annual meetings of the I.M.F. and the World Bank.Officials who planned to grapple with the lingering economic effects of the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine now face a new crisis.“Economies are at a delicate state,” Ajay Banga, the World Bank president, said in an interview on the sidelines of the annual meetings. “Having war is really not helpful for central banks who are finally trying to find their way to a soft landing,” he said. Mr. Banga was referring to efforts by policymakers in the West to try and cool rapid inflation without triggering a recession.Mr. Banga said that so far, the impact of the Middle East attacks on the world’s economy is more limited than the war in Ukraine. That conflict initially sent oil and food prices soaring, roiling global markets given Russia’s role as a top energy producer and Ukraine’s status as a major exporter of grain and fertilizer.“But if this were to spread in any way then it becomes dangerous,” Mr. Banga added, saying such a development would result in “a crisis of unimaginable proportion.”Oil markets are already jittery. Lucrezia Reichlin, a professor at the London Business School and a former director general of research at the European Central Bank, said, “the main question is what’s going to happen to energy prices.”Ms. Reichlin is concerned that another spike in oil prices would pressure the Federal Reserve and other central banks to further push up interest rates, which she said have risen too far too fast.As far as energy prices, Ms. Reichlin said, “we have two fronts, Russia and now the Middle East.”Smoke rising from bombings of Gaza City and its northern borders by Israeli planes.Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the I.M.F.’s chief economist, said it’s too early to assess whether the recent jump in oil prices would be sustained. If they were, he said, research shows that a 10 percent increase in oil prices would weigh down the global economy, reducing output by 0.15 percent and increasing inflation by 0.4 percent next year. In its latest World Economic Outlook, the I.M.F. underscored the fragility of the recovery. It maintained its global growth outlook for this year at 3 percent and slightly lowered its forecast for 2024 to 2.9 percent. Although the I.M.F. upgraded its projection for output in the United States for this year, it downgraded the euro area and China while warning that distress in that nation’s real estate sector is worsening.“We see a global economy that is limping along, and it’s not quite sprinting yet,” Mr. Gourinchas said. In the medium term, “the picture is darker,” he added, citing a series of risks including the likelihood of more large natural disasters caused by climate change.Europe’s economy, in particular, is caught in the middle of growing global tensions. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, European governments have frantically scrambled to free themselves from an over-dependence on Russian natural gas.They have largely succeeded by turning, in part, to suppliers in the Middle East.Over the weekend, the European Union swiftly expressed solidarity with Israel and condemned the surprise attack from Hamas, which controls Gaza.Some oil suppliers may take a different view. Algeria, for example, which has increased its exports of natural gas to Italy, criticized Israel for responding with airstrikes on Gaza.Even before the weekend’s events, the energy transition had taken a toll on European economies. In the 20 countries that use the euro, the Fund predicts that growth will slow to just 0.7 percent this year from 3.3 percent in 2022. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is expected to contract by 0.5 percent.High interest rates, persistent inflation and the aftershocks of spiraling energy prices are also expected to slow growth in Britain to 0.5 percent this year from 4.1 percent in 2022.Sub-Saharan Africa is also caught in the slowdown. Growth is projected to shrink this year by 3.3 percent, although next year’s outlook is brighter, when growth is forecast to be 4 percent.Staggering debt looms over many of these nations. The average debt now amounts to 60 percent of the region’s total output — double what it was a decade ago. Higher interest rates have contributed to soaring repayment costs.This next-generation of sovereign debt crises is playing out in a world that is coming to terms with a reappraisal of global supply chains in addition to growing geopolitical rivalries. Added to the complexities are estimates that within the next decade, trillions of dollars in new financing will be needed to mitigate devastating climate change in developing countries.One of the biggest questions facing policymakers is what impact China’s sluggish economy will have on the rest of the world. The I.M.F. has lowered its growth outlook for China twice this year and said on Tuesday that consumer confidence there is “subdued” and that industrial production is weakening. It warned that countries that are part of the Asian industrial supply chain could be exposed to this loss of momentum.In an interview on her flight to the meetings, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said that she believes China has the tools to address a “complex set of economic challenges” and that she does not expect its slowdown to weigh on the U.S. economy.“I think they face significant challenges that they have to address,” Ms. Yellen said. “I haven’t seen and don’t expect a spillover onto us.” More

