You would think from May’s blowout jobs report the economy was booming.

Here’s the puzzle: Other recent data suggest it is in recession.

The dichotomy emerges from the divergent behaviour of employment and output, two key indicators of economic activity.

In May, employers added 339,000 jobs, bringing the total number of jobs added this year to nearly 1.6 million, a gain of 2.5% annualised.

But real gross domestic income, a measure of total economic activity, shrank in both the fourth quarter and the first quarter. Two negative quarters of output growth are one indicator of a recession.

The economy has gone through periods where output has expanded faster than employment, but seldom the other way around, said Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.

What explains these dissonant signals is productivity, or output per hour worked: It is cratering. That raises questions about whether the much-hyped technology adoption during the pandemic and, more recently, artificial intelligence are making a difference. It also raises the risk that the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates more to tame inflation.

Labor productivity fell 2.1% in the first quarter from the fourth at an annual rate, and was down 0.8% in the first quarter from a year earlier, the Labor Department said Thursday. That is the fifth-straight quarter of negative year-over-year productivity growth—the longest such run since records began in 1948.

Those calculations are derived from gross domestic product, which shows output rising at a 1.3% annualised rate in the first quarter. But another key measure—gross domestic income—declined, implying an even bigger productivity collapse.

GDI is the yin to GDP’s yang, measuring incomes earned in wages and profits, while GDP tallies up purchases of goods and services produced. In theory, the two should be equal, since someone’s spending is another’s income.

They never exactly match because of statistical challenges. Lately, though, the divergence is dramatic. “Over the past two quarters, real GDP shows the economy expanding by 1.0%, not far off potential growth, whereas GDI shows it contracting by 1.4%, which amounts to a decent-sized recession,” said Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics. The divergence is ominous: GDI previously undershot GDP dramatically during the 2007-09 financial crisis and in the early 1990s recession, Ashworth said.

The second quarter is also shaping up to be weak. S&P Global Market Intelligence sees second-quarter real GDP expanding at a 0.8% annual rate; Morgan Stanley projects 0.3%. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model estimates 2%. Most economists don’t forecast GDI.

Usually, employment plummets during recessions because as factories, offices and restaurants produce less, they need fewer workers. That clearly isn’t happening. “If you look at the early 2000s, that was what was called a ‘jobless recovery,’ because employment took a long time to come back even though the economy was growing,” said Sweet. “This time around it could be the opposite—the economy could be contracting, but you’re not seeing job losses.”

One reason could be labor hoarding. After struggling to hire and train workers during the pandemic-induced labor crunch, employers are now balking at letting them go, even as sales slip, given the labor market’s unusual tightness. There were 10.1 million vacant jobs in April, well above the 5.7 million people looking for work that month. Some firms—particularly services such as restaurants and travel-related businesses—ran short-staffed for the past couple of years and are still catching up.

A possible sign of this is hours worked per week, which in May fell slightly below the 2019 average, after having surged during the pandemic. This drop has been particularly sharp in retail and leisure-and-hospitality—industries that have been especially strapped for workers. The unemployment rate also rose in May, one sign of a potential cooling in the labour market.

It’s “not that technology got worse in the last year, but that businesses were selling less stuff and they’re nervous about their ability to attract employees, so they’re holding on to their employees,” said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University who served in the Obama administration. It is also plausible, he said, that the shift to working from home generated a hit to productivity, whose impact grows with the cumulative loss of creative exchange and mentoring.

Productivity growth is important in the long run because it is one of two engines of economic growth, the other being an expanding workforce. Sweet, the Oxford Economics economist, notes businesses have been spending on equipment, software and intellectual property, investments that should eventually raise productivity. Though it may take many years, so should recent advances in artificial intelligence.

A more imminent concern is that when workers produce more, companies can raise wages without increasing prices. When productivity falls, it is harder to keep inflation in check.

This could make things even more challenging for the Fed. “Companies probably have the ability to pass on higher prices to consumers if they want to,” said Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research. “That would be problematic for the Fed.”

Moreover, if GDI is a better indicator of output than GDP, “it would mean that the economy has slowed more than we had thought, without bringing down inflation that much,” Furman said. That might mean it will ultimately take an even bigger economic pullback “to bring inflation down.”

Investments in solar power are on course to overtake spending on oil production for the first time, the foremost example of a widening gap between renewable-energy funding and stagnating fossil-fuel industries, according to the head of the International Energy Agency.

More than $1 billion a day is expected to be invested in solar power this year, which is higher than total spending expected for new upstream oil projects, the IEA said in its annual World Energy Investment report.

