Japan says manufacturers increased production in May for the third straight month.

Fresh signs of weakness in the US job market have underlined the strains on a recession-struck US economy that contracted slightly less in the first quarter than previously thought.

President Barack Obama has faced new concerns among the American public about the budget deficit and government intervention in the economy as he works to enact ambitious health and energy legislation, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) has said the Japanese economy has begun to stop deteriorating, but it has still kept interest rates unchanged at 0.1%.

The World Bank has raised its forecast for growth in China this year from 6.5% to 7.2% amid signs that the economy is doing better than expected.

Japan's core machinery orders, a closely watched indicator of the health of the economy, fell by 5.4% in April.

Australia's economy grew in the first quarter of 2009, defying a global slowdown and crunched confidence, and being one of the few developed nations to have side-stepped a technical recession.

Optimists argue that the government's loose credit and fiscal policies have succeeded in staving off the worst of the economic downturn. However, there are growing concerns about the impact of these policies on the public finances.

The SEMI PV Group has recommended that China should accelerate its adoption of PV-generated electricity to reach the global average by 2014.

Japan's economy has seen its worst ever quarterly performance, with GDP shrinking 4% in the first three months of 2009. The world's second biggest economy, which depends heavily on exports, has been hit hard by the global downturn.

Why, if investment is rising so rapidly, was its contribution to GDP growth in 1Q09 (2pp of the 6.1% total) so low? And why is electricity output still falling, down by 3.5% on year in April? The slowdown in on-year industrial production growth, to 7.3% in April from 8.3% in March, raises further concerns.

The pace of Taiwan's economic decline has slowed down, but a much-anticipated rebound is still far way, the chairman of one of Taiwan's biggest companies said Monday.

Bowing to what has long appeared inevitable, Japan lowered its growth forecast on Monday, projecting a 3.3% contraction for the fiscal year that began April 1.

Things are looking up for Xugong Group, China's largest heavy machinery maker. Driven by Beijing's five-month-old US$586 billion fiscal stimulus, sales of its bulldozers, wheel loaders, and construction cranes reached an all-time high in March, a spokesman says.

Signs that a giant fiscal stimulus is starting to work in China. However, China still needs to find a new engine for future growth. Reforms to improve health care and the social safety net will take many years to encourage people to save less.

Annual growth in China's gross domestic product (GDP) slowed in the first quarter of 2009 to 6.1%, the National Bureau of Statistics has announced.

Excluding China, which will announce first-quarter GDP figures later this week, the World Bank now expects developing countries in the region to grow by 1.2% in 2009, down from an estimate of 4.8% in 2008.

The 10 countries, including China and Thailand, will grow by 5.3% this year, half of the growth seen in 2007, the World Bank said in a report.

Japan's second lost decade holds worrying lessons for other rich economies. Its large fiscal stimulus succeeded in preventing a depression in the 1990s after its bubble burst—and others are surely correct to follow today. But Japan's failure to spur a strong domestic recovery a decade later suggests that America and Europe may also have a long, hard journey ahead.

Singapore's exports fell for a 10th month in February, as a collapse in global demand for electronics and pharmaceuticals extended the longest slump in the nation's overseas sales since 2002.

The economy contracted at a staggering 6.2% pace at the end of 2008, the worst showing in a quarter-century, as consumers and businesses ratcheted back spending, plunging the country deeper into recession.

Asia's export-driven economies had benefited more than any other region from America's consumer boom, so its manufacturers were bound to be hit hard by the sudden downward lurch. Asia's low rate of consumption and borrowing means that it has huge scope to make consumption the engine of growth over the next decade.

The US economy shrank at its fastest pace in nearly 27 years in the fourth quarter, government data showed on Friday, sinking deeper into a recession that the White House said demands urgent action.

China's economic growth slumped to 6.8% last quarter, dragging down the pace of expansion for all of 2008 to a seven-year low of 9% as the full force of the global financial crisis struck home.