Global Economy | featured news

Thirty years ago, Lourdes Huesca and her husband moved to a tiny patch of land in the muddy bean fields at the edge of Mexico City. The young couple lived in a shack, with no water or electricity, in the poor, rural, old Mexico.

The dozens of vehicles that roared into northeast India this week on a rally from Indonesia symbolize deeper ties between the South Asian giant and Southeast Asia, but the dreadful roads along several parts of the 8,000 km (5,000 mile) journey also show how much remains to be done.

Tony Clift's family has plowed the rich black soil of Australia's Liverpool Plains for six generations. The thought of selling never crossed his mind — until a Chinese company came to town. Shenhua Watermark Coal offered to buy farms at unheard-of prices. The decision wasn't easy, Clift says. His pioneer ancestors settled the land in 1832. But farming is a business nowadays, and selling his 6,500 acres (2,600 hectares) made business sense.

Just a few months ago, the global economy seemed to be stuck in a precarious state. Huge swaths of the world economy were either slowing down or contracting outright, and it wasn't at all clear whether global economic policymakers would have enough gas left in their stimulus tanks to stop things from spiraling into a bad place.

Shin Cheol-soo no longer sees his future in the United States. The South Korean businessman supplied components to American automakers for a decade. But this year, he uprooted his family from Detroit and moved home to focus on selling to the new economic superpower: China.

Britain named Canadian central bank chief Mark Carney on Monday as the next governor of the Bank of England, springing the surprise choice of a foreigner to help steer the world's sixth-largest economy out of stagnation.

The Indian economy is likely to have grown at 5.5 % in the July-September quarter, posing a "difficult situation," the country's federal finance minister, P. Chidambaram, said Saturday. "When growth declines to 5.5% as it has in the first quarter [April-June] of this financial year and when the growth is likely to be around 5.5% in the second quarter of this financial year, it goes without saying we are facing a difficult situation," Mr. Chidambaram told a bankers' conference in the Western Indian city of Pune.

Leaders resumed talks on a trillion-euro budget for the European Union on Friday, but played down expectations of a resolution before the weekend as divisions lingered on where cuts should be applied.

The euro zone economy is on course for its weakest quarter since the dark days of early 2009, according to business surveys that showed companies toiling against shrinking order books in November.

China's vast manufacturing sector saw expansion accelerate in November for the first time in 13 months, preliminary results from a factory survey showed, a sign that the pace of economic growth has revived after seven consecutive quarters of slowdown.