DealBook: A Stock Exchange Expands Its Global Reach

Plan at G-20 Is to Tighten Global Rules on Taxes

They are expected on Friday to agree to enact new tax laws that would limit the ability of multinational corporations like Apple and Starbucks to legally avoid paying taxes by operating subsidiaries in certain countries.

The practice came to the fore during the global recession as national coffers were strained and leaders looked for new sources of revenue. The recent positive economic news has not damped that desire or relieved the pressure to crack down.

In the United States, economic news has pointed to continued growth. On Friday, the Labor Department is expected to issue a healthy jobs report with 180,000 jobs created in August. It is the last set of economic data the government will release before the Federal Reserve meets to consider tightening monetary policy and raising interest rates in the United States.

On Thursday, the Institute for Supply Management issued its closely watched report, which said service companies were hiring more, and fewer people are applying for unemployment benefits. Auto sales are up sharply.

Recent economic reports from Britain, France, Germany and other countries in Europe’s northern tier have also been optimistic, although central bankers there remain cautious.

If the United States government reports that even more jobs were created, analysts expect that the 10-year Treasury note, which rose to 3 percent on Thursday, will rise further.

Currencies in many of the developing economies that benefited from the expansionist policies of the Federal Reserve have recently been falling sharply against the dollar as the Fed signaled its plans to tighten, and as money flows have reversed. Growth in many of the so-called BRICS economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — that had buoyed global growth have slowed as momentum shifts to the United States, Japan and northern Europe.

The heads of state have two days of meetings and will issue a communiqué on Friday that is expected to address the tax overhaul and other questions of economic policy.

Though the meeting is overshadowed by the crisis in Syria, and deep divisions between nations over possible American military action there, the heads of state are still expected to collectively endorse an economic policy statement that will encourage the continuing fiscal stimulus, or government spending, to help the recovery.

Germany, in the driver’s seat of European economic policy, had objected but appeared ready to acquiesce to a statement endorsing fiscal stimulus at a ministerial-level meeting in July in Moscow.

That meeting also encouraged governments to carefully coordinate tapering off monetary stimulus programs like the Federal Reserve’s so-called quantitative easing. The end of cheap credit has curbed growth in emerging markets as investors bring money back to the United States to take advantage of rising interest rates.

On Thursday, Russia’s deputy minister of finance, Sergei A. Storchak, said the leaders were set to endorse a similarly worded statement on Friday.

“It’s not going to be more than the agreements that were reached in Moscow,” Mr. Storchak told Reuters at the summit meeting, being held in the restored Czarist-era Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg.

In a reflection of the depth of concern about currency outflows caused by rising interest rates in the United States — meaning investors can obtain similar returns in emerging markets at far lower risk — the BRICS nations announced an intention to create a collective fund of $100 billion to defend their weakening local currencies. It was unclear when it would be operating and able to intervene in currency trading.

The effort at tax reform, if enacted widely, would squeeze more money from multinational corporations and shift a portion of the global tax burden from individuals and small businesses to large corporations. The proposal is for countries to better coordinate tax treaties to close loopholes that multinational corporations exploit by registering in tax havens like Delaware or the Cayman Islands. Another tactic of concern is shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions and costs to high-tax ones.

In one widely cited example, Starbucks last year paid no corporate tax in Britain despite generating sales of nearly $630 million from more than 700 stores in that country. The company volunteered to pay more in coming years. Apple, despite being the most profitable American technology company, avoided billions in taxes in the United States and around the world through a web of complex subsidiaries.

Even with the high-level agreement, it will take years to put in place, and companies that benefit and have structured their business to comply with the laws in place today are all but certain to lobby to retain these advantages. The G-20 governments endorsed a draft of the tax agreement in Moscow in July.

The reform would encourage nations to adopt new standardized tax treaties, to replace the web of thousands of such agreements that exists now.

Russia is hosting the G-20 for the first time since the group was formed in 1999 and began discussing strategies for priming the global economy.

Mr. Storchak, the deputy finance minister in Russia, said in an interview before the opening meeting on Thursday that Russia had asked all governments to explain their spending plans for the years ahead, and that most had complied and agreed to release the results of this survey during the forum.

