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EASTERN EUROPEAN airlines are sick. Fuel is dear, their markets are small and budget airlines are poaching their passengers. Most eastern European airlines lose money. Malev, Hungary’s flag carrier, went bankrupt in February. To avoid a similar fate, four Balkan airlines are considering a novel strategy: flying together.The idea is not officially on the agenda when the bosses of Croatia Airlines, Montenegro Airlines, Serbia’s Jat and Slovenia’s Adria meet in Montenegro on May 19th. But it will be discussed behind closed doors. All are in debt and losing money, but between them they have many profitable routes. Serving the scattered Balkan diasporas ought to be lucrative.Zoran Djurisic, the boss of Montenegro, says that before Yugoslavia collapsed, it represented a market of 10m passengers a year, of which 7m flew with JAT or Adria. Now, 11m people fly to or from the seven ex-Yugoslav states each year, but only 4m use the four carriers meeting in Montenegro. Bosnia’s B&H airlines has only one functioning plane. Kosovo, with a large diaspora, has no domestic airline. And Macedonia’s MAT went bust in 2010.Mr Djurisic, who called the summit, says that in the short run the four airlines must co-operate to cut costs. He hopes that, in five to eight years, they might create “a single airline for this whole area, including Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo”. Vladimir Ognjenovic, the...

BABEL TV, a niche channel on Sky Italia, a pay-TV platform owned by Rupert Murdoch, airs worthy programming for immigrants. Recent shows include “Invitation to Dinner”, a reality show where an immigrant cooks for a native Italian. Such serious fare may become more common. Silvio Berlusconi is no longer prime minister and Mediaset, his cleavage-flaunting media group, may be fading.Mediaset’s three main free-to-air channels currently attract 36% of total television viewership. (RAI, a state broadcaster, has another 40%.) Mediaset’s dominance of television advertising is even more striking. It wins 62% of the €4.3 billion ($5.5 billion) spent on television ads each year, a far higher portion than leading broadcasters in other big European markets.Scantily clad showgirls, Mediaset’s speciality, may not be the only reason. Rivals contend that Mr Berlusconi’s political clout helps Mediaset. Sky Italia, its main competitor, has long complained about regulatory and political decisions that have gone against it. In recent years pay television has been hit with a sharp tax increase and restricted in the amount of advertising it can carry. The changes hurt Mediaset far less than Sky, since Mediaset operates mainly in free-to-air television.Stockpickers have noticed that Mr Berlusconi is no longer in power. Mediaset’s shares have fallen by nearly half since late October last year, when...

BEFORE foreign investors came to India, its finance minister remarked recently, “we did not eat lizards.” For all the grumbles one hears about India’s economy, there is hardly a sense of desperation. Those foreign investors keep coming: on May 1st Vodafone’s boss met the government. Despite a corruption scandal, a price war, a huge retroactive tax claim and wildly unpredictable regulations, the mobile-phone firm is committed to its $18.6 billion investment in India, even though its value has fallen by perhaps a third since it was made in 2007.The boss of IKEA is also reported to be meeting the government soon, despite the shabby way the Swedish furniture chain has been treated. Last year the government said it would open India to foreign retailers but then changed its mind. Politicians still fear an onslaught of Ektorp sofas. Walmart scares them even more.Foreign bosses are persistent because India is important. In the year to March 2012 foreign direct investment (FDI) was about $50 billion, a record, said Anand Sharma, the commerce minister, on May 7th. Proof, he said, that India is one of the world’s best places for foreign firms.Whether he is right matters. India aims to fund its current-account deficit mainly by attracting sticky flows of FDI. Unless oil prices slump, the deficit this fiscal year may balloon to $75 billion, a hefty 4% of GDP. Already the rupee has...

THE fortunes of Japan’s large trading houses have tended to fluctuate with those of the country as a whole, from its opening-up in the 19th century, through the disaster of war in the 1940s, to the highs and lows of the bubble era. But lately the traders have decoupled. While much of Japan is stagnant, the likes of Mitsubishi and Mitsui have become prime movers in the world’s natural-resources boom.This is surprising. In an age of land-grabbing state capitalism, the sogo shosha, as they are collectively known, could easily have been trampled underfoot by Chinese energy giants or sovereign-wealth funds. Instead they have recently pulled off a string of huge deals involving North American shale gas, vast (and disputed) Chilean copper mines, and Australian liquefied natural gas (LNG).They are backed by a lot of public financing from the Japan Bank for International Co-operation, but mostly make decisions independently. As The Economist went to press, another big deal was in the works. Marubeni was reported to be on the verge of becoming one of the world’s largest grain traders (albeit an indebted one), by buying Gavilon, an American company, for $5 billion.After a strong run-up in commodities prices, some might question the timing of such bets: it would not be the first time herd instinct has been the undoing of the Japanese...