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This article discusses the various barriers of trade, particularly on cheese in this case. It discusses how labelling and differences in labelling can affect trade and trade consumers. Barriers such as labelling standards, lower trade volume by almost 7%, as well as differing health standards that lower trade by almost 7.5%.
In the reading, Rauch describes trade as expanding the market over foreign boundaries. However, looking at this case, its difficult to see trade always being beneficial when there are different health standards on the same products. This inhibits trade. It also makes you wonder what other products aren't being traded due to differences in policies.

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BEN SKAILES, a British cheesemaker, is busy as Christmas ripens demand for his Stilton. Foreigners make up a third of demand for his dairy, Cropwell Bishop Creamery. This exporting achievement is not to be sniffed at when one considers the barriers to the cheese trade.

Some are natural. Perishable food goes better with wine than long journeys. At least Mr Skailes's Stilton can survive the three-week trip to America. (His is best eaten within 16 weeks.) Softer cheeses struggle, giving American producers an advantage.

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Other hurdles are man-made. Tariffs and quotas are supposed to support domestic dairy industries, and are more onerous than in other sectors. The European Union protects its dairy industry with a 34% average duty, compared with an overall average of 5%. In America it is 17%, compared with 3.5%. Stilton escapes American quotas, but full "loaves" are taxed at a 12.8% rate, or 17% if they arrive sliced. (Unprocessed foods tend to enjoy lower tariffs, to lure in jobs.) The high level of protection means that dairy disputes often loom large in trade deals, as governments scrabble for more access.

Then come technical barriers to trade. Rules vary everywhere, with different paperwork and labelling requirements. South African labels must have a larger typeface. In America, best-before dates put month and day in a different order from the British norm. Somerdale International, an export agent, helps Cropwell Bishop navigate the maze.

Some rules are justified on safety grounds. If someone gets sick, the authorities want to know where to lay the blame. America, for one, requires wads of paperwork showing where each ingredient comes from. Fall foul of local rules and a cheese can be barred altogether. Earlier this year China for weeks blocked all imports of Stilton, Roquefort, Brie and Camembert on health grounds. The World Cheese Awards, held in London on November 17th (Mr Skailes's Stilton won a gold medal), needed special licences for some non-EU cheeses, which had to be burnt after the prize-giving.

In theory, standards encourage trade, by building trust for foreign products. In practice, they often do not. A recent study for the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies estimated that where they applied to cheese, technical barriers, such as labelling requirements, lowered trade volumes by 6.7%. Sanitary and phytosanitary measures, imposed on health grounds, lowered them by 7.3%.

Some rules are designed to stop imitation cheeses. Try to export Brie to France, or Gorgonzola to Italy, and you will meet more lawyers than cheesemongers. Stilton has this protection. Under European law, only six dairies in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire produce officially recognised Blue Stilton. That is one rule that protects Mr Skailes' slice of the market.

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What cheese can tell you about international barriers to trade

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BEN SKAILES, a British cheesemaker, is busy as Christmas ripens demand for his Stilton. Foreigners make up a third of demand for his dairy, Cropwell Bishop Creamery. This exporting achievement is not to be sniffed at when one considers the barriers to the cheese trade. Some are natural.

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This article discusses how the federal government intends to raise interest rates by the end of the year. Rates were lowered initially to promote economic growth, but with little change, they intend to raise them again, yielding any movement. The plan was to keep rates the same until inflation was back to 2%, but is not plausible given the small amount of change.
This article pertains to our discussion of financialization. If the Fed decides to raise interest rates then we will see an increased risk and cost of borrowing. As we discussed in class and also in Kwon and Roberts article, if financialization goes up, then so does income inequality. I believe that effects that this would have on the economy, would do more harm than good.

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The Fed also indicated that it planned to raise its benchmark rate once more this year, following quarter-point increases in March and June. In economic projections released after the meeting, 12 of the 16 officials on the Federal Open Market Committee predicted a third rate hike. Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, reinforced that expectation in a speech in Cleveland a week later.

Ms. Yellen reviewed the reasons to worry about low inflation but concluded that the weight of evidence did not warrant a shift in the Fed's plans. "Given that monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation with a substantial lag, it would be imprudent to keep monetary policy on hold until inflation is back to 2 percent," she said.

But the minutes of the September meeting said that "a few" Fed officials opposed another 2017 rate move, and that "several others" remained on the fence.

Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, is among the skeptics. "There's room for a very honest discussion later this year as to whether or not it's the right time to raise rates," Mr. Evans told Bloomberg News on Wednesday.

The divisions are not about the economic outlook. The account noted that all participants agreed that economic activity during the summer months was in line with the Fed's expectations "and that the incoming data had not materially altered the medium-term economic outlook."

The Fed expects the recent hurricanes to bring down the figures for third-quarter growth, but it anticipates a rebound in the fourth quarter and little impact from the storms going forward.

The issue is the behavior of inflation. The Fed aims to keep inflation at an annual pace of about 2 percent, but it has undershot that goal consistently since the financial crisis, and the Fed says it expects to miss the target again this year.

A majority of Fed officials, led by Ms. Yellen, continue to subscribe to the view that inflation is just around the corner.