Getting a Seat at the Global Table -- for a Price

The Eiffel Tower and the Atomium in Brussels are other lasting legacies of the world expos that have showcased the latest in technology, architecture and culture every five years since London’s inaugural Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851.

Today, though, hosting an expo means much more than building things. Would-be bidders count on an economic boost and a higher international profile as benefits from staging the event.

But on the negative side, they are also faced with a series of challenges, like ballooning costs and an uncertain future for some of the large scale construction that such events leave behind.

Still, the race for the 2020 World Expo, the next to be awarded, has attracted a diverse group of cities, all situated in emerging regions: Dubai; Izmir, Turkey; São Paulo; and Yekaterinburg, Russia.

“An expo marks a certain ‘coming of age’ for a city,” Urso Chappell, an expo historian, said. “It can aid a city’s physical redevelopment as well as the nation’s image abroad.”

For the 2020 bidders, then, the event means more than hosting more than 200 nations and their pavilions for six months.

Much like the Olympics or the soccer World Cup, an expo brings a host of economic opportunities for a city: Jobs are created as large construction projects get under way, and international and local tourism grows, giving a boost to restaurants, hotels, car rental agencies and other businesses. The Dubai bid, for instance, anticipates more than 25 million visitors and 270,000 new jobs because of the expo.

At the same time, though, much as with any other global mega-event, expo organizers have to walk a tightrope, balancing cost and legacy.

The Shanghai World Expo 2010, for example, cost the equivalent of $4.2 billion, according to government figures. But the Chinese news media have reported that the actual cost of staging the event was north of $50 billion — more than was spent on the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

The Shanghai Expo has also left a number of “white elephants,” venues and construction that proved useless after the event and were abandoned. Some, like Germany’s pavilion at the expo, were razed.

The hosts of the next world expo, which will be held in Milan in 2015, hope to avoid the same fate by “organizing a totally sustainable event and building the country pavilions with eco-friendly materials which, if necessary, can be easily dismantled at the end of the six-month event,” said Giuseppe Sala, chief executive of the Expo 2015 Co.

One of the few things that will remain after the Milan Expo will be a large park. The organizers say plans call for 56 percent of the site to remain “green” after the event. At $1.7 billion, the projected investment by the Milan Expo would also be much smaller than Shanghai’s.

With a reasonable budget and a sound legacy plan, a world’s fair can become a transformative opportunity for a city, and even for a country, expo officials say.

“For the hosts, expos are a key part of a strategic plan for urban development and act as catalysts for accelerating infrastructural transformations,” said Vicente Gonzalez Loscertales, secretary general of the Paris-based Bureau of International Expositions, which chooses the host cities and supervises the events. “At the same time, the expo has more intangible but equally powerful impacts on the branding of the city and of the country, and on their international image.”

It is exactly that “unique P.R. opportunity,” as Mr. Gonzalez Loscertales calls the expo, that the 2020 bidders are looking to exploit.

Dubai, which would become the first host of a world’s fair in the Middle East, has emerged as the front-runner, boasting the biggest financial and governmental support. On the other hand, political tensions in Russia, most recently over what is viewed as an anti-gay law, and in Turkey could hurt the chances of Yekaterinburg and Izmir. São Paulo, the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, is seen as least likely to succeed when the 100 or so delegates of the exposition bureau’s General Assembly vote in November, people familiar with the bidding process said.

DealBook: Growth in Global Disputes Brings Big Paychecks for Law Firms

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Bits Blog: Why Asian Internet Companies Struggle to Become Global

Bobby Yip/Reuters Tencent, one of China’s most valuable technology companies, owns WeChat, an online messaging service that’s growing in popularity across borders.

Asia is home to nearly half of the 2 billion Internet users in the world. It makes most of the hardware — laptops, smartphones, tablets and other gadgets — that is used to gain access to the Internet. In countries like South Korea and Japan, it has some of the fastest wired and wireless networks for carrying Internet traffic.

Yet in one aspect of the high-technology economy, Asia still struggles. It has yet to create an Internet company with the global scale of a Google, Facebook or Amazon. A report published Wednesday by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research outfit affiliated with the Economist magazine, examines some of the possible reasons for this.