  • 75 Shares149 Views

    in Economy

    In Provence, Winemakers Confront Climate Change

    by

    “You can taste the climate change.”Frédéric Chaudière, a third-generation winemaker in the French village of Mormoiron, took a sip of white wine and set down his glass.The tastes of centuries-old varieties are being altered by spiking temperatures, scant rainfall, snap frosts and unpredictable bouts of extreme weather. The hellish summer was the latest reminder of how urgently the $333 billion global wine industry is being forced to adapt. Temperature records were set in Europe, the United States, China, North Africa and the Middle East as hail, drought, wildfires and floods on a biblical scale inflicted damage.Grape vines are some of the most weather-sensitive crops, and growers from Australia to Argentina have been struggling to cope. The imperative is particularly great in Europe, which is home to five of the world’s top 10 wine-producing countries and includes 45 percent of the planet’s wine-growing areas.Chêne Bleu is one of the highest vineyards in Provence, France. Winegrowers have been increasingly searching for higher altitudes for cooler temperatures. For many vineyards, new weather patterns are resulting in smaller grapes that produce sweeter wines with a higher alcohol content.A tractor driver loading grapes picked by harvesters. Chêne Bleu is one of the region’s leaders in developing adaptations for cultivation and processing that are regenerative and organic.Mr. Chaudière is the president of an association of wine producers in Ventoux. His winery, Château Pesquié, is in the Rhône Valley, where the impact of climate change over the past 50 years on winegrowers has been significant.The first burst of buds appear 15 days earlier than they did in the early 1970s, according to a recent analysis. Ripening starts 18 days earlier. And harvesting begins in late August instead of mid September. Change was expected, but the accelerating pace has come as a shock.For many vineyards, the new weather patterns are resulting in smaller grapes that produce sweeter wines with a higher alcohol content. These developments, alas, are out of step with consumers who are turning to lighter, fresher tasting wines with more tartness and less alcohol.For other vineyards, the challenges are more profound: Dwindling water supplies threaten their existence.How to respond to these shifts, though, is not necessarily clear.A harvester clipping clusters by hand and dropping them into round baskets, which are then moved into trucks.Emergency irrigation, for example, can save young vines from dying when the heat is scorching. Yet over the long haul, access to water near the surface means the roots may not drill down deep into the earth in search of the subterranean water tables they need to sustain them.Chêne Bleu, a small and relatively new family winery on La Verrière, the site of a medieval priory above the village of Crestet, is one of the region’s leaders in developing adaptations for cultivation and processing that are regenerative and organic.“We’re all going to get whacked by similar weather challenges,” said Nicole Rolet, who inaugurated the winery in 2006 with her husband, Xavier.In her view, there are two responses to climate change: You can fight it with chemicals and artificial additives that battle nature, she said, or “you can create a balanced functioning of the ecology through biodiversity.”Gardeners tending to the fruit and vegetable quarter. Scientists have found that expanding the variety of plants and animals can reduce the impact of shifting climate on crops. Between the rows, grasses blanket the ground. They help manage erosion, retain water, enrich the soil, capture more carbon and control pests and disease.There is a bee colony on the property to increase cross-pollination. The natural approach was on display one morning as harvesters slowly inched down the rows of vines, clipping plump purple clusters of Grenache grapes by hand.Stationary wooden pickets have been replaced by a trellising system that can be adjusted upward as vines grow so that their leaves can be positioned to serve as a natural canopy to shade grapes from a burning sun.Between the rows, grasses blanket the ground. They are just some of the cover crops that have been planted to help manage erosion, retain water, enrich the soil, capture more carbon and control pests and disease.Scientists have found that expanding the variety of plants and animals can reduce the impact of shifting climate on crops, highlighting, as one study put it, “the critical role that human decisions play in building agricultural systems resilient to climate change.”Surrounding Chêne Bleu’s emerald fields are wildflowers, a wide range of plant species and a private forest. There is a bee colony to increase cross-pollination and a grove of bamboo to naturally filter water used in the winery.Sheep provide the manure for fertilizer. The vineyard also dug a muddy pool — nicknamed the “spa” — for roaming wild boar, to lure them away from the juicy grapes with their own water supply.The Rolets have teamed up with university researchers to experiment with cultivation practices. And they are compiling a census of animal and plant species, including installing infrared equipment to capture rare creatures like a genet, a catlike animal with a long, ringed tail.“People are formally and informally doing experimental work, promoting best practices,” Ms. Rolet said, as she sat in a grand dining hall topped by stone archways at the restored priory. “It’s surprisingly hard to do.”“No one has time or money to take nose off the grindstone to look at what someone is doing on the other side of the world,” she explained.Harvesters sifting through grapes on a conveyor belt in the winery, looking to pick out stray leaves or bad grapes.At the winery, the morning’s harvest is emptied onto a conveyor belt, where workers pick out stray leaves or damaged berries before they are dropped into a gentle balloon press. The golden juice drips down into a tray lined with dry ice, producing vaporous swirls and tendrils. The ice prevents bacterial growth and eats up the oxygen that can ruin the flavor.Chêne Bleu has several advantages that many neighboring vineyards don’t. Its 75 acres are relatively isolated and located in a Unsesco biosphere reserve, a designation aimed at conserving biodiversity and promoting sustainable practices. Because it is situated on a limestone outcropping on the ridge of a tectonic plate, the soil contains ancient seabeds and a rich combination of minerals. And, at 1,600 feet, it is one of the highest vineyards in Provence.Winegrowers have been increasingly searching for higher altitudes because of cooler nighttime temperatures and shorter periods of intense heat. In Spain’s Catalonia region, the global wine producer Familia Torres has in recent years planted vineyards at 3,000 to 4,000 feet up.An assistant winemaker. A cellar assistant cleaning equipment.The wine cellar with barrels made of French oaks.Chêne Bleu has other resources. Mr. Rolet, a successful businessman and former chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, has been able to finance the vineyard’s cutting edge equipment and experiments. A larger marketing budget enables the vineyard to take chances others might not want to risk.The Rolets, for example, chose to sometimes bypass traditional appellations — legally defined and protected wine-growing areas — to experiment with more varieties for their high-end offerings.Although the wine map has changed, France’s strict classification system has not. Appellations were instituted decades ago to ensure that buyers knew what they were purchasing. But now, those definitions can limit the type of varieties that farmers can use as they search for vines that can better withstand climate change.Dry ice being added to the press pan to help protect the juice from oxygen. The juice drips down into a tray lined with dry ice, which prevents bacterial growth and eats up the oxygen that can ruin the flavor.“There is a big, frustrating lag time between what the winemakers are experiencing and what the authorities are doing,” said Julien Fauque, the director of Cave de Lumières, a cooperative of roughly 50 winegrowers who farm 450 hectares of land in the Ventoux and Luberon areas.Climate change may mean that growers must reconsider once unthinkable practices.Adding tiny amounts of water could reduce the alcoholic content and prevent fermentation from stalling, he said, but the practice, strictly forbidden across the European Union, could land a winemaker in prison. California, by contrast, allows such additions.There is flexibility in the system, said Anthony Taylor, the director of communications at Gabriel Meffre in Gigondas, one of the larger wineries in southern Rhône. But “they’re on a wire,” he said of official regulators. “They want to preserve as much as possible a profile that is successful, and they’re also listening to the other side, which argues we need to change things or introduce new varieties.”The pace of change, though, is accelerating, Mr. Taylor said: “The speed at which we’re moving is quite frightening.”A chef uses only local products, mainly from the vegetable garden on the estate.Harvesters taking a lunch break before returning to work.Chêne Bleu is on La Verrière, the site of a medieval priory. More