"Many participants continued to believe that the cyclical pressures associated with a tightening labor market or an economy operating above its potential were likely to show through to higher inflation over the medium term," the account said.

Those officials want to raise interest rates so long as the economy keeps growing.

"The Fed's models tell them that an economy at full employment eventually produces more inflation down the road and they want the Fed funds rate to be back to normal levels before that happens," said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.

Some also want to raise rates because they are concerned that markets are not responding to the Fed's pressure. The Fed raises its benchmark rate to tighten financial conditions, including borrowing costs, but conditions have eased so far this year.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury has fallen almost 5 percent this year; the decline was even deeper before it began to bounce back last month.

William C. Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has highlighted the market's equanimity as a reason to keep raising interest rates, noting in a speech this month that financial conditions have eased since last December even as the Fed has raised its benchmark rate by three-quarters of a percentage point, a substantial increase.

The dissidents are less unified in their critiques. Some argue that employment has room to grow. The share of prime-age adults with jobs remains below the level before the recession. The account also pointed to the "absence of broad-based upward wage pressures."

Some officials also see evidence that other factors may be weighing on inflation. The account noted that inflation is low in other advanced economies, and there has been some erosion in market expectations of future inflation, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Those worries have occupied a larger portion of the official minutes with each passing meeting this year, reflecting the growing puzzlement and concern among officials. "Many participants expressed concern that the low inflation readings this year might reflect not only transitory factors but also the influence of developments that could prove more persistent," it said.

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Fed Still Puzzled by Inflation, but Rate Increase Is on Track

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The Fed also indicated that it planned to raise its benchmark rate once more this year, following quarter-point increases in March and June. In economic projections released after the meeting, 12 of the 16 officials on the Federal Open Market Committee predicted a third rate hike. Janet L.

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Over two decades have gone by since a bill was passed to reduce carbon emissions. The article states that despite efforts to reduce carbon by using electricity or solar energy, carbon emissions have not changed hardly at all. The author goes on to discuss how the implementation of renewable resources will take a lot more effort to make a difference in carbon emissions, and the cost of power will increase drastically.

This article reminds me of our discussion of global cities and our paper on global indicators. The united states and cities like new york are giant producers in US and world economy. When doing my global indicators paper, the CO2 emissions for the US were drastic and haven't changed much, which correlates with the articles point; despite efforts, it hasn't changed over time

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This statistic, alone, puts a big question mark over the strategies deployed around the world to replace fossil energy. In a nutshell: Perhaps renewables are not the answer.

Over the past 10 years, governments and private investors have collectively spent $2 trillion on infrastructure to draw electricity from the wind and the sun, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Environmental Progress, a nonprofit that advocates nuclear power as an essential tool in the battle against climate change, says that exceeds the total cost of all nuclear plants built to date or under construction, adjusted for inflation.

Capacity from renewable sources has grown by leaps and bounds, outpacing growth from all other sources - including coal, natural gas and nuclear power - in recent years. Solar and wind capacity installed in 2015 was more than 10 times what the International Energy Agency had forecast a decade before.

Still, except for very limited exceptions, all this wind and sun has not brought about much decarbonization. Indeed, it has not added much clean power to the grid.

Environmental Progress performed an analysis of the evolution of the carbon intensity of energy in 68 countries since 1965. It found no correlation between the additions of solar and wind power and the carbon intensity of energy: Despite additions of renewable capacity, carbon intensity remained flat.

Some countries have bucked the trend. Denmark has sharply cut its carbon intensity with vast installations of wind turbines. And yet Germany's experience seems to be more typical. The country went all out in deploying wind and solar energy over the past 10 years, but the decline in carbon intensity was minuscule, from 212 to 203 grams of CO ₂ per kilowatt-hour.

The renewables-or-bust crowd on the periphery of the meeting in Bonn might argue that the sun and wind owe their poor track record at decarbonization in countries like Germany to the fact that nuclear power was being phased out at the same time that they came online.

It is true that Germans would have made more progress in the battle against climate change had they kept their nuclear reactors running and shut plants burning lignite instead. Still, there are other reasons behind renewables' poor track record in decarbonizing electricity.

Nuclear power faces hurdles beyond popular mistrust. Notably, reactors require a lot of capital up front. But renewables have a hard time producing power at a nuclear scale.

For instance, the Diablo Canyon reactor that California plans to close produces 14 times as much power as the Topaz solar farm, which requires 500 times as much land, according to Environmental Progress. The Wind Catcher farm in Oklahoma occupies 2,400 times as much land as Diablo Canyon but produces half as much energy.

The most worrisome aspect about the all-out push for a future powered by renewables has to do with cost: The price of turbines and solar panels may be falling, but the cost of integrating these intermittent sources of energy - on when the wind blows and the sun shines; off when they don't - is not. This alone will sharply curtail the climate benefits of renewable power.

Integrating renewable sources requires vast investments in electricity transmission - to move power from intermittently windy and sunny places to places where power is consumed. It requires maintaining a backstop of idle plants that burn fossil fuel, for the times when there is no wind or sun to be had. It requires investing in power-storage systems at a large scale.