In some cases, the study says, Asian Internet companies have simply been held back by a lack of international ambition. In countries like China or India, domestic markets are so big that expanding abroad has not always been seen as a necessity. Other companies are reluctant to tackle the cultural challenges of operating in the West, according to the report, whose conclusions were reached after interviews with Internet entrepreneurs and others.

But that is starting to change. A new generation of Asian Web companies is seeing rapid cross-border growth — including, in some cases, in the West. These include online messaging services like Line, from Japan, and WeChat, which is owned by a Chinese Internet business, Tencent. Social gaming companies, like GungHo of Japan, have also achieved strong international growth.

Meanwhile, Alibaba, an e-commerce giant in China, has increasingly international ambitions, and is expected to offer stock to the public soon to finance them. Another Asian e-commerce company, Rakuten of Japan, has moved to expand abroad through acquisitions of companies like PriceMinister of France, and it has adopted English as its official language.

Yet these are the exceptions. The study says Asian Internet companies have been hobbled by factors like a lack of trusted online payment systems, a reluctance among Internet users to pay for digital content and restrictions on hiring foreign workers. The report also highlights burdensome regulations, including laws in countries like India and Thailand that make Internet companies responsible for the content posted on their sites.

“In many markets around the region, change must begin with a better understanding, on the part of governments, of the specific challenges facing Internet businesses, and a more general recognition of the growth opportunity that online commerce represents,” the authors write.

Asia is not alone in struggling to export home-grown Internet services. If anything, Europe has had an even harder time — despite lesser regulatory, linguistic and cultural hurdles to international expansion.

The report was sponsored by the Asia Internet Coalition, a group that was formed by five American Internet companies — Google, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay and Salesforce. The Economist Intelligence Unit says it was written independently. But some of the issues that are highlighted – especially the effect of regulation – do mirror the complaints from American Internet entrepreneurs and executives about operating in Asia.

In addition to the well-known restrictions that American Internet companies face in China, where services like Facebook and Twitter are blocked, Silicon Valley giants have also struggled in some other Asian markets. In South Korea, for example, the Internet search business is dominated by two local players, Naver and Daum, and not by Google.

The report makes clear recommendations for stimulating the Internet economy in Asia, urging governments there, for instance, to make regulatory changes to allow efficient online payments systems to develop.

Who would be the main beneficiaries? That is less clear.

DealBook: Kabel Deutschland Discloses Takeover Approach by Liberty Global

Lisi Niesner/ReutersKabel Deutschland has been approached by several potential suitors.

Kabel Deutschland said on Monday that it had received a preliminary takeover bid by John C. Malone’s Liberty Global, setting up a potential bidding war for the German cable operator.

In a brief statement, Kabel Deutschland acknowledged speculation that Mr. Malone was interested in a deal, a move that potentially interrupts the German company’s talks with Vodafone of Britain.

Any takeover is likely to value the company at more than $10 billion.

Behind the growing interest in Kabel Deutschland are efforts by companies to break into the fast-growing German cable and television market.

Both Vodafone and Liberty are considered natural bidders for Kabel Deutschland, because both already operate in Germany. The biggest company in that market, Deutsche Telekom, is likely to be barred from bidding under antitrust regulations.

The German company is being advised by Morgan Stanley and Perella Weinberg Partners.

Preoccupations: Global Competence Is Vital in Business

In the era of globalization, however, our companies, managers, partners, colleagues and constituents are spread out all over the world. A company based in New York might hire a team in India to manage a project on the ground in Europe. Or a California company might have a presence in China, South Korea or Mexico — or all three. American professionals can no longer afford to be insular.

For several years, I talked up the idea of global competence to anyone who would listen, until one day I realized that I was being hypocritical. I had never spent more than a few weeks outside the United States or worked extensively with people in other countries. So when my husband, Stewart Shankman, an associate professor of clinical psychology, received an opportunity for a sabbatical at King’s College in London, our whole family crossed the pond for several months, and I decided to continue my work as a consultant and writer there, with the goal of enhancing my own global competence.

After moving into a flat in the literary neighborhood of Bloomsbury, I expected the heavy weight of expat anxiety to descend upon me. But then I realized that I had felt more culture shock when I moved from New York to Chicago in 2004 than I did in relocating to London. Britain is like the middle ground between the United States and the rest of Europe. But there are subtle differences that are important to understand if an American professional is to be competent there.