Spending on so-called clean-energy projects—which includes renewable energy, electric vehicles, low-carbon hydrogen and battery storage, among other things—is rising at a “striking” rate and vastly outpacing spending on traditional fossil fuels, Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director said in an interview. The figures should raise hopes that worldwide efforts to keep global warming within manageable levels are heading in the right direction, he said.

Birol pointed to a “powerful alignment of major factors,” driving clean-energy spending higher, while spending on oil and other fossil fuels remains subdued. This includes mushrooming government spending aimed at driving adherence to global climate targets such as President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

“A new clean global energy economy is emerging,” Birol told The Wall Street Journal. “There has been a substantial increase in a short period of time—I would consider this to be a dramatic shift.”

A total of $2.8 trillion will be invested in global energy supplies this year, of which $1.7 trillion, or more than 60% will go toward clean-energy projects. The figure marks a sharp increase from previous years and highlights the growing divergence between clean-energy spending and traditional fossil-fuel industries such as oil, gas and coal. For every $1 spent on fossil-fuel energy this year, $1.70 will be invested into clean-energy technologies compared with five years ago when the spending between the two was broadly equal, the IEA said.

While investments in clean energy have been strong, they haven’t been evenly split. Ninety percent of the growth in clean-energy spending occurs in the developed world and China, the IEA said. Developing nations have been slower to embrace renewable-energy sources, put off by the high upfront price tag of emerging technologies and a shortage of affordable financing. They are often financially unable to dole out large sums on subsidies and state backing, as the U.S., European Union and China have done.

The Covid-19 pandemic appears to have marked a turning point for global energy spending, the IEA’s data shows. The powerful economic rebound that followed the end of lockdown measures across most of the globe helped prompt the divergence between spending on clean energy and fossil fuels.

The energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year has further driven the trend. Soaring oil and gas prices after the war began made emerging green-energy technologies comparatively more affordable. While clean-energy technologies have recently been hit by some inflation, their costs remain sharply below their historic levels. The war also heightened attention on energy security, with many Western nations, particularly in Europe, seeking to remove Russian fossil fuels from their economies altogether, often replacing them with renewables.

While clean-energy spending has boomed, spending on fossil fuels has been tepid. Despite earning record profits from soaring oil and gas prices, energy companies have shown a reluctance to invest in new fossil-fuel projects when demand for them appears to be approaching its zenith.

Energy forecasters are split on when demand for fossil fuels will peak, but most have set out a timeline within the first half of the century. The IEA has said peak fossil-fuel demand could come as soon as this decade. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a cartel of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, has said demand for crude oil could peak in developed nations in the mid-2020s, but that demand in the developing world will continue to grow until at least 2045.

Investments in clean energy and fossil fuels were largely neck-and-neck in the years leading up to the pandemic, but have diverged sharply since. While spending on fossil fuels has edged higher over the last three years, it remains lower than pre pandemic levels, the IEA said.

Only large state-owned national oil companies in the Middle East are expected to spend more on oil production this year than in 2022. Almost half of the extra spending will be absorbed by cost inflation, the IEA said. Last year marked the first one where oil-and-gas companies spent more on debt repayments, dividends and share buybacks than they did on capital expenditure.

The lack of spending on fossil fuels raises a question mark around rising prices. Oil markets are already tight and are expected to tighten further as demand grows following the pandemic, with seemingly few sources of new supply to compensate. Higher oil prices could further encourage the shift toward clean-energy sources.

“If there is not enough investment globally to reduce the oil demand growth and there is no investment at the same time [in] upstream oil we may see further volatility in global oil prices,” Birol said.

China’s era of rapid growth is over. Its recovery from zero-Covid is stalling. And now the country is facing deep, structural problems in its economy.

The outlook was better just a few months ago, after Beijing lifted its draconian Covid-19 controls, setting off a flurry of spending as people ate out and splurged on travel.

But as the sugar high of the reopening wears off, underlying problems in China’s economy that have been building for years are reasserting themselves.

The property boom and government over investment that fuelled growth for more than a decade have ended. Enormous debts are crippling households and local governments. Some families, worried about the future, are hoarding cash.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s crackdowns on private enterprise have discouraged risk-taking, while deteriorating relations with the West—exemplified by a new campaign against international due-diligence and consulting firms—are stifling foreign investment.

Economists say these worsening structural problems are hobbling China’s chances of extending the growth miracle that transformed it into a rival to the U.S. for global power and influence.