These costs will ultimately be reflected in power prices. One concern is that by raising the retail cost of electricity they will discourage electrification, encouraging consumers to rely on alternative energy sources like gas - and pushing CO ₂ emissions up.

Another concern is that they will drive wholesale energy prices down too far. Because they produce the most energy when the sun is up and the wind is blowing, renewable generators can flood the grid at critical times of the day, slashing the price of power. This not only threatens the solvency of nuclear reactors, which cannot shut down on a dime and must therefore pay for the grid to accept their power, but also reduces the return on additional investment in renewables.

A study by Lion Hirth of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin found that the value of wind power falls from 110 percent of the average power price to 50 to 80 percent as the penetration of wind rises from zero to 30 percent of total consumption. "Competitive large-scale renewables deployment will be more difficult to accomplish than many anticipate," he concluded.

The diplomats in Bonn may be tempted to wave away these concerns. Thomas Bruckner of the University of Leipzig argues that in the case of Germany, expanding renewables to supply 80 percent of power by 2050 is "not a significant burden." Heavy German investment in renewable energy technologies over the last decade succeeded in bringing prices down, he contends; it will be much cheaper to go the rest of the way.

Perhaps. But there is some evidence that among investors, at least, the excitement may be waning. After half a decade of sustained increases, investment in solar and wind energy has been fairly flat since 2010, at around $250 billion per year. While that is a lot of money, it is nowhere near enough.

"We will need twice as much investment over a sustained period of time to get anywhere close to achieving 2 degrees," said Ethan Zindler, head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance in the Americas, referring to the objective of the world's climate diplomats: keep the average world temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above its average in the late 19th century.

I would suggest that the challenge is not just to raise more money. Building a zero-carbon energy system requires broader thinking about the technological mix.

Correction: November 10, 2017

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united nations framework convention on climate change

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Wind and Solar Power Advance, but Carbon Refuses to Retreat

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This statistic, alone, puts a big question mark over the strategies deployed around the world to replace fossil energy. In a nutshell: Perhaps renewables are not the answer. Over the past 10 years, governments and private investors have collectively spent $2 trillion on infrastructure to draw electricity from the wind and the sun, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

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A saudi led blockade cut off supplies to Yemen for basic human survival. Yemen faced a shortage of water, food, and medical supplies including cholera medication needed for an outbreak brought over by saudi Arabia. Director of Unicef stated that he was grateful for the contributions they were able to make, but it was still not enough for Yemen.
This article reminds me of our discussion of global foreign aid, as well as INGO's. Unicef is not an INGO, but a program by the united nations to provide humanitarian aid. In Swiss's article he says that foreign aid can be a way to globalize and bring international norms across seas to struggling countries.

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"Far more humanitarian supplies are needed today," he said. "Yesterday's success cannot be a one-off."

Unicef delivered 1.9 million doses of vaccines to Sana on Saturday, and Mr. Cappelaere said the next critical step was to get them to those who need them.

"Getting the supplies is one part," he said. "Ensuring that the supplies - whatever they are - are reaching every single vulnerable girl and boy throughout Yemen is another challenge."

The vaccine campaign aims to immunize children against diseases like whooping cough, tuberculosis, pneumonia, meningitis and diphtheria.

Concerns were raised this month when diphtheria, a potentially deadly disease that is under control in much of the world, made a resurgence in Yemen, affecting at least 120 people. The World Health Organization said diphtheria vaccines were among the supplies that had earlier been blocked.

A cholera epidemic, which had been waning after ravaging the country earlier this year, had also threatened to re-emerge after shipments of chlorine tablets used to sanitize water were blocked from arrival. Several cities were cut off from supplies of fuel for pumping in fresh water and processing sewage during the blockade, which the International Committee of the Red Cross said was putting 2.5 million people at risk of waterborne disease.

The Saudi-led coalition began the blockade of sea, air and land ports on Nov. 6 after it said a missile fired by Houthi rebels from within Yemen was intercepted near Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The blockade was later loosened, but until this weekend had kept key Houthi-held ports sealed. The Saudi coalition has been fighting the rebel group since 2015.

Since then, the war has ravaged Yemen's health care sector, brought about the largest single-year outbreak of cholera ever recorded, killed or wounded thousands of civilians targeted by airstrikes and left 17 million people without reliable access to food.

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As Aid Arrives in Yemen, U.N. Warns It Must Not Be a 'One-Off'

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"Far more humanitarian supplies are needed today," he said. "Yesterday's success cannot be a one-off." Unicef delivered 1.9 million doses of vaccines to Sana on Saturday, and Mr. Cappelaere said the next critical step was to get them to those who need them. "Getting the supplies is one part," he said.

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Japans ethical investment accounts for nearly 3.5% of their total assets. The article states how this movement has worked its way down from top politicians versus individual ethical investors trying to work their way up. The author continues  on to state that if more companies focus on sustainability, then they will be sought out more for investment opportunities, and greater growth.
This article pertains to our discussion of fair trade. As we discussed in class, ethical products are a developmental strategy of selling products by using social justice. This is exactly what japan is trying to do, by focusing on ethics, they are bringing investment opportunities.