  • 138 Shares149 Views

    in Economy

    Europe Rushes to Build Defenses But With Little Consensus on How

    by

    At Saab’s sprawling combat production center in Karlskoga, Sweden, the 84-millimeter shells that can take out a battle tank in a single stroke are carefully assembled by hand. One worker stacked tagliatelle-shaped strips of explosive propellant in a tray. Another attached the translucent sheafs around the rotating fins of a guiding system.Outside the squat building, one of hundreds in the guarded industrial park, construction is underway on another factory. Capacity at this plant — a few minutes’ drive from the home of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the peace prize — is scheduled to more than double in the next two years.The enlargement is part of a titanic expansion in military spending that every country in Europe has undertaken since Russia invaded Ukraine 18 months ago. Yet the mad dash by more than 30 allied countries to stockpile arms after years of minimal spending has raised concerns that the massive buildup will be disjointed, resulting in waste, supply shortages, unnecessary delays and duplication.“Europeans have not addressed the deeply fragmented and disorganized manner in which they generate their forces,” a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies said. “Investing more in an uncoordinated manner will only marginally improve a dysfunctional status quo.”The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which sets overall defense strategy, and the European Union have pushed for greater cooperation and integration, creating several new initiatives, including one to coordinate weapons procurement.Manufacturing shells at a Saab facility in Karlskoga, Sweden.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesAnother step in the production at the Karlskoga facility.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesCleaning the main charges on the production line.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesStill, a growing chorus of weapons manufacturers, political figures and military experts warn the efforts fall far short of what is needed. “There needs to be some clarity since we’re not the United States of Europe,” Micael Johansson, the president and chief executive of Saab, explained from the company’s headquarters in Stockholm. “Every country decides themselves what type of capabilities they need.”Each country has its own strategic culture, procurement practices, specifications, approval processes, training and priorities.Alliance members may sometimes use the same aircraft but with different encryption systems and varying instruments. As Ukrainian soldiers have discovered, 155-millimeter shells produced by one manufacturer do not necessarily fit into a howitzer made by another. Ammunition and parts are not always interchangeable, complicating maintenance and causing more frequent breakdowns.The European Union does not “have a defense planning process,” said Mr. Johansson. This summer, he was appointed vice chairman of the board at the Aerospace and Defense Industries Association of Europe, a trade association representing 3,000 companies. “NATO has to rethink how do we create resilience in the whole system,” including supply chains that produce the munitions soldiers use on the battlefield.Saab’s president and chief executive, Micael Johansson, at the company’s headquarters in Stockholm.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesCrucial raw materials like titanium and lithium, as well as sophisticated electronics and semiconductors, are in great demand.And there is a shortage of explosives, particularly powder, which manufacturers across the entire weapons industry depend on. But there has been little detailed discussion about which systems should get priority or how the supply of powder as a whole could be increased.“I suggested it,” Mr. Johansson said, “but it hasn’t happened yet.”The discussions are taking place at a time when the resilience of far-flung supply chains of all kinds are being re-examined. Memories are still fresh of interruptions in the flow of natural gas and grain resulting from the war in Ukraine, not to mention the severe backlogs in the production and delivery of goods and materials caused by the Covid pandemic.The big trend now, said Michael Hoglund, head of business area ground combat at Saab, is to bring supply chains closer to home and to create reliable backups. “We’re no longer buying the cheapest,” he said. “We’re paying a fee to feel safer.”Workers on the production line.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesAssembling a weapon.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesCoordinating supplies is just one element. Getting a jumble of varying weapons systems, practices and technologies to smoothly perform in concert has always been a challenge. NATO has set standards so that the different systems are compatible — what is known as interoperability.The practice, though, can be less than harmonious.The European Defense Agency’s annual review last year found that only 18 percent of defense investments are done together, half of the targeted amount. “The degree of cooperation among our armies is very low,” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, said at the time.Sweden is on the cusp of joining NATO, but it has partnered with the military alliance before, and Saab, which produces a range of weapons systems including the Gripen fighter jet, sells to scores of countries around the world.Managers there have seen some of the challenges to coordination up close in large and small ways.A Gripen aircraft at the Saab test center in Linkoping.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesJakob Hogberg, a Gripen test pilot, discussing the aircraft.Loulou d’Aki for The New York Times“The whole system in each army is built up in a special way,” said Gorgen Johansson, who oversees the Karlskoga operation. (He is not related to the chief executive.) Behind him sat an empty green tube used to launch Saab’s shoulder-fired NLAW anti-tank missile. It was signed by Ukraine’s former minister of defense and returned to its maker as a token of appreciation.Some customers, he said, want two launchers packed in a single box, another wants four, or six, because they have bought vehicles and equipment that can hold different numbers of launchers.Mr. Johansson said that until very recently, it was impossible to get the players to even talk about standardizing where labels were positioned or what color they should be.Bigger problems remain. After the Cold War ended, there was an enormous consolidation of defense companies as military spending shrank. Still, like varying brands of cereal, there is a wide range of each major weapons system. Europe has 27 different types of howitzers, 20 types of fighter jets and 26 types of destroyers and frigates, according to an analysis by McKinsey & Company.In building a unified fighting force, Europe must balance competition, which can result in improvements and innovation, with the need to eliminate waste and streamline operations, by ordering or even designing weapons in concert.Underlying the once-in-a-generation military expansion is that the continent is still primarily dependent on the United States for its safety. President Trump’s complaints in 2018 of insufficient spending in Europe and veiled threats to withdraw from NATO profoundly shook the region.A staff member collecting equipment from a tank used as a target at a test center.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesHolding up shrapnel that hit the target after a firing exercise.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesBut the view that Europe has to take more financial responsibility for its own defense is now widespread, urgently ratcheting up the pressure to better unify Europe’s defenses.Coordination, though, faces several built-in hurdles. As the center’s report concluded, integrating European defense “will be a slow laborious process and a generational effort.”Governments are already funneling millions or billions of dollars to defense and, naturally, every one wants to support its own industries and workers.And whatever Europe’s overall defense needs may be, each nation’s first priority is protecting their borders. There is limited trust even among alliance members.“We think we are friends,” said Gorgen Johansson in Karlskoga. But he noted that during the pandemic when there was a shortage of ventilators, Germany, which had a surplus, stopped supplying them to Sweden, Italy and other countries in need.“The talks have started,” Mr. Johansson said of efforts to improve coordination. “Do I think it will go quickly? No.”Working on a plane at Saab’s fighter production facility in Linköping.Loulou d’Aki for The New York TimesWorkers assembling an aircraft in Linköping.Loulou d’Aki for The New York Times More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    America’s Foreign Vacations Tell Us Something About the U.S. Economy

