World
Thousands take to Colombia’s streets to protest 50% increase in gasoline prices
Thousands of protesters on cars and motorbikes took to the streets of Colombia’s main cities on Monday to reject recent hikes in gasoline prices that have drastically increased the price of fuel in the South American country.
Protesters say that the monthly price hikes set by Colombia’s first leftist government are making it harder for small businesses to operate, and could push up the price of food.
Read: Climate activists target jets, yachts and golf in a string of global protests against luxury
But the government of President Gustavo Petro says the gasoline subsidies cost about $11 billion a year. It says it must eliminate the subsidies to pay debts to the national oil company Ecopetrol, which produces most of the country’s fuel, and to free up more funds for social programs.
The protest comes as discontent grows with Petro's administration a year after he took office promising to reduce poverty and make peace with the nation’s remaining rebel groups.
Petro’s administration has struggled to stop violence in rural parts of the country, and to boost Colombia’s economy, which is expected to grow by just 1% in 2023, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Read: Students of 7 DU-affiliated colleges stage protest blocking Nilkhet
“This government is making decisions that are anti-business,” said Alejandra Mendoza, the manager of a small company that transports frozen food and other goods for supermarkets in Colombia. She attended Monday’s protest wearing her company’s yellow jacket.
“Our costs have gone up by a third, and we have to adjust our budget each month because of the gasoline hikes” Mendoza said.
Lavrov to represent Russia at Delhi G20 Summit
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is set to attend the upcoming G20 summit in Delhi next month.
Russian President Vladimir Putin conveyed his inability to attend the G20 Summit in New Delhi on 9-10 September 2023 to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi during a phone call between the two leaders on Monday, according to India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
Also read: Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov likely to visit Bangladesh
The two leaders reviewed progress on number of issues of bilateral cooperation and exchanged views on regional and global issues of mutual concern, including the recently concluded BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, Indian foreign ministry said in a statement.
Last week, Moscow sent Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to attend the BRICS summit in South Africa’s Johannesburg as Putin's travel to Johannesburg was complicated by an outstanding International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest over the abduction of children from Ukraine.
Also read: Russia's Putin attends BRICS summit in South Africa remotely while facing war crimes warrant
The 18th G20 Heads of State and Government Summit in New Delhi on September 9-10 will be a culmination of all the G20 processes and meetings held throughout the year among ministers, senior officials, and civil societies.
UK flights are being delayed and canceled as a 'technical issue' hits air traffic control
Thousands of air travelers faced delays on Monday after Britain's air traffic control system was hit by a breakdown that slowed takeoffs and landings across the U.K.
Flight control operator National Air Traffic Services said it was experiencing an unexplained "technical issue" that could delay flights on Monday, the end of a holiday weekend and one of the busiest travel days of the year.
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The service said it had "applied traffic flow restrictions to maintain safety" and that engineers were working to find and fix the fault. It said U.K. airspace remained open.
It did not give an estimate of how long it would take to fix the problem, or what had caused it, but European air traffic authority Eurocontrol warned of "very high" delays because of a "flight data processing system failure" in the U.K.
Scottish airline Loganair said there had been "a network-wide failure of U.K. air traffic control computer systems."
"Although we are hopeful of being able to operate most intra-Scotland flights on the basis of local coordination and with a minimum of disruption, north-south and international flights may be subject to delays," it said.
Also read : New DCTS scheme can create stronger trade, investment partnership with UK: BGMEA President
Airports both inside and outside the U.K. told passengers to expect delays and cancellations.
Heathrow, Europe's busiest air hub, said "national airspace issues" were causing disruption to flights, and advised passengers to check with their airline.
Dublin Airport said in a statement that air traffic control issues were resulting in delays and cancellations to some flights into and out of Dublin. "We advise all passengers due to travel today to check the status of their flight with their airline in advance of travelling," it said.
British Airways said it was "working closely with NATS to understand the impact of a technical issue that is affecting U.K. airspace, and will keep our customers up to date with the latest information."