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JAPAN is prone to fads-usually in fancy desserts or fashion ripe for Instagram. A less photogenic one has hit finance: investing in assets screened for ESG (environmental, social and governance) factors. In 2014-16 funds invested in ESG assets grew faster in Japan than anywhere else (and not just because of better reporting and a low base).

Today Japan's sustainable-investment balance is $474bn, or some 3.4% of the country's total managed assets-low compared with Europe or America, but high for Asia. The shift is driven from the top down, rather than, as elsewhere, by ethically minded individual investors.

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When he returned to power in 2012 with a plan to revitalise the economy Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, wanted to reform Japan's conservative business culture. A code for institutional investors was introduced in 2014, followed by one on corporate governance a year later. The government's aim is not only to get firms to distribute some of their vast piles of cash, but to shake up boards that tend to see their job as rubber-stamping management decisions.

The big boost for ethical investing in Japan came from the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the world's biggest public-sector investor, with $1.3trn of assets under management. In 2015 GPIF signed the UN's Principles for Responsible Investment. This year it invested 3% of its holdings in socially responsible assets, using three ESG indices. Smaller investors have started to follow suit.

Hiromichi Mizuno, GPIF's chief investment officer, says the decision to invest in three ESG indices is for the long-term future, rather than with an eye on short-term returns or to support government policy: "The more companies pay attention to the sustainability of the environment, society and governance, the more likely investors are to find investment opportunities in them."

Analysts say GPIF is setting a trend for sustainable investing not just in Japan but globally. It has said it wants to increase its allocations in ESG funds to 10% of its assets. Earlier this month it called for proposals for ethical funds to manage its foreign equity investments.

Nick Benes, who heads the Board Director Training Institute of Japan, an educational body, says he is "all for" the enthusiasm for ESG in Japan. But he frets that Japanese companies are focusing on environmental and social aspects at the expense of governance. "That is the real driver of sustainability," says Mr Benes. "But here it's a big, boldEand S, and a small, plain G."

Japanese companies tend to score well on environmental concerns: they are very energy-efficient, for example. Social issues such as empowering women are receiving more attention. (One of GPIF's chosen indices represents companies that are gender-diverse.) But governance is a work in progress; some still see requirements for disclosure and outside directors as undue interference. A series of scandals this year at companies including Kobe Steel and Nissan, a carmaker, suggests there is still work to do.

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The craze for ethical investment has reached Japan

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JAPAN is prone to fads-usually in fancy desserts or fashion ripe for Instagram. A less photogenic one has hit finance: investing in assets screened for ESG (environmental, social and governance) factors. In 2014-16 funds invested in ESG assets grew faster in Japan than anywhere else (and not just because of better reporting and a low base).

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This article discusses how smaller cities have a much harder time making a comeback after a recession, than bigger metropolitan cities. The author states that the “the accumulation of human talent that is spurring investment and driving innovations that are fueling the prosperity of the nation as a whole.” is the driving force behind bigger city success.
This article reminds me of our discussion of overurbanization---how people flood to inner cities to find jobs and stake their place. This leaves little talent for smaller cities and companies that lie on the outskirts.

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This inability has not only slowed their recovery. As technology continues to make inroads into the economy - transforming industries from energy and retail to health care and transportation - it bodes ill for the future of such areas.

They can be "dangerous places for working people," said Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.

To prove his point, Mr. Muro compared the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country, those with populations above 550,000, with the 182 smallest, which have populations ranging from 80,000 to about 215,000. On average, the big ones got out of the recession faster than the small ones.

To get a sense of the future, he selected big and small metropolitan areas only in the 10 states most subjected to economic disruption - as defined by the penetration of automation and job displacement as a result of foreign trade - to tease out the effects of these transformative forces.

How states rank in being disrupted by

foreign trade and automation*

Rates of recovery from recession

in the 10 states of greatest disruption

Compound annual

growth rate

Compound annual

growth rate

LABOR FORCE

PARTICIPATION RATE

Rates of recovery from recession

in the 10 states of greatest disruption

How states rank in being disrupted

by foreign trade and automation*

Compound annual

growth rate

Compound annual

growth rate

LABOR FORCE

PARTICIPATION RATE

The difference in performance widened: Private employment grew almost twice as fast in large metropolitan areas than it did in small ones from the trough of the recession, in 2009, to 2015. Income grew 50 percent faster. And the labor participation rate - the share of the working-age population in the labor force - shrank only half as much.

"Economic transitions work against smaller America," Mr. Muro told me. "This is a period demanding excruciating transitions."

By now, most Americans live in big metropolitan clusters. Still, the stagnation of small cities is hardly inconsequential. In the presidential election last year, frustrated voters in metropolitan areas with fewer than 250,000 people chose President Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 57 percent to 38 percent, by one reckoning. Mr. Trump took 61 percent of rural voters and 52 percent of voters in midsize cities. This offset Mrs. Clinton's advantage in America's prosperous big cities in critical states.

The frustration that helped deliver the presidency tod Mr. Trump is a bad guide for policy. Mr. Trump's promise to relieve their pain by reviving the coal and steel industries, by keeping immigrants out of the country and by raising barriers against manufactured imports is only a rhetorical balm to satisfy an angry base seeking to reclaim a prosperous past that is no longer available.