For one thing, most Britons are unfailingly polite. A professional based in London may agree to something in order to be nice, but you shouldn’t necessarily expect the request to be granted. And compared with Americans, Britons tend to be emotionally restrained at work. Major displays of enthusiasm or dismay are rare, and aggressive arguments and overt self-promotion are no-nos. Yet they will happily call you on the phone for a chat or a check-in. I found that I had to be careful not to mistake some of them for telemarketers.

Mastering these nuances little by little, I dived into the task of learning how business was done in Britain. Because my principal area of expertise is talent management, I focused on that. For example, I met with nearly two dozen British professionals — women and men, and of different ages and ethnicities — in fields including human resources, marketing, transportation, health care and banking.

At the London Business School, I sat down with Lynda Gratton, a professor of management practice who talks about globalization in her book, “The Shift.” Although she told me that my global competence would be better honed in Bangalore, India, she echoed my feelings about its necessity in the future world of work. “Pervasive connectivity means that organizations are operating in a global context even if they don’t have a presence overseas,” she said. “This is true for individuals, too.”

If you’re a contractor, for instance, you will increasingly have access to a global resource pool. “With the right specialization and a diverse network, you can sell your products and services to clients all over the world,” Professor Gratton said. “However, this requires a certain mind-set. It means being familiar enough with your clients’ cultures to know how a sentence will sound there.”

FINE-TUNING your global competence doesn’t have to mean a lifestyle overhaul. If you’re employed by a decent-size company, ask to spend a few days in a foreign office, or for an assignment that involves close business dealings with other countries. Read foreign newspapers to gain insights into the daily goings-on of a particular country. Hop onto Skype and interview international colleagues to learn how your industry operates abroad.

My British work experience ended last month, and I’m back in Chicago. The most important thing I’ve brought back with me is a greater sensitivity and perceptiveness. I’m beginning to see that global competence is also about understanding the interplay among individuals, countries, industries and organizational cultures. Those who seek out people and situations foreign to them and master the ability to assimilate are far more likely to be successful in a world that’s becoming both bigger and smaller at the same time.

Court to see if Miss. lawsuit OK on global issue

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court will consider whether the state of Mississippi can bring a state-level lawsuit in a global LCD screen price-fixing conspiracy.

Seven Ways to Excel at Winning Global Clients

In 2012, management unease and indecision fueled by uncertainty reached an all-time high in companies and law firms. In-house counsel worldwide worried about not meeting demand, while outside lawyers lamented over supply. General counsel say everyone wants a lawyer on hand these days, but with territories and complexity growing as budgets shrink, something's got to give.

These "do's" are for firms with international offices, and firms with hopes of serving domestic clients internationally and foreign clients at home.

First, inhabit your client's world; they want you there. While they'll proceed with or without you, they'd like to have their preferred firms at their side. Unfortunately many of you are simply not involved enough in their world. Their focus is not just the legal part -- it's how legal advice is sourced and delivered in the company.

Make time to talk with clients and find out exactly what their in-house legal teams are up to. Schedule a meeting at their offices. Explain that you want to make sure your firm understands their priorities and goals as you support them in the coming year, and they'll likely be happy to talk. After this conversation, figure out a few specific ways that your firm can help. Typically clients don't know how you can help, so you must be proactive with specific ideas and recommendations.

For example, if their focus is to better manage resources to cover growing demand, you could help them better identify and prioritize risks. Your key practices working in the client's industry could review their "risk list," and suggest ones they see other clients facing that may not yet be on their radar. Or you may want to present to them a few ways that your firm has helped other clients that are also working to improve resource management.

Next, build project management tools, including financial accounting ones. Your clients want more certainty. Clients still love what you do for them, but many want to manage smarter so they can use you less. To nourish the relationship, your numbers must show you can deliver on your promises. Most of your firm's financial and account management exists to give you productivity and profitability info. What's in it for the client?

Your clients want to see how you will manage to deliver on budget and on time. You need a system that can help your lawyers and their clients track progress and resource use in relation to project scope and estimates. It must connect to financial accounting and billing. Without such a system, progress reporting will be time consuming and cumbersome, your lawyers will have little credibility, and your firm will be at greater risk of getting the alternative fee estimate wrong.