Also read : UK political watchdog says Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ‘inadvertently’ broke ethics rules
Aviation analyst Alastair Rosenschein, a former BA pilot, said the air traffic system appeared to have suffered "some kind of patchy failure as opposed to a total shutdown."
He told Sky News that "the disruption will be quite severe at some airports" and some U.K.-bound flights will likely have to land in other European countries in order to reduce the flow of inbound planes.
China won't require COVID-19 testing for incoming travelers starting Wednesday
China will no longer require a negative COVID-19 test result from incoming travelers starting Wednesday.
It is a milestone toward ending the virus restrictions imposed in China since early 2020.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin announced the change at a briefing Monday.
Read: China won't require COVID-19 testing for incoming travelers starting Wednesday
China ended its “zero-COVID” policy only in December, after years of draconian curbs that at times included full-city lockdowns and lengthy quarantines for people who were infected.
As part of those measures, incoming travelers were required to quarantine for weeks at government-designated hotels.
The curbs slowed the world’s second-largest economy, leading to rising unemployment and rare instances of unrest.
Read more: China bans seafood from Japan after the Fukushima nuclear plant begins its wastewater release
Libya’s foreign minister suspended after meeting with Israel’s chief diplomat
One of Libya’s rival prime ministers said Monday he has suspended his foreign minister a day after Israel revealed that its chief diplomat met with her last week — news that prompted scattered street protests in the chaos-stricken North African nation.
Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who heads the government of national unity in the capital, Tripoli, also referred Foreign Minister Najla Mangoush for investigation over the meeting, which was the first ever between top diplomats of Libya and Israel.
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Mangoush met in Rome last week. It was a small breakthrough for Israel’s government, whose hard-line policies toward the Palestinians have led to a cooling of its burgeoning ties with the Arab world.
Cohen said they discussed the importance of preserving the heritage of Libya’s former Jewish community, including renovating synagogues and cemeteries. The talks also touched on possible Israeli assistance for humanitarian issues, agriculture and water management, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
The Libyan foreign ministry, meanwhile, sought to downplay the importance of the meeting as “unprepared and an unofficial meeting during a meeting with Italy’s foreign minister. It said in a statement that Mangoush’s encounter with Cohen didn’t include “any talks, agreements or consultations.”
Read: 17-year-old Palestinian killed during Israeli military raid in northern West Bank
Israel’s foreign ministry did not respond to reporters’ questions early Monday, including whether Cohen’s announcement had been coordinated with Libya.
Libya was plunged into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising toppled longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The oil-rich country has been split between the Western-backed government in Tripoli and a rival administration in the country’s east. Each side has been backed by armed groups and foreign governments. Gadhafi was hostile to Israel and a staunch supporter of the Palestinians, including radical militant groups opposed to peace with Israel.
Sunday’s announcement of the meeting prompted scattered protests in Tripoli and other towns in western Libya. Protesters stormed the foreign ministry headquarters to condemn the meeting, while others attacked and burned a residence for the prime minister in Tripoli, according to local reports.
In the town of Zawiya protesters burned the Israeli flag, while others held the Palestinian flag. There were also protests in the city of Misrata, a stronghold for Dbeibah, according to footage circulated on social media and verified by The Associated Press.
Read: Suspected Palestinian shooting attack at West Bank car wash kills 2 Israelis
Khalid al-Mishri, an Islamist politician who was the chair of the State Council, a Tripoli-based legislative body, condemned the meeting and called for the dismissal of Dbeibah’s government, which is close to the U.S. and the West.
“This government has crossed all prohibited lines and must be brought down,” he wrote on the X platform, previously known as Twitter.
The east-based House of Representatives also slammed the meeting as a “legal and moral crime.” It called for an emergency session Monday in the eastern city of Benghazi.
In Israel, Yair Lapid, a former foreign minister and prime minister, criticized Cohen for going public with the sensitive meeting.