    by

    Prices are high, but Americans are opening their wallets for international flights and hotels. It’s the latest evidence of consumer resilience.Forget Emily. These days, a whole flood of Americans are in Paris.People spent 2020 and 2021 either cooped up at home or traveling sparingly and mostly within the continental U.S. But after Covid travel restrictions were lifted for international trips last summer, Americans are again headed overseas.While domestic leisure travel shows signs of calming — people are still vacationing in big numbers, but prices for hotels and flights are moderating as demand proves strong but not insatiable — foreign trips are snapping back with a vengeance. Americans are boarding planes and cruise ships to flock to Europe in particular, based on early data.According to estimates from AAA, international travel bookings for 2023 were up 40 percent from 2022 through May. That is still down about 2 percent from 2019, but it’s a hefty surge at a time when some travelers are being held back by long passport processing delays amid record-high applications. Tour and cruise bookings are expected to eclipse prepandemic highs, with especially strong demand for vacations to major European cities.Paris, for example, experienced a huge jump in North American tourists last year compared with 2021, according to the city’s tourism bureau. Planned air arrivals for July and August of this year climbed by another 14.4 percent — to nearly 5 percent above the 2019 level.“This year is just completely crazy,” said Steeve Calvo, a Parisian tour guide and sommelier whose company — The Americans in Paris — has been churning out visits to Normandy and French wine regions. He attributes some of the jump to a rebound from the pandemic and some to television shows and social media.“‘Emily in Paris’: I never saw so many people in Paris with red berets,” he said, noting that the signature chapeau of the popular Netflix show’s heroine started to pop up on tourists last year. Other newcomers are eager to take coveted photos for their Instagram pages.“In Versailles, the Hall of Mirrors, I call it the Hall of Selfie,” Mr. Calvo said, referring to a famous room in the palace.Robust travel booking numbers and anecdotes from tour guides align with what companies say they are experiencing: From airlines to American Express, corporate executives are reporting a lasting demand for flights and vacations.“The constructive industry backdrop is unlike anything that any of us have ever seen,” Ed Bastian, the chief executive officer at Delta Air Lines, said during a June 27 investor day. “Travel is going gangbusters, but it’s going to continue to go gangbusters because we still have an enormous amount of demand waiting.”Transportation Security Administration data shows that the daily average number of passengers who passed through U.S. airport checkpoints in June 2023 was 2.6 million, 0.5 percent above the June 2019 level, based on an analysis by Omair Sharif at Inflation Insights.And in many foreign airports, the burst of American vacationers is palpable: Customs lines are packed with U.S. tourists, from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle to London’s Heathrow. The latter saw 8 percent more traffic from North America in June 2023 than in June 2019, based on airport data.“This year is just completely crazy,” said Steeve Calvo, a tour guide in Paris.Jessica Chou for The New York Times In a weird way, the rebound in foreign travel may be taking some pressure off U.S. inflation.International flight prices, while surging for some routes, are not a big part of the U.S. Consumer Price Index, which is dominated by domestic flight prices. In fact, airfares in the inflation measure dropped sharply in June from the previous month and are down nearly 19 percent from a year ago.That is partly because fuel is cheaper and partly because airlines are getting more planes into the sky. Many pilots and air traffic controllers had been laid off or had retired, so companies struggled to keep up when demand started to recover after the initial pandemic slump, pushing prices sharply higher in 2022.“We just didn’t have enough seats to go around last year,” Mr. Sharif said, explaining that while personnel issues persist, so far this year the supply situation has been better. “Planes are still totally packed, but there are more planes.”And as people flock abroad, it is sapping some demand from hotels and tourist attractions in the United States. International tourists have yet to return to the United States in full force, so they are not entirely offsetting the wave of Americans headed overseas.Domestic travel is hardly in a free fall — July 4 weekend travel probably set new records, per AAA — but tourists are no longer so insatiable that hotels can keep raising room rates indefinitely. Prices for lodging away from home in the U.S. climbed by 4.5 percent in the year through June, which is far slower than the 25 percent annual increases hotel rooms were posting last spring. There is even elbow room at Disney World.Even if it isn’t inflationary, the jump in foreign travel does highlight something about the U.S. economy: It’s hard to keep U.S. consumers down, especially affluent ones.The Fed has been raising interest rates to cool growth since early 2022. Officials have made it more expensive to borrow money in hopes of creating a ripple effect that would cut into demand and force companies to stop lifting prices so much.Consumption has slowed amid that onslaught, but it hasn’t tanked. Fed officials have taken note, remarking at their last meeting that consumption had been “stronger than expected,” minutes showed.The resilience comes as many households remain in solid financial shape. People who travel internationally skew wealthier, and many are benefiting from a rising stock market and still-high home prices that are beginning to prove surprisingly immune to interest rate moves.Those who do not have big stock or real estate holdings are experiencing a strong job market, and some are still holding onto extra savings built up during the pandemic. And it is not just vacation destinations feeling the momentum: Consumers are still spending on a range of other services.“There’s this last blowoff of spending,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist for the insurance company Nationwide Mutual.It could be that consumer resilience will help the U.S. economy avoid a recession as the Fed fights inflation. As has been the case at American hotels, demand that stabilizes without plummeting could allow for a slow and steady moderation of price increases.But if consumers remain so ravenous that companies find they can still charge more, it could prolong inflation. That’s why the Fed is keeping a close eye on spending.Ms. Bostjancic thinks consumers will pull back starting this fall. They are drawing down their savings, the labor market is cooling, and it may simply take time for the Fed’s rate increases to have their full effect. But when it comes to many types of travel, there is no end in sight yet.“Despite economic headwinds, we’re seeing very strong demand for summer leisure travel,” said Mike Daher, who leads the U.S. Transportation, Hospitality & Services practice at the consulting firm Deloitte.Mr. Daher attributes that to three driving forces. People missed trips. Social media is luring many to new places. And the advent of remote work is allowing professionals — “what we call the laptop luggers,” per Mr. Daher — to stretch out vacations by working a few days from the beach or the mountains. Mr. Calvo, the tour guide, is riding the wave, taking Americans on tours that showcase Paris’s shared history with France and driving them in minivan tours to Champagne. “I have no clue if it’s going to last,” he said. More

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    The Russia-Ukraine War Changed This Finland Company Forever

