Word: importancies
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There is a shortage of consumer goods as a result of strict import quotas, made necessary by declining oil revenues. Many factories are running at 40% or less of capacity because of a shortage of imported raw materials. Oil revenues are likely to be as low as $12 billion this year, down from $21 billion in 1983. But there is a flourishing black market that enables boutiques on Tehran's fashionable Vali-Asr Avenue to sell designer jeans for $120 a pair. Whisky can be found for $100 a bottle, despite the regime's strict...
...decades American firms have complained that a formidable array of government regulations, tariffs and other import barriers in Japan are as difficult to fathom as a formal tea ceremony, effectively blocking business there. Nonetheless, many U.S. companies have flourished in that environment, playing by the rules and somehow still coming out ahead. IBM Japan's 1985 sales might reach $2.7 billion, up about 20% from last year. Schick claims 70% of the safety-razor market. This year U.S. firms will export $25 billion worth of products to Japan. Proclaims Herbert Hayde, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo...
...living. Quite the opposite: the U.S.S.R.'s economic growth rate has slipped to about half the pace of the 1960s, and its citizens still have to stand in long lines for such minor amenities of life as toilet paper and detergent powder. On the most basic level, Moscow must import huge tonnages of grain from the capitalist world to keep the Soviet populace properly...
...stated reason is to speed China's modernization by welcoming foreign capital, technology and management methods. To that end, China has set up four "special economic zones" where foreign investors get unusual privileges to import raw materials and semifinished goods and, to a certain degree, hire workers. But many other foreign investments are simply introducing the Chinese to some amenities, real or alleged, of life elsewhere: fast food, Coca-Cola, Pierre Cardin fashion shows, golf courses, amusement parks, even a Peking branch of Paris' famed Maxim's restaurant...
...that Jiang Zemin would replace the avuncular Wang Daohan as Shanghai's mayor, the choice seemed a bit odd. No one doubted that Jiang, 59, was a man of high accomplishment. A Soviet-trained electrical engineer fluent in four languages, Jiang distinguished himself in China's Administrative Commission of Import and Export Affairs for three years before becoming, and excelling as, the Minister of Electronics Industry. But Jiang, as he is the first to admit, had never run a municipality before, let alone his country's largest industrial city (pop. 12 million). "I'm inexperienced," he says with attractive modesty...