Read more: After Israeli raids, Palestinian police struggle in militant hotbed, reflecting region on the brink
"Countries of the world this morning are looking at the irresponsible leak of the meeting of the Israeli and Libyan foreign minister and asking themselves: is it possible to manage foreign relations with this country? Is it possible to trust this country?” Lapid said in a statement.
Climate activists target jets, yachts and golf in a string of global protests against luxury
Climate activists have spraypainted a superyacht, blocked private jets from taking off and plugged holes in golf courses this summer as part of an intensifying campaign against the emissions-spewing lifestyles of the ultrawealthy.
Climate activism has intensified in the past few years as the planet warms to dangerous levels, igniting more extreme heat, floods, storms and wildfires around the world. Tactics have been getting more radical, with some protesters gluing themselves to roads, disrupting high-profile sporting events like golf and tennis and even splashing famous pieces of artwork with paint or soup.
They’re now turning their attention to the wealthy, after long targeting some of the world’s most profitable companies – oil and gas conglomerates, banks and insurance firms that continue to invest in fossil fuels.
“We do not point the finger at the people but at their lifestyle, the injustice it represents,” said Karen Killeen, an Extinction Rebellion activist who was involved in protests in Ibiza, Spain, a favorite summer spot for the wealthy. She said the group is protesting unnecessary emissions such as superrich individuals going to pick up a pizza by boat. “In a climate emergency, it’s an atrocity,” she said.
Read: National Adaptation Plan aims to achieve climate-resilience by 2050
Killeen and others from climate activist group Futuro Vegetal — or Vegetable Future — spraypainted a $300 million superyacht belonging to Walmart heir Nancy Walton Laurie. Protesters held up a sign that read, “You consume, others suffer.”
In Switzerland, some 100 activists disrupted Europe’s biggest private jet sales fair in Geneva when they chained themselves to aircraft gangways and the exhibition entrance. In Germany, climate group Letzte Generation — which translates to Last Generation — spraypainted a private jet in the resort island of Sylt, in the North Sea. In Spain, activists plugged holes in golf courses to protest the sport's heavy water needs during hot dry spells.
In the U.S., Abigail Disney, the grand-niece of Walt Disney, was arrested at East Hampton Town Airport, New York, in July along with 13 other protesters for blocking cars from entering or exiting the parking lot. It was the first of up to eight actions carried out in the exclusive Hamptons area. Activists also crashed a golf course, disrupted a museum gala and demonstrated outside some private luxury homes.
“Luxury practices are disproportionately contributing to the climate crisis at this point,” said University of Maryland social scientist Dana Fisher. According to a 2021 report by nonprofit Oxfam, if all planet-warming emissions were attributed to the people producing them, the richest 1% will be responsible for around 16% of emissions by 2030. “It makes a lot of sense for these activists to be calling out this toxic behavior.”
Read: "Climate Promise-From Pledge to Impact" launched to drive ambitious climate action in Bangladesh
Richard Wilk, an economic anthropologist at Indiana University, said luxury travel is “the real culprit” in the emissions of the ultrawealthy.
He published estimates of top billionaires’ annual emissions in 2021 and found that a superyacht — with permanent crew, helicopter pad, submarines and pools — emits about 7,020 tons of carbon dioxide a year, over 1,500 times higher than a typical family car. And private aircraft in Europe alone last year caused more than 3 million tons of carbon pollution, equivalent to the average annual CO2 emissions of over half a million EU residents, according to the nonprofit Greenpeace.
But Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann warned that attention away from the fossil fuel companies — which are responsible for at least 70% of all emissions — and toward the rich could be “playing right into the hands of the fossil fuel industry and the ‘deflection campaign’ they’ve used to divert attention from regulation by emphasizing individual carbon footprints over the much larger footprint of polluters.”
“The solution is to get everyone to use less carbon-based energy,” whether wealthy or lower-income people, he said.
