Is Gazprom the latest weapon with which to wage foreign policy or a powerful partner ready to do business?
In the third debate, Mr Kerry drew thumbnail sketches of his policies on health care, raising the minimum wage, immigration policy and everything else that makes voters think he feels their pain and has ideas for doing something about it.
Gone, or at least reduced, is the subsidy China gives to foreign consumers at the expense of Chinese consumers through a low-wage, low-cost policy.
Proponents of the minimum wage such as John Schmitt, a senior fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, like to argue that the mean effect of the minimum wage on jobs for low-skilled workers is close to zero.
FORBES: The Minimum Wage Delusion, And The Death Of Common Sense
Popular treatments of the minimum wage point to Wanda Washerwoman and declare the policy a success because she now earns higher wages than she used to.
The city council will start paying the wage from 1 November, if agreed by the Policy and Resources Committee next week.
Women represent nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage workers, while black and Hispanic workers represent a higher share of the minimum-wage workforce than whites, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
But let's just say from the standpoint of social policy it's just bad social policy to have people earning such a low wage that they feel frustrated, that they feel they can't get ahead.
Foreign policy blunders, our rigid tax structure, lower wage scales abroad, and failure of regulators to monitor intensively brokers and big banks.
Even so, the impact of the minimum wage depends largely on another gang of nine: the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England.
Recent data from the Economic Policy Institute show that the inflation-adjusted hourly wage of college-educated Americans aged 23 to 29 dropped about 4.7 percent from 2007 to 2011.
FORBES: Regulation, The Democrats, and The Parallel Universe
And it was "inconceivable" that he could agree to a policy which would further depress incomes in his already low-wage constituency.
"Childcare is so expensive it is becoming a luxury that only families earning a very good wage can comfortably afford, " said Sally Copley, head of UK policy at Save the Children.
BBC: Save the Children and Daycare Trust rue childcare costs
Plaid Cymru AM Bethan Jenkins said although she was sure that everybody in the chamber supported the concept of a 'living wage', some businesses are concerned about the expansion of such a policy, as the increase in costs could lead to job losses.
As part of its policy review Labour is looking at ways of making the living wage the new norm, including naming and shaming companies who do not pay the wage and introducing rules forcing government contracts to only be given to those firms who pay it.
BBC: Living wage: Ed Miliband pledge over government contracts
"Our contracts require payment of minimum wage, " says Anne Burt, a spokesperson, adding that Syngenta has a strict policy against child labor.
To plug the gap the three governing parties, the conservative New Democracy, PanHellenic Socialist Movement and Democratic Left, may have to rip out a key plank in their joint policy-platform: a deal ruling out further across-the-board wage cuts for the civil service.
The Fed's hawkish credibility, along with cheap goods from China and other low-wage countries, has helped to keep consumer-price inflation relatively tame despite exceptionally loose monetary policy.
As of early 2012, about 70% of the 1.4 million minimum wage earners in the U.S. are full-time workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
If base wage levels for workers cannot go up, says Yoji Tatsui, a director in the labour-policy co-ordination division at the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, then companies should at least try to bring pay for part-timers who do similar jobs closer to that of their full-time counterparts.
ECONOMIST: Deflation is transforming Japan's annual pay rituals
But he warned that low commodity prices and unusually low wage growth may have "artificially suppressed" inflationary pressures "in which case a more dramatic tightening of monetary policy may be called for".
The higher minimum wage can be set to sunset in 8 years conditional on what the experiment has shown about the impact of the policy.
David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, has done the best-known empirical studies on job loss resulting from minimum wage hikes.
To what extent Leapfrog is a response to genuine market need, as opposed to a piece of industrial policy intended to keep the European garment-making industry alive in the face of competition from low-wage countries, is not yet clear.
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