Yet it is unclear what should be done to slow the decline of small-city America. For what is driving the decline is the flip side of the forces powering the success of large metropolises: the accumulation of human talent that is spurring investment and driving innovations that are fueling the prosperity of the nation as a whole.

Some of the advantages of big-city living are not hard to find. For starters, big cities have a greater variety of employers and thus more job opportunities in a richer mix of industries than do small cities, whose fortunes are often tied to those of just a small number of employers.

Bigger cities are more productive. They are more innovative. They draw better-educated workers by offering them higher wages. They develop a richer variety of industries. It should not be surprising that they are growing faster.

It was not always so. In the decades after World War II, the share of jobs in big metropolitan areas actually declined, as employment growth spread to smaller cities.

But that was a different economy. Unlike manufacturing, which took root in cities large and small, and in exurban industrial parks, opportunity in the information era has clustered in dense urban enclaves where high-tech businesses can tap into rich pools of skilled and creative people.

"The thickness of a labor market is crucial in the innovation industries that are drivers of economic success today," said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. "This applies to the biotech engineer but not to the welder, who has more replaceable skills."

Elisa Giannone of the University of Chicago pointed out that the wage gap between rich and poor cities was in fact closing from 1940 to 1980. But then regional convergence stopped, as the wages of college educated workers started to rise faster in the big cities that were plugged into the digital economy. The cities where people were quickest to adopt the personal computer saw wages increase the fastest.

"Twenty years ago I would never have predicted that urban concentration would be so strong," said Richard Florida, an urban studies expert at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. "What has happened is significant, and it is not going away."

There are a couple of forces that could stop the rise of big cities. Congestion costs - traffic jams, and any rise in urban poverty and crime - could turn them into less attractive places for the smart young men and women that have been critical to their success. Rising real estate prices could also put a brake on their growth. Some economists argue that housing restrictions hamper economic growth by slowing the flow of talent.

Mr. Muro worries that geographic concentration may ultimately hurt the nation's prosperity, by concentrating innovation in a very small cluster of mega-metro areas. And yet the forces that favor larger cities may be too powerful to save the nation's Steubenvilles and Weirtons from inexorable decline.

As Mr. Florida noted, the United States economy isn't even that geographically concentrated by international standards. London produces a third of Britain's gross domestic product. The output of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago combined doesn't add up to even 17 percent of the American economy.

A recent paper by economists from the University of Illinois, the University of Quebec, the University of Lausanne and the University of Utah suggested that there were too many American cities and that they were inefficiently small.

Adapting to these sorts of changes will require something different than reviving the industries of old. Smaller metropolitan areas might try plugging into the economic orbit of more successful larger cities. They might try to become innovations hub, by, say, drawing large teaching hospitals.

And yet the future for the residents of small-city America looks dim. Perhaps the best policy would be to help them move to a big city nearby.

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Why Big Cities Thrive, and Smaller Ones Are Being Left Behind

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This inability has not only slowed their recovery. As technology continues to make inroads into the economy - transforming industries from energy and retail to health care and transportation - it bodes ill for the future of such areas. They can be "dangerous places for working people," said Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.

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This article discusses how economists are becoming more skeptical of how accurate the GDP is at measuring the economy and its progress. It goes on to say there is no perfect measurement to take everything into account when calculating GDP, for example, certain aspects of the internet.
GDP is used to measure the economy's total output, as discussed in class. As one of Keynes aspects of macroeconomics, it has some margin of error. The article goes on to explain that when the measurement was created in the 30’s, they were measuring very different things, so over time its been losing its accuracy.

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These calculations may seem to be the esoteric domain of number crunchers, but the yearly growth figures - fairly or not - end up being used to answer several essential questions. Is the country getting richer? Are standards of living rising? Are businesses and workers more productive? Is the economy improving?

Indeed, the measure was initially created to back up President Herbert Hoover's overly buoyant claim in 1930, based solely on sprinkled anecdotes of improvements, that "the Depression is over."

Gross domestic product has always been an imperfect answer to such questions. It is designed to measure production and just production - not welfare or happiness.

Since the end of the recession in 2009, the government has estimated that G.D.P. has trudged forward at an average annual rate of roughly 2 percent. Last year, as the Commerce Department reported on Jan. 27, growth amounted to a disappointing 1.6 percent. That's certainly better than the shrinkage that occurred during the recession, but nowhere close to the typical yearly gains of 3-plus percent or more that undergirded American prosperity for decades after World War II.

Such ho-hum performance has become both an emblem of and explanation for the anxiety that smears the economic outlook like a bathtub ring. And every day, decisions about government policy, investment, regulations, taxes, trade and more are based on such measurements.

At its most basic, G.D.P. is calculated by looking at prices - the price of materials, workers, overhead and so on that it costs to make a product and the price that consumers in turn pay for that product.

And while prices can be measured, they don't necessarily reflect the value of quality and experience. As far as G.D.P. is concerned, a delectable $20 meal that would wow Julia Child is equal to a rubbery, tasteless one that costs the same amount.

The growing suspicion, however, is that in a digital world overflowing with free services like Facebook, Google and YouTube, price is an increasingly ill-suited proxy for value.