Read: Climate adaptive innovation must for development of agro industries: Speakers say at ICC Bangladesh, Standard Chartered, FAO roundtable
David Gitman, president of Monarch Air Group, a Florida private air charter provider, encouraged activists to think twice about whether they're taking the right approach.
“If their activism goes toward some sort of actual assistance to real programs to make real change like sustainable aviation fuel, like carbon offsets, I think that this kind of activism can help achieve those results,” said Gitman. “Now, if they go out and they spray-paint a private jet in an airport in Europe, is that going to get those results? In my opinion, no.”
Fisher, of the University of Maryland, was also skeptical that the activism was effective in changing behavior by the wealthy.
In some cases, governments have stepped in with regulations. France is cracking down on the use of private jets for short journeys, and earlier this year, the Netherlands' Schiphol Airport also announced plans to ban private jets.
But as protests escalate, Fisher and Wilk say they could still move the needle toward behavior change.
“Public shaming is one of the most powerful ways of controlling people,” Wilk said. “It acts in a lot of different ways to embarrass people, to make them more conscious of the consequences of their actions.”
Son stolen at birth hugs Chilean mother for first time in 42 years
"Hola, Mama."
What seems like an unremarkable greeting between mother and son was in this case anything but.
Forty-two years ago, hospital workers took Maria Angelica Gonzalez' son from her arms right after birth and later told her he had died. Now, she was meeting him face-to-face at her home in Valdivia, Chile.
"I love you very much," Jimmy Lippert Thyden told his mother in Spanish as they embraced amid tears.
"It knocked the wind out of me. ... I was suffocated by the gravity of this moment," Thyden told The Associated Press in a video call after the reunion. "How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugs?"
His journey to find the birth family he never knew began in April after he read news stories about Chilean-born adoptees who had been reunited with their birth relatives with the help of a Chilean nonprofit Nos Buscamos.
The organization found that Thyden had been born prematurely at a hospital in Santiago, Chile's capital, and placed in an incubator. Gonzalez was told to leave the hospital, but when she returned to get her baby, she was told he had died and his body had been disposed of, according to the case file, which Thyden summarized to the AP.
"The paperwork I have for my adoption tells me I have no living relatives. And I learned in the last few months that I have a mama and I have four brothers and a sister," Thyden said in the interview from Ashburn, Virginia, where he works as a criminal defense attorney representing "people who look like me" who cannot afford a lawyer.
He said his was a case of "counterfeit adoption."
Nos Buscamos estimates tens of thousands of babies were taken from Chilean families in the 1970s and 1980s, based on a report from the Investigations Police of Chile which reviewed the paper passports of Chilean children who left the country and never came back.
"The real story was these kids were stolen from poor families, poor women that didn't know. They didn't know how to defend themselves," said Constanza del Rio, founder and director and Nos Buscamos.
The child-trafficking coincided with many other human rights violations that took place during the 17-year reign of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who on Sept. 11, 1973, led a Chilean coup to overthrow Marxist President Salvador Allende. During the dictatorship, at least 3,095 people were killed, according to government figures, and tens of thousands more were tortured or jailed for political reasons.
Over the past nine years, Nos Buscamos has orchestrated more than 450 reunions between adoptees and their birth families, del Rio said.
Other nonprofit organizations are doing similar work, including Hijos y Madres del Silencio in Chile and Connecting Roots in the United States.
Nos Buscamos has been partnering for two years with genealogy platform MyHeritage, which provides free at-home DNA testing kits for distribution to Chilean adoptees and suspected victims of child trafficking in Chile.
Thyden's DNA test confirmed that he was 100% Chilean and matched him to a first cousin who also uses the MyHeritage platform.
Thyden sent the cousin his adoption papers, which included an address for his birth mother and a very common name in Chile: Maria Angelica Gonzalez.
It turns out his cousin had a Maria Angelica Gonzalez on their mother's side and helped him make the connection.
But Gonzalez wouldn't take his phone calls until he texted her a photo of his wife and daughters.