    by

    Even with sheets of rain falling, the sprawling construction site was buzzing. Yellow and orange excavators slowly danced around a maze of muddy pits, swinging giant fistfuls of dirt as a chorus line of trucks traipsed across the landscape.This 50-acre plot in Oradea, Romania, close to the border with Hungary, beat out scores of other sites in Europe to become the home of Nokian Tyres’ new 650 million-euro, or $706 million, factory. Like an industrial-minded Goldilocks, the Finnish tire company had searched for the just-right combination of real estate, transport links, labor supply and pro-business environment.Yet the make-or-break feature that every host country had to have would not have even appeared on the radar a few years ago: membership in both the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.Geopolitical risk “was the starting point,” said Jukka Moisio, the chief executive and president of Nokian. That was not the case before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.Nokian Tyres’ altered business strategy highlights the transformed global economic playing field that governments and companies are confronting. As the war in Ukraine drags on and tensions rise between the United States and China, critical decisions about offices, supply chains, investments and sales are no longer primarily ruled by concerns about costs.As the world re-globalizes, assessments of political threats loom much larger than before.Oradea, Romania, became Nokian Tyres’ top choice for a new factory.Andreea Campeanu for The New York TimesThe new factory is going on a 50-acre site.Andreea Campeanu for The New York Times“This is a world that has fundamentally changed,” said Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins. “We cannot just think in terms of innovation and efficiency. We have to think about security, too.”For Nokian Tyres, which first sold shares on the Helsinki stock exchange in 1995, the new reality struck like a hammer blow. Roughly 80 percent of Nokian’s passenger car tires were manufactured in Russia. And the country accounted for 20 percent of its sales.The perils of over-concentration hit home, Mr. Moisio said, “when your company loses billions.”Within six weeks of the war’s start, it became clear that the company had no choice but to exit Russia and ramp up production elsewhere. Rubber had been added to the European Union’s rapidly expanding package of sanctions. Public sentiment in Finland soured. The share price plunged. In January 2022, the share price was over €34; today it’s €8.25.“We were very exposed,” Mr. Moisio said, sipping coffee in a sunny conference room at the company’s low-key Helsinki office. The Russian operation had high returns, but it also had high risks, a fact that, over time, had faded from view.Diversifying may not be as efficient or cheap, he said, but “it’s far more secure.”With roughly 80 percent of its production located in Russia, “we were very exposed” when Russia attacked Ukraine, said Jukka Moisio, Nokian’s chief executive.Juho Kuva for The New York TimesC-suite executives are relearning that the market often fails to accurately measure risk. A January survey of 1,200 global chief executives by the consulting firm EY found that 97 percent had altered their strategic investment plans because of new geopolitical tensions. More than a third said they were relocating operations.China, which has become an increasingly fraught home for foreign businesses and investment, is among the places that firms are leaving. Roughly one in four companies planned to move operations out of the country, a survey conducted last year by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China found.Businesses are suddenly finding themselves “stranded in the no-man’s land of warring empires,” Mr. Farrell and his co-author, Abraham Newman, argue in a new book.Mr. Moisio’s tenure at Nokian has coincided with the triple crown of crises. He started in May 2020, a few months after the Covid-19 pandemic essentially shut down global commerce. Like other companies, Nokian hunkered down, cutting production and capital spending. Its lack of outstanding debt helped it ride out the storm.And when the economy bounced back, Nokian scrambled to restart production and restock raw materials amid a huge breakdown of the supply chain and transportation. The war posed an existential threat to Nokian’s operations.Adding production lines to existing facilities is often the fastest and cheapest way to increase output. Still, Nokian decided not to expand its operation in Russia.Production there was already concentrated, Mr. Moisio said, but more important, the persistent supply chain bottlenecks underscored the added risks and costs of transporting materials over long distances.The Nokian Tyres main office in Nokia, Finland.Juho Kuva for The New York TimesNewly completed tires on the production line. Nokian is moving manufacturing closer to specific markets.Juho Kuva for The New York TimesGoing forward, instead of locating 80 percent of production in one spot, often far from the market, 80 percent of production would be local or regional.“It turned upside down,” Mr. Moisio said.Tires for the Nordic market would be produced in Finland. Tires for American customers would be manufactured in the United States. And in the future, Europe would be serviced by a European factory.Diversification had, to some extent, already been incorporated into the company’s strategic plan. It opened a plant in Dayton, Tenn., in 2019, in addition to the original factory that operated in Nokia, the Finnish town that gave the tire maker its name.At the end of 2021, the company opened new production lines at both of those plants.When it came time to build the next factory, executives figured it would be in Eastern Europe, close to its largest European markets in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France, as well as Poland and the Czech Republic.That moment came much sooner than anyone expected.In June 2022, less than four months after the invasion of Ukraine, Nokian executives asked the board to approve an exit from Russia and the construction of a new plant.Negotiations to leave Russia commenced, as did a high-speed search for a new location. Aided by the consulting firm Deloitte, the site assessment process, which included dozens of candidates across Europe, was completed in four months, said Adrian Kaczmarczyk, senior vice president of supply operations. By comparison, in 2015 Deloitte took nine months to recommend a site in a single country, the United States.Nokian expedited its search for a site, selecting Oradea in just four months, said Adrian Kaczmarczyk, senior vice president of supply operations.Andreea Campeanu for The New York TimesMr. Kaczmarczyk and engineers examining designs for the project.Andreea Campeanu for The New York TimesThe aim was to start commercial production by early 2025.Serbia had a flourishing automotive sector, but was eliminated from the get-go because it was in neither the European Union nor NATO. Turkey was a member of NATO but not the European Union. And Hungary was labeled high risk because of its illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orban, and close relationship with Russia.At each successive round, a long list of other considerations kicked in. Where were the closest highway, harbor and rail lines? Was there a sufficient pool of qualified employees? Was land available? Could permitting and construction time be fast-tracked? How pro-business were the authorities?Nokian would have looked to reduce a new factory’s carbon footprint in any event, Mr. Moisio, the chief executive, said. But the decision to commit to a 100 percent emissions-free plant probably would not have happened in the absence of war. After all, cheap gas from Russia was what helped lure Nokian there in the first place. Now, the disappearance of that supply accelerated the company’s thinking about ending dependence on fossil fuels.“Disruption allowed us to think differently,” Mr. Moisio said.As the winnowing progressed, a complex matrix of small and large considerations came into play. Was there good health care and an international school where foreign managers could send their children? What was the likelihood of natural disasters?Countries and cities fell out for various reasons. Slovenia and the Czech Republic were considered low-to-medium-risk countries, but Mr. Kaczmarczyk said they couldn’t find appropriate plots of land.A machine operator monitoring equipment on the production line inside the factory in Nokia.Juho Kuva for The New York TimesTires being made on the production line.Juho Kuva for The New York TimesSlovakia fell into the same bucket and already had a large automotive industry. Bratislava, though, made clear it had no interest in attracting more heavy industry, only information technology, Mr. Kaczmarczyk said.At the end, six candidates made Deloitte’s final cut: two sites in Romania, two in Poland, and one each in Portugal and Spain.The messy mix of new and old considerations that businesses have to contemplate were evident in the list of finalists. Geopolitics, as the Nokian Tyres chief executive said, had been a starting point, but it was not necessarily the end point.Spain has virtually no geopolitical risk. And the site in El Rebollar had a large talent pool, but Deloitte ruled it out because of high wage costs and heavy labor regulations. Portugal, another country with no security risk, was rejected because of worries about the power supply and the speed of the permitting process.Poland, along with Hungary and Serbia, had been labeled high risk despite its staunch anti-Russia stance. It has an antidemocratic government and has repeatedly clashed with the European Commission over the primacy of European legislation and the independence of Poland’s courts.Yet low labor costs, the presence of other multinational employers and a quick permitting process outweighed the worries enough to elevate the sites in Gorzow and Konin to second and third place.Oradea, the top recommendation, ultimately offered a better balance among the company’s competing priorities. The cost of labor in Romania, like Poland, was among the lowest in Europe. And its risk rating, though labeled relatively high, was lower than Poland’s.The factory in Nokia. The low cost of labor in Romania attracted the company.Juho Kuva for The New York TimesStretching the lining for tires. The main raw materials for tires are natural rubber, synthetic rubber, soot and oil.Juho Kuva for The New York TimesThere were other pluses as well in Oradea. Construction could start immediately; utilities were already in place; a new solar power plant was in the works. The amount of development grants from the European Union for companies investing in Romania was larger than in Poland. And local officials were enthusiastic.Mihai Jurca, Oradea’s city manager, detailed the area’s appeal during a tour of the turreted confection of Art Nouveau buildings in the renovated city center.“It was a flourishing cultural and commercial city, a junction point between East and West,” in the early 20th century, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Mr. Jurca said.Today the city, an affluent economic hub of 220,000 with a university, has solicited businesses and European Union funds, while constructing industrial parks that house domestic and international companies like Plexus, a British electronics manufacturer, and Eberspaecher, a German automotive supplier.Nokian is not looking to replicate the kind of megafactory in Romania that it ran in Russia — or anywhere else, for that matter. The idea of concentrating production is “old-fashioned,” Mr. Moisio said.For him, the company emerged from crisis mode on March 16, the day $258 million from sale of its Russian operation landed in Nokian’s bank account. Although only a fraction of the total value, the amount helped finance the construction and closed out the company’s involvement with Russia.Now uncertainty is the norm, Mr. Moisio said, and business leaders need to constantly be asking: “What can we do? What’s our Plan B?”Oradea “was a flourishing cultural and commercial city, a junction point between East and West,” in the early 20th century, said Mihai Jurca, the city manager.Andreea Campeanu for The New York TimesOradea is an affluent hub of 220,000 people with a university, and has solicited businesses and European Union funds.Andreea Campeanu for The New York Times More