Instead of expanding at 6% to 8% a year as was common in the past, China might soon be heading toward growth of 2% or 3%, some economists say. An ageing population and shrinking workforce compound its difficulties.

China could drive less global growth this year and beyond than many business leaders expected, making the country less important for some foreign companies, and less likely to significantly surpass the U.S. as the world’s biggest economy.

“The disappointing recovery today really suggests that some of the structural drags are already in play,” said Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC.

China’s economy expanded at an annual rate of 4.5% in the first quarter, boosted by the end of Covid-era restrictions.

Yet more recent signals suggest the revival is ebbing. Retail sales rose 0.5% in April compared with March. A bundle of data on factory output, exports and investment came in much weaker than economists were expecting.

More than a fifth of Chinese youths aged 16 to 24 were unemployed in April. E-commerce companies Alibaba and JD.com reported lacklustre first-quarter earnings. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, dominated by Chinese companies, is down 5.2% year to date, and the yuan has weakened against the U.S. dollar.

Most economists don’t expect China’s problems to lead to recession, or derail the government’s growth target of around 5% this year, which is widely seen as easily achievable given how weak the economy was last year.

McDonald’s and Starbucks have said they are opening hundreds of new restaurants in China, while retailers including Ralph Lauren are launching new stores.

A boom in electric-vehicle production allowed China to surpass Japan as the world’s largest exporter of vehicles in the first quarter. Beijing’s industrial policies and China’s manufacturing prowess mean it is still finding ways to succeed in some major industries.

“We still have confidence in the long-term growth story of China,” said Phillip Wool, head of research at Rayliant Global Advisors, an asset manager with $17 billion under management. He said the country’s transition to one that relies more on domestic consumption instead of exports will help keep it on track.

Still, many economists are growing more worried about China’s future.

The big hope for this year was that Chinese consumers would step up spending, as the main drivers of China’s past growth—investment and exports—languish.

But while people are spending somewhat more after almost three years of tough Covid-19 controls, China isn’t experiencing the kind of surge other economies enjoyed when they emerged from the pandemic.

Consumer confidence is low. More important, some economists say, is that Beijing hasn’t been able to meaningfully change Chinese consumers’ long-running propensity to save rather than spend—a response to a threadbare social-safety net that means families must sock away more for medical bills and other emergencies.

Chinese household consumption accounts for around 38% of annual gross domestic product, according to United Nations data, compared with 68% in the U.S.

“Consumer-led growth has always been a bit of an aspirational target” for China, said Louise Loo, China lead economist in Singapore at Oxford Economics, a consulting firm. Now, it might be even harder to achieve, she said, given how cautious Chinese consumers are coming out of the pandemic.

Although Beijing is trying to make it easier to borrow this year, lending data indicate households prefer to pay down debt than take on new loans.

In March, Zi Lu dipped into her dowry and paid off the remaining 1.2 million yuan, equivalent to about $170,000, on her mortgage for an apartment she bought in Shanghai two years ago. Working for an e-commerce retailer, she said sales have been underwhelming this year. Lu said she is anxious and wants to reduce her debt burden.

“I’m scared of getting laid off out of the blue,” she said.

Also looming over the economy is its massive debt pile.

Between 2012 and 2022, China’s debt grew by $37 trillion, while the U.S. added nearly $25 trillion. By June 2022, debt in China reached about $52 trillion, dwarfing outstanding debt in all other emerging markets combined, according to calculations by Nicholas Borst, director of China research at Seafarer Capital Partners.

As of last September, total debt as a share of GDP hit 295% in China, compared with 257% in the U.S., data from the Bank for International Settlements shows.

Viewing the debt buildup as a threat to financial stability, Xi has made deleveraging a centrepiece of his economic policy since 2016, weighing on growth.

To help deflate the country’s housing bubble, regulators imposed strict borrowing limits for property developers from late 2020. Property development investment fell 5.8% in the first quarter of this year despite policy efforts to stem the pace of the slide.

Two-thirds of local governments are now in danger of breaching unofficial debt thresholds set by Beijing to signify severe funding stress, according to S&P Global calculations. Cities across the country from Shenzhen to Zhengzhou have cut benefits for civil servants and delayed salary payments in some cases for teachers.

These problems are deepening when China’s appeal as a destination for foreign firms is waning, data show, as tensions rise with the U.S.-led West.

Foreign direct investment into China tumbled 48% in 2022 compared with a year earlier, to $180 billion, according to Chinese data, while FDI as a share of China’s GDP has slipped to less than 2%, from more than double that a decade ago.

