Rebuilding the Economy

US foot-dragging dims hopes for world trade deal

Prospects for reaching a deal in the eight-year old Doha Round of global trade negotiations were remote; now, they’re truly distant. On Nov. 30, trade ministers of the 153-nation World Trade Organization (WTO) hold their ministerial conference in Geneva , but their agenda doesn’t even mention negotiations. It is officially defined ...

Best deals from Black Friday 2009 ads: Use your smartphone

Using Black Friday ads to get the best deals could be grueling. If your best sales intelligence came from printed retail circulars, it meant organizing and comparing long lists. If you used an online deals aggregator, you still didn't have a good way of transporting that knowledge to the ...

New Economy cities: Boston is magnet for high-skilled workers

Stu Haber has seen the future and it is trash. His employees at Infoscitex, a Boston-area start-up, built a machine that can transform everything from carpet to yesterday’s lunch into electricity or heat without any hazardous waste. The Green Energy Machine that Mr. Haber and his engineers call “the GEM” was ...

New Economy cities: Houston aims to move beyond the oil age

The moment oil came spewing out of the Lucas No. 1 well at Spindletop on Jan. 10, 1901, Texas’ economy was forever wrenched from its agricultural roots and thrust into the Industrial Age of the 20th century. Today, nearby Houston is still riding the economic gusher produced by the major oil ...

New Economy cities: Huntsville eyes next launchpad for growth

You should probably leave the rocket scientist jokes at home when visiting Huntsville, Ala. The chances are good (1 in 12, in fact) you’ll meet one here. In a state beset with educational challenges, this mid-size city (pop. 396,000) is an anomaly, a figurative brain soup where intellectual capital is ...

New Economy cities: Fort Collins builds on clean tech

Melanie Sloan, a soot-covered lab technician, is trying to boil water to help save lives. But Ms. Sloan isn’t concerned with the liquid. On a recent day, she’s in her lab steadily shoving firewood into a pipe-like stove that is heating the water. The stove is similar to those used by ...

New Economy cities: A Seattle slew of advantages

In some ways, Seattle is the prototype city of the future. It embodies in one leafy landscape virtually all of the forces driving the New Economy – exports, an educated workforce, a vibrant high-tech base, a budding green-tech sector, and an enviable lifestyle. One usually overlooked characteristic is how dependent it ...

The world’s next boom cities

If the last century was the age of economic globalization, expect the first half of this one to be the era of urbanization. By 2050, 3 out of 4 people will be concentrated in major cities or massively urbanized regions, many of them climate-change refugees from exposed agricultural areas. But as nations ...

Five cities that will rise in the New Economy

In Houston, the Texas Medical Center is expanding so quickly that it will soon become the seventh largest downtown in the US. By itself. The hospital complex brims with restaurants, shops, and hotels, and employs 100,000 people – the population of Billings, Mont. In Seattle, the erector-set cranes along the waterfront ...

Um, Virginia, Santa’s not getting his mail in North Pole, Alaska

Fewer children will get their letters to Santa answered this year. Tight budgets and tougher privacy protections have forced the US Postal Service to scale back its Operation Santa program, where volunteers help postal workers answer children's letters to St. Nick. Some residents of North Pole, Alaska, think the post office ...