"Then just the dam broke," said Thyden, who sent more photos of the American family who adopted him, his time in the U.S. Marines, his wedding, and many other memorable life moments.
"I was trying to bookend 42 years of a life taken from her. Taken from us both," he said.
He traveled to Chile with his wife, Johannah, and their two daughters, Ebba Joy, 8, and Betty Grace, 5, to meet his newly discovered family.
Stepping into his mother's home, Thyden was greeted with 42 colorful balloons, each one signifying a year of lost time with his Chilean family.
"There is an empowerment in popping those balloons, empowerment in being there with your family to take inventory of all that was lost," he said.
Thyden recalls his birth mother's response to hearing from him: "Mijo (son) you have no idea the oceans I've cried for you. How many nights I've laid awake praying that God let me live long enough to learn what happened to you."
Gonzalez declined to be interviewed for this story.
Thyden, along with his wife and daughters visited the Santiago zoo where his American family first took him after the adoption. This time their tour guide was his biological sister.
Back at Gonzalez' home, Thyden realized that he and his mother share a love of cooking.
"My hands are in the same dough as my mama," he said as they made fried empanadas together. He pledged to keep using the family recipe to stay connected with his family and his culture.
Thyden said his adoptive parents are supportive of his journey to reunite with his lost relatives, but were "unwitting victims" of a far-reaching illegal adoption network and are wrestling with the realities of the situation.
"My parents wanted a family but they never wanted it like this," he said. "Not at the extortion of another, the robbing of another."
Through a spokesperson, his parents declined comment.
While Thyden was successfully reunited with his birth family, he recognizes that reunification might not go as well for other adoptees.
"It could have been a much worse story," he said. "There are people who find out some really unfortunate details about their origin."
While in Chile, Thyden and del Rio met with one of seven investigators working to address thousands of counterfeit adoption cases like his own.
"We don't want money, we just want the human recognition that this horrible thing happened in Chile and the compromise that this is not going to continue happening in the future," del Rio said. "We are trying to make a difference. Not only with Jimmy and his family but we want to do it, the change, in the country."
Thyden also met with Juan Gabriel Valdes, the Chilean ambassador to the United States, to seek government recognition of the pervasiveness of the adoption scheme.
He said there was no mechanism, financial or otherwise, to assist Chilean adoptees in their efforts to visit their home country. He said he sold a truck to pay for his family's plane tickets and other expenses.
"People need to be able to decide ... what their name is going to be, where their citizenship is going to be. They should have access to both," he said. "They should have all the rights and privileges of a Chilean citizen because this is a thing that happened to them, not that they chose."
The Chilean Embassy in Washington did not return a request for comment.
Jacksonville killings: What we know about the hate crime
A white man wearing a mask and firing a weapon emblazoned with a swastika gunned down three Black people Saturday in what the sheriff described as a racially motivated attack in Jacksonville, Florida. The shooter, who had also posted racist writings, then killed himself. Here's what is known about the killings:
WHERE AND WHEN DID THE SHOOTING TAKE PLACE?
The shooting happened Saturday afternoon at a Dollar General store in New Town, a predominantly Black neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida. The store is near Edward Waters University, a historically Black school with about 1,000 students. The school said the man was spotted on campus by a security guard shortly before the shooting and asked to leave when he refused to identify himself. He was seen putting on his bullet-resistant vest and mask before he drove away. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said Sunday that it does not appear that he intended to attack the school.
READ: Authorities say 4 people dead in shooting at California biker bar
WHO WAS THE SHOOTER?
Ryan Palmeter, 21, who lived in neighboring Clay County with his parents. Sheriff Waters said Palmeter had been involved in a 2016 domestic violence incident that did not lead to an arrest and was involuntarily committed for a 72-hour mental health examination the following year. Palmeter used two guns — a Glock handgun and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. Waters said they were purchased legally earlier this year.
WHO ARE THE VICTIMS?