What is the worth of a free software update that protects against a nasty virus? Of the streaming service that enables you to watch shows on your computer instead of on a television? Of the hours and hours saved by looking up a fact on Wikipedia rather than having to go to a library? All have productive value but no price.

Trying to measure an economy as large and complicated as the United States' is daunting even under the best of circumstances. Ever since the Nobel Prize winner Simon Kuznets helped create the government's first estimate of the national income in 1934, the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the measure have been debated. Kuznets, for example, wanted to include the value provided by mothers taking care of their children and the home, which would cost a sizable amount if it were paid labor.

Kuznets lost that battle, but economists and statisticians have continually struggled to compensate for the measure's shortcomings - like qualities not reflected in price and the constant cavalcade of new goods and services.

Mr. Feldstein and other critics, some of whom raised the issue at the recent meeting of the American Economic Association, are quick to point out that government economists who calculate a nation's G.D.P. do an extremely difficult job well with the tools available.

They are constantly adjusting and fine-tuning for quality, trying to account not only for the better-built mousetrap, but also the new mousetrap app, its upgrades and sometimes even the version sold on the black market. (When the European Union decided to include recreational drugs and paid sex work in 2013, Britain's G.D.P. grew by 0.7 percent.)

Economists seek to attach values to specific improvements, whether faster internet speed, less pollution or a medical treatment that leaves you healthy enough to water ski instead of stuck in a hospital bed. And they look at ad revenue that free services like Google and Facebook rack up and jobs they create.

Still, given how much of people's time and activity has migrated online, there remains a sizable chunk of "digital dark matter" that is not counted. At the same time, measuring the increased value to consumers can be even more difficult when it comes to services and experience than it is with goods.

"It's hard to evaluate consumer preferences," said Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard, and it may be even harder to figure for "things where knowledge is involved and for some kind of qualitative changes."

The best biology textbook in the 1950s, for example, would still not have the accuracy, depth and complexity of one published in 2017. "A doctor who graduates today knows and learns many more techniques and medicines than someone who graduated years ago," Mr. Freeman said. "And we don't really build that in."

Mr. Feldstein likes to illustrate his argument about G.D.P. by referring to the widespread use of statins, the cholesterol drugs that have reduced deaths from heart attacks. Between 2000 and 2007, he noted, the death rate from heart disease among those over 65 fell by one-third.

"This was a remarkable contribution to the public's well-being over a relatively short number of years, and yet this part of the contribution of the new product is not reflected in real output or real growth of G.D.P.," he said. He estimates - without hard evidence, he is careful to point out - that growth is understated by 2 percent or more a year.

The critical question, though, is whether growth and productivity figures are being underestimated more than ever before.

Last year's annual report from the president's Council of Economic Advisers pointed out that there have always been services - like electricity and indoor plumbing - that consumers value more than is reflected in market prices. The report concluded that while the mismeasurement might have worsened in recent years, the problem of digital dark matter was modest (one estimate puts it at 0.4 percent) compared with other hard-to-measure sectors like health care.

"Growth statistics have always missed some important quality improvements, and it's not obvious that we're missing more today than in the past," said Jason Furman, the head of the council under President Barack Obama and now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Mr. Furman said that Americans were feeling a genuine slowdown in growth, but aggravating the impact was that the growth that had occurred "is less equally shared than before."

For Mr. Feldstein, it is misleading measurements that are contributing to a public perception that real incomes - particularly for the middle class - aren't rising very much. That, he said, "reduces people's faith in the political and economic system."

"I think it creates pessimism and a distrust of government," leading Americans to worry that "their children are going to be stuck and won't be able to enjoy upward mobility," he said. "I think it's important to understand this."

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The Economic Growth That Experts Can't Count

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These calculations may seem to be the esoteric domain of number crunchers, but the yearly growth figures - fairly or not - end up being used to answer several essential questions. Is the country getting richer? Are standards of living rising? Are businesses and workers more productive? Is the economy improving?

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In this article, the author discusses how the odd phenomenon of low inflation and low unemployment seem to be coexisting. With this taking place, government officials are struggling to raise interest rates. While some support the raise of interest rates, others say to wait on raising them due to the fact that low rates enhance job growth by more people risk-taking.

This article pertains to Keynes teachings on macroeconomics. Aspects of Keynes macroeconomics include GDP and inflation rate. That being said, this article is interesting because it is discussing how low unemployment tends to drive up inflation, but is currently remaining stagnant.

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But the weakness of inflation, which the Fed now expects to remain below its target annual pace of 2 percent for the fifth-consecutive year, is prompting some Fed officials to hesitate.

Most Fed officials subscribe to a view of inflation in which prices rise more quickly as unemployment declines. The basic idea is that companies must offer higher and higher wages to keep their workers.

Now, the Fed is confronting "the coexistence of low inflation and low unemployment," a phenomenon that inverts the "stagflation" experience of the 1970s, when both inflation and unemployment climbed.

The meeting account said most officials continued to regard low unemployment as the most important factor. They said inflation was rising slowly because of temporary factors, like a decline in cellphone service prices. And they remain inclined to raise the Fed's benchmark rate later this year.

But as low inflation persists, alternative theories have blossomed. Some Fed officials see evidence that the low unemployment rate overstates the health of the job market, and therefore that the Fed should wait to raise interest rates. Low rates support job growth by encouraging borrowing and risk-taking.

