ECONOMY & MARKETS

African countries are rushing to fulfill their Millennium Development Goals by 2015, and some are more serious than others.

Shinzo Abe is preparing to ask Japan's public pension funds -- worth $2 trillion -- to raise their investment in riskier assets, Reuters reports.

Regulators voted to term AIG, Prudential Financial and GE Capital as "systemically important" and place them under increased scrutiny.

China's manufacturing sector is still shrinking, but at a slower pace than last year.

Tourism and foreign investment could take hits if the protests continue through the summer.

Rhode Island’s Japonica Partners seeks to buy 2.9 billion euros worth of Greek bonds from major bondholders.

Powerball officials have yet to identify the Zephyrhills, Fla., winner of the $590 million jackpot. Still, drawings for the new jackpot were held on Saturday.

Here's what qualifies as good news about European manufacturing: It's not shrinking as fast as it had been for the past 22 months.

At least 119 people were killed in Jilin province in northeast China when a blaze engulfed a poultry processing plant.

HSBC's Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index for China, released Monday, showed it fell to 49.2 in May from 50.4 in April, showing a contraction. Official data, released Saturday, say otherwise.

The prospect that the U.S. central bank will turn off its monetary spigot hangs like a specter over this week’s economic reports.

Quality of life for elderly Chinese is abysmally low compared to that of the elderly in the U.S. and U.K.

Unemployment remains high across the United States, but President Barack Obama and Congress seem to have forgotten all about it.

Low-income households often spend more than half their annual income on housing.

Major auto companies are seen pushing the seasonally adjusted annual rate back up to 15 million after an April dip.

The Federal Reserve's advisory council has expressed fears of a "breakout of inflation" and an "unsustainable bubble" in stock and bond markets.

Rising labor costs, reform uncertainty dent investor confidence in China, while studies say outsourcing to China will equal cost of manufacturing in the U.S. by 2015.

Hoarding of copper by warehouses has distorted prices to new highs, despite a global glut.

Some 308,000 people (mostly youths) have left Ireland since 2009 (in a country with a population of only about 4.6 million).

A British nongovernmental organization documented more than a dozen cases of migrant workers enslaved on Thai fishing boats.

Goldman Sachs analysts said in a research report Friday that a mass sale of U.S. Treasury bonds is under way.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s index on consumer sentiment came in unexpectedly stronger in May.

Thousands of demonstrators from the anti-austerity group Blockupy took to the streets in Germany's main financial district.

More than one-quarter of Greeks and Spaniards are idle, along with nearly one-quarter of all younger working-age Europeans.

India's economy expanded by 4.8 percent in the first three months of 2013, the country's last fiscal 2012-13 quarter.

The damage to U.S. household balance sheets has fallen disproportionately on minorities and the uneducated.

Mainland shoppers are not just buying brand name handbags in Hong Kong.

The wheat trade is already being hit within hours of reports that unapproved genetically modified wheat has been found growing on an Oregon farm.

After rapidly expanding for the past 10 years, China's distilled liquor industry reverses in the first quarter of 2013.