Angela Michelle Carr, 52, who was shot in her car outside; store employee A.J. Laguerre, 19, who was shot as he tried to flee; and customer Jerrald Gallion, 29, who was shot as he entered the store. No one else was injured.
WHAT MOTIVATED THE ATTACK?
Racism. During the attack, Palmeter texted his father and told him to break into his room and check his computer. There, the father found a suicide note, a will and racist writings from his son. The family notified authorities, but by then the shooting had already begun, the sheriff said. Officials say there were writings to his family, federal law enforcement and at least one media outlet. At least one of the guns had swastikas painted on it. Sheriff Waters said that the shooter made clear in his writings that he hated Black people.
READ: Russia says it has confirmed Prigozhin died in the plane crash
HOW WAS EDWARD WATERS UNIVERSITY AFFECTED?
After the shooting, the school was put on lockdown for several hours and the students were kept in their dorm rooms for their safety. The school says no students or staff were involved in the shooting.
REACTION FROM AROUND THE NATION:
Florida State Rep. Angie Nixon: “We must be clear, it was not just racially motivated, it was racist violence that has been perpetuated by rhetoric and policies designed to attack Black people, period."
Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan: “I’ve heard some people say that some of the rhetoric that we hear doesn’t really represent what’s in people’s hearts, it’s just the game. It’s just the political game. Those three people who lost their lives, that’s not a game. That’s the reality of what we’re dealing with. Please let us stop viewing each other as pieces on a game board, and let us please start to see each other’s humanity. “
READ: 3 US Marines killed, 20 injured in an aircraft crash in Australia during a training exercise
Rudolph McKissick, senior pastor of the historic Bethel Church in Jacksonville: “As it began to unfold, and I began to see the truth of it, my heart ached on several levels."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: “This guy killed himself rather than face the music and accept responsibility for his actions. He took the coward’s way out." —
LaTonya Thomas, a Jacksonville resident riding a charter bus home after the 60th anniversary commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: “It made the march even more important because, of course, gun violence and things of that nature seem so casual now. Now you have employees, customers that will never go home.”
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland: "No person in this country should have to live in fear of hate-fueled violence and no family should have to grieve the loss of a loved one to bigotry and hate. One of the Justice Department’s first priorities upon its founding in 1870 was to bring to justice white supremacists who used violence to terrorize Black Americans. That remains our urgent charge today. The Justice Department will never stop working to protect everyone in our country from unlawful acts of hate.”
Russia says it has confirmed Prigozhin died in the plane crash
Russia’s Investigative Committee has confirmed Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash.
Read more: Plane crash believed to have killed Wagner chief Prigozhin seen as Kremlin's revenge
The committee said in a statement Sunday that after forensic testing, all 10 bodies recovered at the site of the crash were identified, and their identities “conform to the manifest.”
Read more: Russian mercenary leader Prigozhin's commanders met Putin after short-lived mutiny, pledged loyalty
Russia’s civil aviation authority earlier this week said Prigozhin, along with some of his top lieutenants, were on the list of those on board the plane that crashed Wednesday.
Global inflation pressures could become harder to manage in coming years, research suggests
Rising trade barriers. Aging populations. A broad transition from carbon-spewing fossil fuels to renewable energy.
The prevalence of such trends across the world could intensify global inflation pressures in the coming years and make it harder for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to meet their inflation targets.
That concern was a theme sounded in several high-profile speeches and economic studies presented Friday and Saturday at the Fed’s annual conference of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Read more: Why inflation persists at a higher level in Bangladesh
For decades, the global economy had been moving toward greater integration, with goods flowing more freely between the United States and its trading partners. Lower-wage production overseas allowed Americans to enjoy inexpensive goods and kept inflation low, though at the expense of many U.S. manufacturing jobs.
Since the pandemic, though, that trend has shown signs of reversing. Multinational corporations have been shifting their supply chains away from China. They are seeking instead to produce more items — particularly semiconductors, crucial for the production of autos and electronic goods — in the United States, with the encouragement of massive subsidies by the Biden administration.