Competition for investment with countries including India and Vietnam is heating up as firms seek to diversify supply chains, partly in response to the risk of disruption from conflict between the U.S. and China.

Jens Eskelund, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, said uncertainty over China’s long-term economic prospects is another factor in companies’ investment decisions.

“Naturally, it dampens the willingness to go out and invest in additional capacity if you are not super optimistic about the economic outlook,” he said.

Reforms to foster more productive, private-sector activity have stalled under Xi, who is placing greater emphasis on security than economic growth. Beijing has tightened regulation of sectors including technology, private education and real estate, leaving many business owners unwilling to invest more.

In the first four months of this year, fixed-asset investment made by private firms grew 0.4% from a year earlier, compared with 5.5% growth in the same period in 2019.

Chinese leaders have dialled up rhetoric to reassure entrepreneurs and investors. Li Qiang, China’s No. 2 official and new premier, said in March that China will open further to foreign players, and told Communist Party officials to treat private entrepreneurs as “our own people.”

Economists are split over whether policy makers, who have held off on launching large-scale stimulus as they did in 2008 and 2015, will resort to more aggressive stimulus now. Some, including economists from Citigroup, expect China’s central bank to cut interest rates in the coming months to lift sentiment.

Others say that Beijing’s restraint stems from fear of compounding already-high debt levels, and that more stimulus might do little to trigger demand for credit anyway.

Jeff Bowman, chief executive of Cocona, which makes temperature-regulating materials used in apparel and bedding, said he is still optimistic about China. He said that during a recent two-week business trip to Taiwan and China, customers who were focused on China’s domestic market were far more upbeat than their counterparts exporting to the U.S. or Europe, who he said “are hurting for sure.”

He said that Cocona, based in Boulder, Colo., plans to set up a subsidiary in China to expand its business there.

But many analysts still wonder where the growth will come from.

“The big question is, have we reached the point where awareness of the structural slowdown is becoming a near-term issue for confidence? Then it’s a bit of a vicious cycle,” said Michael Hirson, head of China research at 22V Research, a New York-based consulting firm.

Germany slipped into recession during the first three months of the year, as households cut spending in response to sharply higher prices for energy and food.

With Europe’s largest economy now having shrunk for two quarters in a row, meeting the technical definition of a recession, the eurozone as a whole may also have also contracted in the first quarter.

The development doesn’t fundamentally alter economists’ views about the country’s immediate prospects, and any decline in output in the broader region is likely to have been modest.

Still, a recession in the eurozone would deflate some of the optimism that has built up around the currency area’s economic prospects in recent months. It could also inspire greater caution among policy makers at the European Central Bank as they prepare to raise interest rates further.

“A technical recession would be a change in the overall narrative on how resilient the eurozone economy has been over recent quarters,” said Bert Colijn, an economist at ING.

Germany’s statistics agency said Thursday that gross domestic product—a broad measure of the goods and services produced by an economy—was 0.3% lower in the three months through March than in the final quarter of last year. It had previously estimated that the economy flatlined in the first quarter, having contracted by 0.5% in the final quarter of last year.

The agency said a 1.2% fall in household consumption was the main reason for the contraction, as households saw their spending power eroded by a surge in food prices. In March, German households were paying 21.2% more for their food purchases than a year earlier.

In the months immediately following the invasion of Ukraine, economists had warned that Germany faced a high risk of sliding into recession, given its reliance on Russian supplies of natural gas. But economic data releases at the turn of the year appeared to indicate that Germany would avoid that fate.

The revised figures for the first quarter confirmed that the world’s fourth-largest economy had succumbed to recession, but one less severe than feared when the Kremlin cut gas supplies in summer 2022.

Business surveys have pointed to a return to growth in Germany during the second quarter. But the impact of higher borrowing costs and a weak expansion in many of its main export markets point to the possibility of a renewed contraction in the three months through September.

“Higher interest rates will continue to weigh on both consumption and investment and exports may also suffer amid economic weakness in other developed markets,” said Franziska Palmas, an economist at Capital Economics who expects declines in GDP during both the third and fourth quarters.

Should the estimates for growth in other eurozone members be unchanged, the new measure of GDP for Germany suggests the currency area’s economy as a whole contracted slightly in the first quarter. The European Union’s statistics agency currently estimates it grew at an annualised rate of 0.3%, after shrinking by 0.2% in the final quarter of last year.

While that change in measured output would be small, it may have an influence on the ECB’s interest rate decisions over coming months. The ECB’s economists raised their growth forecasts for this and subsequent years in March, partly in response to a picture of the eurozone economy at the turn of the year that now appears overly optimistic.