Third, use knowledge management and IT across borders to reinforce client relationships. In multipolar business, relationships between international law firms and corporate clients are inevitably multipersonal. Across the time zones, org structures, legal systems and compliance frameworks, trust is a network constructed with information and project continuity that supports good personal relationships.

The question is: Does your firm's infrastructure help your lawyers win and perform effectively across borders, making the world flatter so they can more easily bring the firm's strengths to clients? If you're not sure, another firm is likely doing it better.

Fourth, demonstrate international know-how. Your firm should provide specific and compelling proof of your knowledge of laws and regulations across the diverse places where your clients are selling, buying, sourcing or investing. It seems so basic, but global clients say their most pressing concern in high-growth markets is: understanding local and regional laws and regulations.

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With 2 Big Deals Approaching, Rosneft Stands to Become a Global Oil Power

At the heart of the maneuvering is the country’s third-largest oil company, articles about TNK-BP." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/tnk_bp/index.html?inline1=nyt-org">TNK-BP, which is a joint venture between the British oil giant BP and four Russian billionaires. Rosneft is negotiating to buy out one or both partners.

If either or both of the sales are concluded, Rosneft, whose headquarters is a mansion across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, is sure to expand its power on global oil markets. If both deals get done, Rosneft would become the world’s largest publicly traded oil company in terms of crude oil production, with the Russian government as the majority owner. The transactions would also lift the fortunes of Igor I. Sechin, a former spy and close aide to President Vladimir V. Putin, who has championed them as Rosneft’s chief executive.

The company has been trying to play down negative associations with state ownership. Rosneft is like a teddy bear, Mr. Sechin told a group of investors in London this month, in a video posted on the company’s Web site. “We love our teddy bear. We clean it, look after it and take care of it.”

The shift of BP’s Russian operations from private to state hands is fraught with risks, both for the company and the Russian industry more broadly.

BP’s partnership with private sector billionaires has yielded a return of 34 percent annually since it began in 2003. BP has earned $19 billion in dividends on an $8 billion investment and is now poised to sell its stake for a reported $25 billion to $28 billion.

BP’s investment in Rosneft stock from 2006, when the state company held an initial public offering, brought BP a loss.

“The state is tempted to milk the oil industry as a cash cow,” Peter Westin, the chief equity analyst at Aton, an investment bank in Moscow, said by telephone, referring to both high taxes and expanding government control.

The Kremlin, eager for investment to maintain the flow of oil that props up Mr. Putin’s popularity and the improved living standards of ordinary Russians, has sought both control and market-oriented policy changes under Mr. Putin.

Rosneft is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is among a group of oil companies that are owned or closely affiliated with governments that control access to oil reserves but are also open to private sector investment, like Petrobras in Brazil and Statoil in Norway.

The company has taken pains to emphasize that it will be run efficiently, hiring former executives from Exxon Mobil and TNK-BP in anticipation of the deal with BP. It has also reaffirmed its privileged access to new exploration sites in the Arctic Ocean after Mr. Sechin blocked a proposal by a liberal wing of the Russian government to open offshore drilling to competition.

Cliff Kupchan, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, which conducts risk analysis on Russian politics and economic policy for large investors including oil companies, wrote in a research note that Rosneft’s expansion could tempt the Russian government to use it strategically, just as Aramco, the Saudi Arabian company, is used to influence oil prices. This would come with a distinction: unlike Saudi Arabia, Russia would be unlikely to coordinate such moves with the United States.

Rosneft, if the acquisitions are completed, would pump about four million barrels of oil a day, or about 40 percent of the output of Saudi Arabia.

Oil analysts say Russia is unlikely to withhold oil, even as this becomes more feasible, because shutting down continent-spanning oil pipelines is too expensive. Also, many Siberian oil wells cannot be stopped without destroying them because permafrost surrounding their upper portions would freeze the well bore solid.

BP is hoping a deal with Rosneft might follow a similar arc of profit as its deal with the oligarchs.

BP made a fortune in Russia by applying Western oil field techniques to Soviet-era wells and infrastructure, which worked well despite BP’s blundering technical reputation after the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Sometimes, engineers made adjustments as simple as opening the spigot wider at the mouth of a well because the previous owners, following the Soviet axiom that they would pretend to work for pretend pay, had never bothered to check if more oil could flow.