  • 150 Shares189 Views

    in Economy

    Why What We Thought About the Global Economy Is No Longer True

    by

    While the world’s eyes were on the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and China, the paths to prosperity and shared interests have grown murkier.When the world’s business and political leaders gathered in 2018 at the annual economic forum in Davos, the mood was jubilant. Growth in every major country was on an upswing. The global economy, declared Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, “is in a very sweet spot.”Five years later, the outlook has decidedly soured.“Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading,” the World Bank warned in a recent analysis. “The result could be a lost decade in the making — not just for some countries or regions as has occurred in the past — but for the whole world.”A lot has happened between then and now: A global pandemic hit; war erupted in Europe; tensions between the United States and China boiled. And inflation, thought to be safely stored away with disco album collections, returned with a vengeance.But as the dust has settled, it has suddenly seemed as if almost everything we thought we knew about the world economy was wrong.The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago — the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency — look to be running off the rails.During the Covid-19 pandemic, the ceaseless drive to integrate the global economy and reduce costs left health care workers without face masks and medical gloves, carmakers without semiconductors, sawmills without lumber and sneaker buyers without Nikes.Calverton National Cemetery in New York in early 2021, where daily burials more than doubled at the height of the pandemic.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesCaring for Covid patients in Bergamo, Italy, in 2020. Cost-cutting and economic integration around the globe left health care workers scrambling for masks and other supplies when the coronavirus hit.Fabio Bucciarelli for The New York TimesThe idea that trade and shared economic interests would prevent military conflicts was trampled last year under the boots of Russian soldiers in Ukraine.And increasing bouts of extreme weather that destroyed crops, forced migrations and halted power plants has illustrated that the market’s invisible hand was not protecting the planet.Now, as the second year of war in Ukraine grinds on and countries struggle with limp growth and persistent inflation, questions about the emerging economic playing field have taken center stage.Globalization, seen in recent decades as unstoppable a force as gravity, is clearly evolving in unpredictable ways. The move away from an integrated world economy is accelerating. And the best way to respond is a subject of fierce debate.Of course, challenges to the reigning economic consensus had been growing for a while.“We saw before the pandemic began that the wealthiest countries were getting frustrated by international trade, believing — whether correctly or not — that somehow this was hurting them, their jobs and standards of living,” said Betsey Stevenson, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration.The financial meltdown in 2008 came close to tanking the global financial system. Britain pulled out of the European Union in 2016. President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on China in 2017, spurring a mini trade war.But starting with Covid-19, the rat-a-tat series of crises exposed with startling clarity vulnerabilities that demanded attention.As the consulting firm EY concluded in its 2023 Geostrategic Outlook, the trends behind the shift away from ever-increasing globalization “were accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic — and then they have been supercharged by the war in Ukraine.”A view of the destruction in Bakhmut, Ukraine, in May.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesUkrainians lined up to receive humanitarian aid in Kherson last year. Trade and shared economic interests weren’t enough to prevent wars, as once thought.Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesIt was the ‘end of history.’Today’s sense of unease is a stark contrast with the heady triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It was a period when a theorist could declare that the fall of communism marked “the end of history” — that liberal democratic ideas not only vanquished rivals, but represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”Associated economic theories about the ineluctable rise of worldwide free market capitalism took on a similar sheen of invincibility and inevitability. Open markets, hands-off government and the relentless pursuit of efficiency would offer the best route to prosperity.It was believed that a new world where goods, money and information crisscrossed the globe would essentially sweep away the old order of Cold War conflicts and undemocratic regimes.There was reason for optimism. During the 1990s, inflation was low while employment, wages and productivity were up. Global trade nearly doubled. Investments in developing countries surged. The stock market rose.The World Trade Organization was established in 1995 to enforce the rules. China’s entry six years later was seen as transformative. And linking a huge market with 142 countries would irresistibly draw the Asian giant toward democracy.China, along with South Korea, Malaysia and others, turned struggling farmers into productive urban factory workers. The furniture, toys and electronics they sold around the world generated tremendous growth.China joined the World Trade Organization at a signing ceremony in 2001. ReutersThe favored economic road map helped produce fabulous wealth, lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and spur wondrous technological advances.But there were stunning failures as well. Globalization hastened climate change and deepened inequalities.In the United States and other advanced economies, many industrial jobs were exported to lower-wage countries, removing a springboard to the middle class.Policymakers always knew there would be winners and losers. Still, the market was left to decide how to deploy labor, technology and capital in the belief that efficiency and growth would automatically follow. Only afterward, the thinking went, should politicians step in to redistribute gains or help those left without jobs or prospects.Companies embarked on a worldwide scavenger hunt for low-wage workers, regardless of worker protections, environmental impact or democratic rights. They found many of them in places like Mexico, Vietnam and China.Television, T-shirts and tacos were cheaper than ever, but many essentials like health care, housing and higher education were increasingly out of reach.The job exodus pushed down wages at home and undercut workers’ bargaining power, spurring anti-immigrant sentiments and strengthening hard-right populist leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France.In advanced industrial giants like the United States, Britain and several European countries, political leaders turned out to be unable or unwilling to more broadly reapportion rewards and burdens.Nor were they able to prevent damaging environmental fallout. Transporting goods around the globe increased greenhouse gas emissions. Producing for a world of consumers strained natural resources, encouraging overfishing in Southeast Asia and illegal deforestation in Brazil. And cheap production facilities polluted countries without adequate environmental standards.It turned out that markets on their own weren’t able to automatically distribute gains fairly or spur developing countries to grow or establish democratic institutions.Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said in a recent speech that a central fallacy in American economic policy had been to assume “that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently — no matter what our competitors did, no matter how big our shared challenges grew, and no matter how many guardrails we took down.”The proliferation of economic exchanges between nations also failed to usher in a promised democratic renaissance.Communist-led China turned out to be the global economic system’s biggest beneficiary — and perhaps master gamesman — without embracing democratic values.“Capitalist tools in socialist hands,” the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said in 1992, when his country was developing into the world’s factory floor. China’s astonishing growth transformed it into the world’s second largest economy and a major engine of global growth. All along, though, Beijing maintained a tight grip on its raw materials, land, capital, energy, credit and labor, as well as the movements and speech of its people.Globalization has had enormous effects on the environment — including deforestation in Roraima State, in the Brazilian Amazon.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesDistributing food in Johannesburg in 2020, where the pandemic caused a significant spike in the need for assistance.Joao Silva/The New York TimesMoney flowed in, and poor countries paid the price.In developing countries, the results could be dire.The economic havoc wreaked by the pandemic combined with soaring food and fuel prices caused by the war in Ukraine have created a spate of debt crises. Rising interest rates have made those crises worse. Debts, like energy and food, are often priced in dollars on the world market, so when U.S. rates go up, debt payments get more expensive.The cycle of loans and bailouts, though, has deeper roots.Poorer nations were pressured to lift all restrictions on capital moving in and out of the country. The argument was that money, like goods, should flow freely among nations. Allowing governments, businesses and individuals to borrow from foreign lenders would finance industrial development and key infrastructure.“Financial globalization was supposed to usher in an era of robust growth and fiscal stability in the developing world,” said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But “it ended up doing the opposite.”Some loans — whether from private lenders or institutions like the World Bank — didn’t produce enough returns to pay off the debt. Others were poured into speculative schemes, half-baked proposals, vanity projects or corrupt officials’ bank accounts. And debtors remained at the mercy of rising interest rates that swelled the size of debt payments in a heartbeat.Over the years, reckless lending, asset bubbles, currency fluctuations and official mismanagement led to boom-and-bust cycles in Asia, Russia, Latin America and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, extravagant projects undertaken by the government, from ports to cricket stadiums, helped drive the country into bankruptcy last year as citizens scavenged for food and the central bank, in a barter arrangement, paid for Iranian oil with tea leaves.It’s a “Ponzi scheme,” Ms. Ghosh said.Private lenders who got spooked that they would not be repaid abruptly cut off the flow of money, leaving countries in the lurch.And the mandated austerity that accompanied bailouts from the International Monetary Fund, which compelled overextended governments to slash spending, often brought widespread misery by cutting public assistance, pensions, education and health care.Even I.M.F. economists acknowledged in 2016 that instead of delivering growth, such policies “increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion.”Disenchantment with the West’s style of lending gave China the opportunity to become an aggressive creditor in countries like Argentina, Mongolia, Egypt and Suriname.A market in Buenos Aires. China has become an aggressive creditor to countries like Argentina. Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesSelf-reliance replaces cheap imports.While the collapse of the Soviet Union cleared the way for the domination of free-market orthodoxy, the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation has now decisively unmoored it.The story of the international economy today, said Henry Farrell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is about “how geopolitics is gobbling up hyperglobalization.”Old-world style great power politics accomplished what the threat of catastrophic climate collapse, seething social unrest and widening inequality could not: It upended assumptions about the global economic order.Josep Borrell, the European Union’s head of foreign affairs and security policy, put it bluntly in a speech 10 months after the invasion of Ukraine: “We have decoupled the sources of our prosperity from the sources of our security.” Europe got cheap energy from Russia and cheap manufactured goods from China. “This is a world that is no longer there,” he said.Supply-chain chokeholds stemming from the pandemic and subsequent recovery had already underscored the fragility of a globally sourced economy. As political tensions over the war grew, policymakers quickly added self-reliance and strength to the goals of growth and efficiency.“Our supply chains are not secure, and they’re not resilient,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said last spring. Trade relationships should be built around “trusted partners,” she said, even if it means “a somewhat higher level of cost, a somewhat less efficient system.”“It was naïve to think that markets are just about efficiency and that they’re not also about power,” said Abraham Newman, a co-author with Mr. Farrell of “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.”Economic networks, by their very nature, create power imbalances and pressure points because countries have varying capabilities, resources and vulnerabilities.Russia, which had supplied 40 percent of the European Union’s natural gas, tried to use that dependency to pressure the bloc to withdraw its support of Ukraine.The United States and its allies used their domination of the global financial system to remove major Russian banks from the international payments system.The Port of Chornomorsk near Odesa, last year. In 2021, Ukraine was the largest wheat exporter in the world.Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesHarvesting grapes at a vineyard in South Australia. China blocked Australian exports of wine and other goods after the country expressed support for Taiwan.Adam Ferguson for The New York TimesChina has retaliated against trading partners by restricting access to its enormous market.The extreme concentrations of critical suppliers and information technology networks has generated additional choke points.China manufactures 80 percent of the world’s solar panels. Taiwan produces 92 percent of tiny advanced semiconductors. Much of the world’s trade and transactions are figured in U.S. dollars.The new reality is reflected in American policy. The United States — the central architect of the liberalized economic order and the World Trade Organization — has turned away from more comprehensive free trade agreements and repeatedly refused to abide by W.T.O. decisions.Security concerns have led the Biden administration to block Chinese investment in American businesses and limit China’s access to private data on citizens and to new technologies.And it has embraced Chinese-style industrial policy, offering gargantuan subsidies for electric vehicles, batteries, wind farms, solar plants and more to secure supply chains and speed the transition to renewable energy.“Ignoring the economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous,” Mr. Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said. Adherence to “oversimplified market efficiency,” he added, proved to be a mistake.While the previous economic orthodoxy has been partly abandoned, it is not clear what will replace it. Improvisation is the order of the day. Perhaps the only assumption that can be confidently relied on now is that the path to prosperity and policy trade-offs will become murkier.A solar farm in Yanqing district, in China. The country makes 80 percent of the world’s solar panels.Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times More