Others see evidence that the connection between unemployment and inflation has been overstated.

Some Fed officials have suggested that the public is losing confidence that the Fed will raise inflation back to a 2 percent annual pace, which could make it harder for the Fed to do so, because inflation expectations can become self-fulfilling.

The account said some voting members of the Fed's policy arm, the Federal Open Market Committee, wanted reassurance that inflation was rising before voting to raise rates again.

The slow pace of wage growth is driving a parallel debate. Wages have increased modestly in recent years, and the minutes noted again there was "little evidence of wage pressures."

Some officials see further confirmation that the economy is weak.

Others, however, see the data as misleading. One possibility, advanced by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, is that aggregate wage measures remain low because the baby boomers are retiring. In this view, older, high-wage workers are being replaced by younger workers who make less simply because they are at an earlier stage in their careers. That is holding down measures of average wages, but individual workers may still be seeing healthier wage growth.

And there are also those who contend that wage growth is doing about as well as one would expect given the slow growth of productivity.

Fed officials continue to retreat from the expectation that the Trump administration will deliver a large dose of fiscal stimulus, whether in tax cuts or increased infrastructure spending. The Fed reported that companies, too, are losing hope.

"Uncertainty about the course of federal government policy, including in the areas of fiscal policy, trade and health care, was tending to weigh down firms' spending and hiring plans," the minutes said.

The Fed also included in the minutes a warning about the Trump administration's plans to reduce what it regards as overly burdensome financial regulation.

"It would not be desirable," the minutes said, "for the current regulatory framework to be changed in ways that allowed a re-emergence of the types of risky practices that contributed to the crisis."

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Fed Officials Confront New Reality: Low Inflation and Low Unemployment

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But the weakness of inflation, which the Fed now expects to remain below its target annual pace of 2 percent for the fifth-consecutive year, is prompting some Fed officials to hesitate. Most Fed officials subscribe to a view of inflation in which prices rise more quickly as unemployment declines.

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This article discussed an annual conference held by the federal reserves bank in kansas city. At this conference, several government officials touch base on various aspects that will help or hurt them in terms of economic growth. Some aspects thought to contribute to the decline of the economy included deregulation, protectionism, and trade.
I found that this article  and some of the problems it discusses relates to certain economic theorists. For example, Keynes would agree that deregulation would be a bad idea for a struggling economy. Whereas, Hayek believed a free market would be better in terms of growth, and would disagree with government regulation, and policies like protectionism.

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Both Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, and Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, gave speeches that focused on issues other than monetary policy. Ms. Yellen spoke instead about the dangers of financial deregulation; Mr. Draghi, on the dangers of protectionism.

The world's major economies are all growing for the first time since the crisis, but the expansion is tepid and fragile.

The most immediate threat is posed by the looming deadline for Congress to raise the federal " debt ceiling," allowing the government to borrow money to pay its bills. Federal debt is widely viewed as the world's safest investment, and even a temporary break in payments could cause a financial crisis.

Congressional leaders and administration officials insist that the necessary legislation will pass before the government reaches its borrowing limit sometime in October, but President Trump on Thursday described the situation as a " mess."

Mr. Powell, a Republican who helped persuade his party to raise the debt ceiling in 2011 and 2013, warned in a pair of interviews on the financial networks CNBC and Fox Business that a default would deliver "a major shock to the economy." That is "not something we need right now," he added dryly. Mr. Powell also emphasized that the Fed could not shield the economy from the consequences.

Much of the formal discussion was devoted to the global turn toward protectionism. The trend is highlighted by Britain's decision to withdraw from the European Union, and by Mr. Trump's scattershot threats to impose restrictions on imports to the United States. It can also be seen in a decline of trade as a share of global economic activity in the decade since the crisis.

"People are concerned whether openness is fair, whether it's safe and whether it's equitable," Mr. Draghi said.

Economists have long preached that trade among nations is all of those things, and many at the conference view the backlash as a public relations problem.

Trade, in this view, has become a scapegoat for issues including the decline of manufacturing in developed economies and the rise of income inequality. The evidence suggests technological change has played the predominant role in reducing manufacturing employment; globalization is a bit player by comparison.

Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University, observed that people generally accept job losses that they attribute to technological change but are angered by job losses that they attribute to trade policies. The economic effects are basically identical; the political consequences are remarkably different.

Referring to the founding father of the economic analysis of trade, Mr. Blinder said, "We economists think that David Ricardo got it mostly right 200 years ago, and a lot of people think he got it badly wrong, and we haven't convinced them in 200 years."

But there is an emerging mountain of evidence that economists also have significantly and systematically understated the disruptions caused by increased trade for workers, particularly in manufacturing, their families and their communities.

"The backlash against globalization does not arise because people doubt trade's overall benefits," said Nina Pavcnik, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College. "The backlash reflects that trade makes some individuals worse off."

The idea that developed nations should focus on reaping the benefits of trade, and then worry about offsetting the costs, has produced large benefits, particularly for the wealthy - and large uncompensated costs, particularly for the workers.