The green push by the U.S. and state governments is turning trash into treasure and boosting the firms that handle America’s garbage.

Shares of the biggest players in the U.S. trash business, Waste Management and Republic Services, have traded at record highs since President Biden signed the climate, tax and healthcare bill in August. A recent decline notwithstanding, the stocks are popular picks on Wall Street to ride the sustainability boom higher.

“They’re sitting in this extraordinary position,” said Michael Hoffman, an analyst at investment bank Stifel. “Garbage will be on the forefront.”

Efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and to reuse materials are making it more profitable to mine landfills for energy and sift through refuse for the hot commodities of the green economy, such as detergent bottles and cardboard boxes.

WM and Republic are building plants to isolate methane from the fumes emitted by rotting garbage and pipe it into the natural-gas grid to be burned in power plants, furnaces and kitchens. They are also equipping recycling facilities with the latest in automation to better sort and process materials for the consumer-goods companies that are under pressure to keep their packaging out of landfills and the ocean.

Landfill owners are forecasting hundreds of millions of dollars in additional profit from rising demand for recycled materials and tax incentives for making energy from emissions that would otherwise seep into the atmosphere.

“We’re blessed to be sitting right in the middle of a megatrend,” Republic Chief Executive Jon Vander Ark said. “We used to think about getting 5% top-line growth a year; now we’re in double-digit top-line growth mode.”

Republic, which has 206 active landfills, has a joint venture with a unit of BP to install gasworks at 43 of its dumps. The Phoenix firm has 65 landfill-gas plants. Some feed utility pipelines. Others generate electricity on site.

Republic is also spending about $275 million to build four polymer-processing facilities that will sort the plastic it collects kerbside and turn it into flakes for new bottles and jugs.

Vander Ark said consumer-product companies face minimum post-consumer-content mandates in California, Washington and other states, as well as their own sustainability goals. Republic’s first plastics plant is scheduled to open later this year in Las Vegas. Customers lined up.

“There’s fighting among customers about who gets what,” Vander Ark said.

Analysts say one risk is that adding exposure to volatile markets for commodities and renewable-fuel credits might spook investors interested in the steady and predictable profits involved in dumping garbage into landfills. Executives say the sustainability businesses are supplementary and moneymakers even when commodity prices are low, like now.

“Yes, there’s a year-over-year impact, but recycling is still profitable,” said Tara Hemmer, WM’s chief sustainability officer. “It still is one of our highest return-on-capital investments.”

WM, which operates more than 250 landfills, is in the second year of a four-year plan to spend $1.2 billion adding 20 trash-gas plants as well as $1 billion expanding and automating its recycling business.

The Houston company expects new and upgraded facilities to increase its recovery of reusable materials 25% by 2025. Having machines do the dirty work also cuts labor costs, executives say.

A lot of hard-to-fill jobs will be replaced by optical sorters, which use infrared cameras to spot valuable materials in the jumble and blow the desirable bits into separate bins with pinpoint puffs of air, Hemmer said.

“In the past we might have had mixed-paper bales that had cardboard embedded in them,” she said. “Now we’re able to pull more of that cardboard out, it goes in the cardboard bale, and the price point on cardboard is much higher than mixed paper.”

WM says the blended commodity value from its automated material recovery facilities is about 15% higher per ton. Not only do the machines amass more of the valuable stuff, the company says the material emerges cleaner and can fetch more than messy bales.

The recycling investments will add $240 million to its bottom line over the next four years, WM says. It has higher expectations for its gas business.

WM says it will boost landfill-gas output eightfold and generate more than $500 million in additional earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation through 2026.

That profit forecast assumes two prices associated with every million British thermal units of gas. WM is counting on the actual fuel selling for $2.50, which is lately about the price of gas from geologic wells. Another $23.50 is anticipated from renewable-fuel credits, which is in line with recent trading, according to energy-information firm Platts.

The outlook doesn’t count the $250 million or more of tax credits WM expects for building new gas plants.

Last year’s climate bill sweetened the economics of trash gas. A federal proposal to offer additional credits for biogas projects that produce power for electric vehicles could make the incentives even stronger.

Waste-company executives and analysts say that many are worth building anyway and that the incentives make it economical to install gasworks at smaller, less-gassy landfills.

“Landfill gas is essentially the only scalable biofuel that doesn’t have a food-for-fuel trade-off,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Jerry Revich. “These projects don’t need any subsidies, but they will take the free money.”