Read more: Ex-governors optimistic MPS can claw back inflation, implementation the key
At the same time, large-scale investments in renewable energies could prove disruptive, at least temporarily, by increasing government borrowing and demand for raw materials, thereby heightening inflation. Much of the world's population is aging, and older people are less likely to keep working. Those trends could act as supply shocks, similar to the shortages of goods and labor that accelerated inflation during the rebound from the pandemic recession.
“The new environment sets the stage for larger relative price shocks than we saw before the pandemic,” Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, said in a speech Friday. “If we face both higher investment needs and greater supply constraints, we are likely to see stronger price pressures in markets like commodities — especially for the metals and minerals that are crucial for green technologies.”
This would complicate the work of the ECB, the Fed and other central banks whose mandates are to keep price increases in check. Nearly all central banks are still struggling to curb the high inflation that intensified starting in early 2021 and has only partly subsided.
“We are living in this world in which we could expect to have more and maybe bigger supply shocks,” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said in an interview. “All of these things tend to make it harder to produce stuff and make it more costly. And that is definitely the configuration that central banks dislike the most.”
The shifting patterns in global trade patterns sparked the most attention during Saturday's discussions at the Jackson Hole conference. A paper presented by Laura Alfaro, an economist at Harvard Business School, found that after decades of growth, China's share of U.S. imports fell 5% from 2017 to 2022. Her research attributed the decline to tariffs imposed by the United States and the efforts of large U.S. companies to find other sources of goods and parts after China's pandemic shutdowns disrupted its output.
Those imports came largely from such other countries as Vietnam, Mexico and Taiwan, which have better relations with the United States than does China — a trend known as “friendshoring.”
Read more: Persistent inflation, rising interest rates will weigh on global economy, OECD predicts
Despite all the changes, U.S. imports reached an all-time high in 2022, suggesting that overall trade has remained high.
“We are not deglobalizing yet,” Alfaro said. “We are seeing a looming ‘Great Reallocation' " as trade patterns shift.
She noted that there are also tentative signs of “reshoring” — the return of some production to the United States. Alfaro said the United States is importing more parts and unfinished goods than it did before the pandemic, evidence that more final assembly is occurring domestically. And the decline of U.S. manufacturing jobs, she said, appears to have bottomed out.
Yet Alfaro cautioned that these changes bring downsides as well: In the past five years, the cost of goods from Vietnam has increased about 10% and from Mexico about 3%, adding to inflationary pressures.
In addition, she said, China has boosted its investment in factories in Vietnam and Mexico. Moreover, other countries that ship goods to the United States also import parts from China. Those developments suggest that the United States hasn't necessarily reduced its economic ties with China.
Read more: UK inflation falls to lowest level in over a year but food prices keep decline in check
At the same time, some global trends could work in the other direction and cool inflation in the coming years. One such factor is weakening growth in China, the world's second-largest economy after the United States. With its economy struggling, China will buy less oil, minerals and other commodities, a trend that should put downward pressure on the global costs of those goods.
Kazuo Ueda, governor of the Bank of Japan, said during a discussion Saturday that while China's sputtering growth is “disappointing," it stems mainly from rising defaults in its bloated property sector, rather than changes to trade patterns.
Ueda also criticized the increased use of subsidies to support domestic manufacturing, as the United States had done in the past two years.
“The widespread use of industrial policy globally could just lead to inefficient factories,” Ueda said, because they wouldn't necessarily be located in the most cost-effective sites.
Read more: Economists wary about finance minister’s 6 percent inflation target for FY24
And Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general of the World Trade Organization, defended globalization and also denounced rising subsidies and trade barriers. Global trade, she asserted, often restrains inflation and has helped significantly reduce poverty.
“Predictable trade," she said, "is a source of disinflationary pressure, reduced market volatility and increased economic activity. ...Economic fragmentation would be painful.”