  • 125 Shares139 Views

    in Economy

    World Bank Projects Weak Global Growth Amid Rising Interest Rates

    by

    A new report projects that economic growth will slow this year and remain weak in 2024.The World Bank said on Tuesday that the global economy remained in a “precarious state” and warned of sluggish growth this year and next as rising interest rates slow consumer spending and business investment, and threaten the stability of the financial system.The bank’s tepid forecasts in its latest Global Economic Prospects report highlight the predicament that global policymakers face as they try to corral stubborn inflation by raising interest rates while grappling with the aftermath of the pandemic and continuing supply chain disruptions stemming from the war in Ukraine.The World Bank projected that global growth would slow to 2.1 percent this year from 3.1 percent in 2022. That is slightly stronger than its forecast of 1.7 percent in January, but in 2024 output is now expected to rise to 2.4 percent, weaker than the bank’s previous prediction of 2.7 percent.“Rays of sunshine in the global economy we saw earlier in the year have been fading, and gray days likely lie ahead,” said Ayhan Kose, deputy chief economist at the World Bank Group.Mr. Kose said that the world economy was experiencing a “sharp, synchronized global slowdown” and that 65 percent of countries would experience slower growth this year than last. A decade of poor fiscal management in low-income countries that relied on borrowed money is compounding the problem. According to the World Bank, 14 of 28 low-income countries are in debt distress or at a high risk of debt distress.Optimism about an economic rebound this year has been dampened by recent stress in the banking sectors in the United States and Europe, which resulted in the biggest bank failures since the 2008 financial crisis. Concerns about the health of the banking industry have prompted many lenders to pull back on providing credit to businesses and individuals, a phenomenon that the World Bank said was likely to further weigh down growth.The bank also warned that rising borrowing costs in rich countries — including the United States, where overnight interest rates have topped 5 percent for the first time in 15 years — posed an additional headwind for the world’s poorest economies.The most vulnerable economies, the report warned, are facing greater risk of financial crises as a result of rising rates. Higher interest rates make it more expensive for developing countries to service their loan payments and, if their currencies depreciate, to import food.In addition to the risks posed by rising interest rates, the pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine have combined to reverse decades of progress in global poverty reduction. The World Bank estimated on Tuesday that in 2024, incomes in the poorest countries would be 6 percent lower than in 2019.“Emerging market and developing economies today are struggling just to cope — deprived of the wherewithal to create jobs and deliver essential services to their most vulnerable citizens,” the report said.The World Bank sees widespread slowdowns in advanced economies, too. In the United States, it projects 1.1 percent growth this year and 0.8 percent in 2024.China is a notable exception to that trend, and the reopening of its economy after years of strict Covid-19 lockdowns is propping up global growth. The bank projects that the Chinese economy will grow 5.6 percent this year and 4.6 percent next year.Inflation is expected to continue to moderate this year, but the World Bank expects that prices will remain above central bank targets in many countries throughout 2024. More