From the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, Russian oil output dropped by half to just more than six million barrels a day, before deals like the creation of TNK-BP helped reverse the trend.

Overall production is now at about 10 million barrels a day, about tied with the levels of Saudi Arabia, but again in decline.

But future growth from fixing sloppy late Soviet work is unlikely, and a new chapter is opening in the history of the Russian oil industry.

“The landscape going forward looks a lot less attractive than the experience of the last 10 years,” said Peter Hutton, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. Referring to the revival of old fields in Siberia using Western technology, he said: “TNK-BP has been able to get fairly low-hanging fruit in the brownfield revolution. Getting additional reserves is going to be a lot more difficult.”

One senior oil company executive close to BP said the partnership could similarly transfer know-how to Rosneft.

“Mr. Sechin and Mr. Dudley have known each other for years,” he said, referring to BP’s chief executive, Robert W. Dudley, a former director of TNK-BP. “There is a willingness on the part of the leadership of Rosneft to get expertise and people from BP to improve the capability of Rosneft.”

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, and Stanley Reed from London.

I.M.F. Lowers Its Forecast for Global Growth

It foresees global growth of 3.3 percent in 2012 and 3.6 percent in 2013, down from 3.5 percent this year and 3.9 percent next year when it made its last report in July. New estimates suggest a 15 percent chance of recession in the United States next year, 25 percent in Japan and above 80 percent in the euro area.

Financial market stress, government spending cuts, stubbornly high unemployment and political uncertainty continue to dampen growth in high-income countries, the fund said. At the same time, the emerging-market countries that fueled much of the recovery from the global recession, like China and India, have continued to cool off, with global trade slowing.

“The recovery has suffered new setbacks, and uncertainty weighs heavily on the outlook,” the fund said, warning that its forecasts might be overly optimistic if policy makers in Europe and the United States fail to carry out pro-growth policies. “Downside risks have increased and are considerable.”

The fund, which is based in Washington, will officially issue its report Tuesday at the start of a major meeting with the World Bank in Tokyo. The forecasts are part of the fund’s World Economic Outlook report, released four times a year.

The latest report focused on the higher-income countries whose political and economic troubles are posing significant risks to the rest of the world. The fund estimated that these advanced economies, including the United States and Germany, would grow about 1.3 percent this year, down from 3 percent in 2010.

The fund does not expect growth to pick up much next year, either, forecasting growth of just 1.5 percent, in those countries.

“Low growth and uncertainty in advanced economies are affecting emerging market and developing economies through both trade and financial channels, adding to homegrown weaknesses,” Olivier Blanchard, the fund’s chief economist, said.

The fund has praised central banks for doing more to support the recovery in recent months. The European Central Bank, the United States Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan have all enacted new policies to help economic growth and fight financial distress. That has helped to quiet the markets in Europe and bolster them elsewhere.

Still, political uncertainty and high unemployment have held the recovery back, the fund said. For Europe, the hard work of building a mechanism to aid countries having trouble accessing financing on the debt markets at reasonable rates and enacting new cross-Continent policies remains, the fund cautioned.

“The European Central Bank has recently done its part,” the fund said. “It is now up to national policy makers to move and activate the European Stability Mechanism, while articulating a credible path and beginning to implement measures to achieve a banking union and greater fiscal integration.”

The fund has also had stern words for the United States. After the presidential and Congressional elections next month, policy makers will have just weeks to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” a combination of tax increases and mandatory federal spending cuts that could throw the country back into recession — and drag down global growth with it.

“It’s not a threat just for the United States of America, it’s a threat for the global economy,” Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the fund, said last month in a speech at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

“We all hope that despite political calendars, which anywhere in the world entail a degree of uncertainty and unpredictability, there will soon be enough political clarity and no political games in order to actually focus on removing this uncertainty,” she said.

In the economic forecast report, the fund also cut its growth estimates for emerging economies, whose strength has helped pull the world out of the global recession. It now foresees growth of 5.3 percent this year and 5.6 percent next year, down from its July estimates.

The fund knocked a full percentage point off its 2012 growth estimate for Brazil, and 1.3 percentage points off its growth estimate for India.

