Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping you a world.

India's Hindu nationalist government is on a mission. In the state of Assam, it's declared

4 million people overwhelmingly Muslims to be illegal immigrants. It's likened them

to termites and is planning 10 new detention centers. That drives just the kind of sectarian

division that benefits the ruling party. And it's true that on average Americans work

longer hours than their European counterparts. But it wasn't always this way. So why have

transatlantic times of toil been diverging for 40 years?

They are neighbors who share a friendship with America but not with each other. Political

tensions between Japan and South Korea date back well over a century. But recently the

relationship has deteriorated sharply. At the beginning of the month Prime Minister Shinzo

Abe limited South Korea's access to Japanese chemicals that are essential to its semiconductor

industry. South Korea manufactures 60% of the global supply of memory chips. So the embargo

threatens the world market for phones, computers, and just about every other kind of electronic

gizmo. Mr. Abe's decision bears the hallmarks of a trade approach adopted by President Donald

Trump. The rules it seems are changing, eroding established global norms that have prevented

trade disputes from spiraling out of control.

So Japan on July 4th began to restrict supplies of three different industrial chemicals to

South Korea. Simon Rebenovich is our Asia economic

senator. The chemicals sound relatively obscure but they're actually critical to the manufacture

of semiconductors and smartphones more generally. And this is significant because Japan produces

roughly 90% of the global supply of these three different chemicals. South Korea in turn

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