  • 75 Shares149 Views

    in Economy

    G7 Countries Borrow China’s Economic Strategy

    by

    Wealthy democracies rev up an effort to spend trillions on a new climate-friendly energy economy, while stealing away some of China’s manufacturing power.Midway through his face-to-face meeting with President Biden in Indonesia last fall, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, offered an unsolicited warning.Mr. Biden had in the preceding months signed a series of laws aimed at supercharging America’s industrial capacity and imposed new limits on the export of technology to China, in hopes of dominating the race for advanced energy technologies that could help fight climate change. For months, he and his aides had worked to recruit allied countries to impose their own restrictions on sending technology to China.The effort echoed the sort of industrial policy that China had employed to become the world’s manufacturing leader. In Bali, Mr. Xi urged Mr. Biden to abandon it.The president was not persuaded. Mr. Xi’s protests only further convinced Mr. Biden that America’s new industrial approach was the right one, according to a person familiar with the exchange.As Mr. Biden and fellow leaders of the Group of 7 nations meet this weekend in Hiroshima, Japan, a centerpiece of their discussions will be how to rapidly accelerate what has become an internationally coordinated round of vast public investment. For these wealthy democracies, the goal is both to reduce their reliance on Chinese manufacturing and to help their own companies compete in a new energy economy.Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda, including bills focused on semiconductors, infrastructure and low-emission energy sources, has begun to spur what could be trillions of dollars in government and private investment in American industrial capacity. That includes subsidies for electric vehicles, batteries, wind farms, solar plants and much more.The spending — the United States’ most significant intervention in industrial policy in decades — has galvanized many of America’s top allies in Europe and Asia, including key leaders of the Group of 7. European nations, South Korea, Japan, Canada and others are pushing for increased access to America’s clean-energy subsidies, while launching companion efforts of their own.“This clean-tech race is an opportunity to go faster and further, together,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said after an economy-themed meeting at the Group of 7 summit on Friday.“Now that the G7 are in this race together, our competition should create additional manufacturing capacity and not come at each other’s expense,” she said.Mr. Biden touring a semiconductor manufacturer in Durham, N.C., in March.Al Drago for The New York TimesMr. Biden and his Group of 7 counterparts have embarked on a project with two ambitious goals: to accelerate demand, even by decades, for the technologies needed to reduce emissions and fight climate change, and to give workers in the United States and in allied countries an advantage over Chinese workers in meeting that demand.Much of that project has roared to life since the G7 leaders met last year in the German Alps. The wave of recent Group of 7 actions on supply chains, semiconductors and other measures to counter China is based on “economic security, national security and energy security,” Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, told reporters this week in Tokyo.He added: “This is an inflection point for a new and more relevant G7.”Mr. Emanuel said the effort reflected a growing impatience among Group of 7 leaders with what they call Beijing’s use of economic measures to punish and deter behavior by foreign governments and companies that China’s officials do not like.But more than anything, the shift has been fueled by urgency over climate action and by two laws Mr. Biden signed last summer: a bipartisan bill to shower the semiconductor industry with tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies, and the climate provisions of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which companies have jumped to cash in on.Those bills have spurred a wave of newly announced battery plants, solar panel factories and other projects. They have also set off an international subsidy race, which has evolved after being deeply contentious in the immediate aftermath of the signing of the climate law.The lucrative U.S. supports for clean energy and semiconductors — along with stricter requirements for companies and government agencies to buy U.S.-made steel, vehicles and equipment — have put unwelcome pressure on competing industries in allied countries.Workers at a solar energy parts and batteries factory in Suqian, China, in February.Alex Plavevski/EPA, via ShutterstockSome of those concerns have been quelled in recent months. The United States signed a deal with Japan in March that will allow battery materials made in Japan to qualify for the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act. The European Union is pursuing a similar agreement, and has proposed its own $270 billion program to subsidize green industries. Canada has passed its own version of the Biden climate law, and Britain, Indonesia and other countries are angling for their own critical mineral deals.Administration officials say once-rankled allies have bought into the potential benefits of a concerted wealthy-democracy industrial strategy.At the Group of 7 meeting, “you will see a degree of convergence on this that, from our perspective, can continue the conversion of the Inflation Reduction Act from a source of friction into a source of cooperation and strength between the United States and our G7 partners,” Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, told reporters on Air Force One as Mr. Biden flew to Japan.Some Group of 7 officials say the alliance has much more work to do to ensure that fast-growing economies like India benefit from the increased investments in a new energy economy. “It is important that the acceleration that is going to be created by this doesn’t disincentivize investment around the world,” Kirsten Hillman, the Canadian ambassador to the United States, said in an interview.One country they don’t want to see benefit is China. The United States has issued sweeping restrictions on China’s ability to access American technology, namely advanced chips and the machinery used to make them. And it has leaned on its allies as it tries to enforce global restrictions on sharing technology with Russia, as well as China. All of those efforts are meant to hinder China’s continued development in advanced manufacturing.Biden officials have urged allied countries not to step in to supply China with chips and other products it can no longer get from the United States. The United States is also weighing further restrictions on certain kinds of Chinese chip technology, including a likely ban on venture capital investments that U.S. officials are expected to discuss with their counterparts in Hiroshima.Although many of the Group of 7 governments agree that China poses an increasing economic and security threat, there is little consensus about what to do about it.Mr. Biden with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in Bali, Indonesia, in November.Doug Mills/The New York TimesJapanese officials have been relatively eager to discuss coordinated responses to economic coercion from China, following Beijing’s move to cut Japan off from a supply of rare earth minerals during a clash more than a decade ago.European officials, by contrast, have been more divided on whether to risk close and lucrative business ties with China. Some, like the French president, Emmanuel Macron, have pushed back on U.S. plans to decouple supply chains with China.Ms. von der Leyen, the European Commission president, has been pushing for a “de-risking” of relations with China that involves recognizing China’s growing economic and security ambitions while reducing, in targeted ways, European dependence on China for its industrial and defense base. European officials said in Hiroshima that they had been pleased to see American leaders moving more toward their approach, at least rhetorically.Still, the allies’ industrial policy push threatens to complicate already difficult relations with China. Consulting and advisory firms with foreign ties have been subject to raids, detainments and arrests in China in recent months. Chinese officials have made clear that they see export controls as a threat. Adopting the phase American officials use to criticize Beijing, the Chinese Embassy in Washington warned the Group of 7 this week against what it called “economic coercion.”Mr. Xi issued a similar rebuke to Mr. Biden in Bali last fall. He pointed to the late 1950s, when the Soviet Union withdrew support for the Chinese nuclear program.China’s nuclear research continued, Mr. Xi said, and four years later, it detonated its first atomic bomb. More