Earlier this month, the World Bank released a major development report focusing on the importance of employment to growth and stability — a concern given high rates of youth unemployment around the world after the recession.

The report found that more than half a billion young people are neither working nor studying, and estimated that the world would need to create about 600 million new jobs in the next 15 years just to keep the unemployment rate constant.

“Governments need to move jobs to center stage to promote prosperity and fight poverty,” Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, said.“Jobs equal hope. Jobs equal peace. Jobs can make fragile countries become stable.”

Expectations for progress are low heading into the I.M.F. and World Bank meetings. The major political transitions in China, the United States and other countries have put issues like quota reform on the back burner.

Global Entry Applications Rejected for Past Brushes With Law

But some people have been surprised to find that their applications for the Global Entry trusted traveler program have been rejected — not for some serious infraction but for a minor brush with law enforcement or customs inspectors that turned up during the required background check.

Some travelers deemed untrustworthy have taken to discussing their options on online travel message boards. Others are seeking advice about divulging, say, marijuana use in college, even before submitting their applications. One common concern is the government’s ability to find records of juvenile incidents that applicants thought were sealed or expunged.

“By and large, any type of criminal conviction would disqualify someone,” said John Wagner, executive director of admissibility and passenger programs for United States Customs and Border Protection. “We are looking for people who have demonstrated past compliance with laws and regulations.”

Asked whether a drunken-driving arrest or past drug use divulged during the Global Entry interview might lead to a rejection, Mr. Wagner responded: “It could. It is an assessment of the person we’re looking at as far as risk factors.”

Mr. Wagner said that 3 to 5 percent of travelers were rejected, out of about 30,000 applications every month, and that individuals are generally told the reason for the denial. Applicants must pay a $100 fee, provide their fingerprints and submit to a criminal-background check, which may uncover police encounters from long ago.

Chris Summers, a photographer from Texas, was arrested in Georgia when he was 17 years old. A friend had given him a key to the school’s darkroom, but it turned out other students were using similar keys to steal school property. Mr. Summers said that once a detective interviewed him and determined that he was not involved in the theft, he was released and the case was relegated to Georgia’s “dead docket.”

But when he applied for Global Entry this year, he was asked about that arrest during his interview with a customs agent. Although his application was denied, the agent told him he could appeal that decision by submitting documents proving the disposition of his case.

“I had to get a copy of my 1974 juvenile arrest record,” Mr. Summers said. “It just seemed ironic that this made me a threat to the security of the United States.”

While it is a testament to Global Entry’s popularity that Mr. Summers went to the trouble of getting fingerprinted so he could secure the necessary paperwork from officials in Georgia — “Try going back and getting a court to give you something from 30-some years ago,” he said — it has also been eye-opening to find out how much information exists in government databases.

One California woman was surprised when a customs agent asked during her Global Entry interview about a long-forgotten incident at customs: while she was waiting in line with her husband and children after a trip to Europe in 2008, a dog detected an apple in her bag.

“We took the apple out and threw it away and that was the end of that,” she said. “It was a total nonevent in our eyes.”

Although she was approved for Global Entry, she asked that her name not be published because she was skittish about an episode she never realized was recorded. “It wasn’t written up and it wasn’t even at a point that they had my documentation yet,” she said. “That’s what shocked me.”

Mr. Wagner said the agency kept a record of what happened at ports of entry, and that some infractions involving prohibited or undeclared items might prevent a traveler from being enrolled in Global Entry. Since the agency’s mission includes catching smugglers, not just potential terrorists, past compliance with customs regulations is part of the trusted traveler screening process.

“If we seized an article from a person, we would want to keep track of that,” he said. “If someone paid a fine because they did not declare it, that’s generally going to disqualify a person.”

Those whose Global Entry applications are denied have three ways to appeal: making an appointment to speak with a supervisor at a trusted traveler enrollment center (listed at globalentry.gov), e-mailing the agency’s ombudsman (cbp.cbpvc@dhs.gov) or filing a complaint through the Department of Homeland Security’s Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (dhs.gov/trip).

While those avenues helped Mr. Summers with his appeal (he has an interview for reconsideration this month), other travelers have had trouble getting a clear response.