Peter Schott, an economist at Yale, said researchers needed to understand why workers had struggled to find new jobs. While the shock of increased trade with China was a one-time event, Mr. Schott said such research could shape public policies that would help workers displaced by other shocks, like improved technology.

Ms. Yellen devoted her keynote address at the conference to a careful defense of the changes made after the financial crisis that aimed to improve the resilience of the American financial system. The Trump administration is pushing to loosen those ties, and Ms. Yellen warned that anything more than modest changes could be bad for the economy.

"Enhanced resilience supports the ability of banks and other financial institutions to lend, thereby supporting economic growth through good times and bad," she said.

Mr. Draghi touched on the same theme at the end of his speech.

"There is never a good time for having lax regulation," he said.

Even the protesters gathered outside the conference changed their tone. The liberal group Fed Up was founded four years ago for the purpose of urging the Fed to pursue faster economic growth. This year, however, members of the group donned "Yellen wigs" and held a rally in support of a second term for Ms. Yellen.

Ms. Yellen's four-year term as Fed chairwoman ends in early February, and Mr. Trump has said he is considering whether to replace her.

The protesters said they were not satisfied with the economic recovery. The share of American adults without jobs remains higher than before the crisis, and the numbers are significantly worse among minorities. Wage growth remains weak.

But they are worried that Ms. Yellen's departure would make things worse. A new Fed chairman might be inclined to raise interest rates more quickly. They see a longer-term risk, too, that less regulation would lead to another economic crisis.

"Yellen's work is not done," said Apryl Evelyn Lewis, 34, from Charlotte, N.C. "I don't agree with the Fed's recent decisions to raise rates. But Yellen's record over the years shows that, over all, she cares about people like me."

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Bankers and Economists Fear a Spate of Threats to Global Growth

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Both Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, and Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, gave speeches that focused on issues other than monetary policy. Ms. Yellen spoke instead about the dangers of financial deregulation; Mr. Draghi, on the dangers of protectionism.

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Researchers conducted an experiment where they measured net interest margins and returns on equity of seven international banks, in which they found most banks fall short on these measures when they go overseas. Factors that contribute to loss include legal expenses, sacrificing margin for market share, and heavier regulatory burdens.
This article relates to our discussion of foreign direct investment. These banks go international to stake their place in the foreign market, and acquire various business assets. The goal is to gain profit by expanding internationally, but this article explains how these banks are doing more damage than good for themselves.

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NOT everybody-or every business-travels well. Retailers from Walmart to Tesco have faltered in forays into foreign lands. Banks, too, often fancy that success at home can be reproduced abroad. In meeting the needs of big companies, they are often right. Global corporations seem to want global banks. But in retail banking, serving households and small businesses, they are usually mistaken.

Or so concludes a report by Lorraine Quoirez and her colleagues at UBS, examining the performance of seven international banks (BBVA, Citigroup, HSBC, ING, Santander, Société Générale and Standard Chartered). For several measures, such as net interest margins and returns on equity, the Swiss bank's analysts constructed benchmarks for each firm. The benchmarks are the averages for all banks in countries where the seven are active, weighted by the importance of each market in each bank's loan book.

Most of the banks fall short on most measures. For example, UBS expects Standard Chartered's return on tangible equity to be just 5.7% in 2018, 7.1 points below its benchmark. Société Générale's projected net interest margin is 0.75 percentage points; par is 1.84.

Part of the explanation is that a global brand does not automatically confer pricing power. So international banks often sacrifice margin in the frequently vain pursuit of market share. HSBC's Mexican bank, the country's fifth-biggest by assets, made a net interest margin of 4.1 percentage points in 2016, a whole point below the local average. BBVA Bancomer, the Spanish lender's local arm and the market leader, scooped 5.7 points.

Banks also tend to overestimate the ease of replicating cross-selling models that have worked at home. And national borders constrain economies of scale. Businesses stretching across several countries are simply harder to run. Legal and compliance expenses multiply. Bigger, more complex banks carry heavier regulatory burdens. At only two of the seven are projected ratios of costs to income below the benchmarks.

A possible benefit of heading abroad is that diversification reduces risk. Even this is not always borne out: four of the seven make provisions, as a proportion of loans, above their benchmarks. Between 2003 and 2017 at only two, HSBC and Santander, were earnings per share less volatile than in a comparable portfolio.

Globetrotting retail banks are not doomed to fail, especially if they can exploit new technology. ING, which the UBS team rates the best of the seven overall, has expanded as a digital bank outside its Dutch home. In Germany it boasts 8m customers. Although it has a thinner interest margin than the locals, its costs are far lower too, largely because it has no branches. Its return on equity beats those of German rivals by ten percentage points or more.

Perhaps wisely, since the financial crisis banks have retreated from foreign retail ventures, seeking to cut costs and bolster capital. UBS lists no fewer than 274 disposals of operations abroad since 2010. Last year mergers started to pick up. But the volume remains low and most deals have been domestic. Banks may be right to think twice before heading abroad again.

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Retail banks' foreign ventures rarely pay off

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NOT everybody-or every business-travels well. Retailers from Walmart to Tesco have faltered in forays into foreign lands. Banks, too, often fancy that success at home can be reproduced abroad. In meeting the needs of big companies, they are often right. Global corporations seem to want global banks.