Strategies: Central Banks’ Moves Are Giving Global Stocks a Lift

The overall economy is sluggish at best, and unemployment has remained above 8 percent since early 2009. Yet despite a decline last week, stock investors have been on a roll. In the three months ended on Friday, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 5.8 percent. In Europe, stocks fared even better for the quarter, with the Euro Stoxx 50 index up 8.4 percent. Japan was a laggard, as the Nikkei index dropped 1.5 percent, but in Hong Kong the Hang Seng index rose 7.2 percent.

During much of this period, the Federal Reserve and other central banks have been flooding the planet with money. Cause and effect is hard to prove, but it seems reasonable to assume that the central banks have had something to do with the markets’ buoyancy. “Clearly central bank actions have been a major factor in the market rally,” Ethan Harris, chief North American economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, wrote in a recent report. News reports of “super dovish” announcements by the Fed and the European Central Bank correlated neatly with stock market climbs, he found.

On Sept. 6, for example, Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, said that under certain conditions it would buy unlimited amounts of government bonds, a move that could lower borrowing costs for Spain and other troubled countries in the euro zone. Stocks immediately rose around the world.

The next week, the Fed met the market’s expectations, and then some. It extended its plans for maintaining near-zero short-term interest rates into the middle of 2015. And it announced that it would increase its bond-buying to a total of $85 billion a month for the rest of the year, with a focus on mortgage-backed securities, a program aimed at giving the housing market another lift. What’s more, the Fed linked the duration of its loose policies to the state of the job market. As long as the unemployment rate remained unacceptably high, the Fed planned to maintain its expansionary monetary policy, Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, said in a news conference.

“We will be looking for the sort of broad-based growth in jobs and economic activity that generally signal sustained improvement in labor market conditions and declining unemployment,” Mr. Bernanke said.

Last week, however, the markets gave up ground. The central banks aside, it’s easy to see why the bullish mood might darken quickly. A partial list of dangers includes rising tensions in the Mideast, a contentious election campaign and a looming “fiscal cliff” in the United States, an unresolved and multifaceted financial crisis in Europe, and a global economy that is far from robust.

Little of this would appear to augur well for stocks, except that the central banks have tilted the odds on the bullish side, at least for now, some analysts say.

“A modestly growing economy with the cyclically sensitive sectors at still-depressed levels is a relatively stable and safe, if not exciting, environment,” said Larry Kantor, head of research at Barclays, in a recent report. “When this is combined with a central bank committed to aggressively supporting growth through higher asset prices, it amounts to a very attractive environment for taking risk.”

In fact, Barclays calls the current version of its flagship quarterly research publication “Global Outlook: Don’t Fight the Fed.”

OF course, no one knows where the markets are going day to day. After their recent run upward, and even without the emergence of any nasty news, stocks could easily “consolidate,” that is, decline for a while before moving upward again. And because the global economy is already rather weak, an external shock — a disruptive geopolitical event — could alter perceptions abruptly.

Some analysts are not upbeat even now. The Economic Cycle Research Institute, an independent forecasting organization with an excellent record, says it believes that the United States is already in recession, and that action by the Fed won’t change that. “Unfortunately, the economy is just going to have to ride out the business cycle,” Lakshman Achuthan, chief operations officer of the institute, said recently. “The Fed’s actions have been increasingly ineffective.” The relationship between the economy and the stock market is complex, he said, and it’s not always clear whether the market is predicting the direction of the economy, reacting to it or responding to other factors.

Robert Rodriguez, managing partner and chief executive of FPA, an asset management firm in Los Angeles, says it’s possible that fund managers, seeking to bolster their returns, will “continue to pile into stocks in the remainder of this year and push them to even higher levels.” But he says he believes that the market is already overextended, and his firm has begun to reduce its stock exposure.

Mr. Rodriguez anticipated the subprime mortgage crisis and the financial crisis. But, as he acknowledged ruefully in an interview, he “was early, and got out of the market too soon, and could well be doing so again.” Still, he says he fears what he calls “the unintended consequences of the expansionary activities of the central banks.”

Another credit bubble is likely if the banks persist in trying to prop up the global economy, he said. As he sees it, the fundamental problem in the United States can’t be solved by the Fed. “We must get our fiscal house in order,” he said, “and we have only a limited amount of time to do it.”

For the next several months, though, he suspects that Wall Street’s fascination with the Fed may well keep stocks rising.