With barbers' shops closed during the pandemic, people took matters into their own hands –causing a huge surge in hair-clipper sales. It’s a similar story with computer equipment for people working from home.

Online retail has profited greatly from the pandemic. And social media sites have been quick to start another new trend – with their own virtual shops targeting one demographic in particular: Generation Z.

Krieger doesn't recognize the real world anymore and wants to create a reality like the background picture of a video conference. He feels lost in today's reality and wants to go back to the chat room.

To stop another wave of the coronavirus, vaccinations are needed worldwide simultaneously. Yet, while rich countries have high vaccination rates, emerging countries are lagging behind. The costs are enormous for them.

A year after many economists predicted a catastrophic economic downturn, DW reporter Ben Fajzullin ventured out to see just how hard the coronavirus has hit the economy.

Smartphones couldn't exist without rare earths. They cause it to vibrate, for example, and display vivid colors. So rare earth elements are in huge demand worldwide. But mining them is difficult and bad for the environment, and reserves are finite.

Critical raw materials like lithium, rare earths and graphite are in high demand, but in most places they're not readily available. A team of geologists is working to find them in northern Europe - to allow the EU to be less dependent on China.

The middle class often stands for growth and stability in a society. But there is still no universal definition, due to differing bases of analysis. Is purchasing power a better indicator than income? We check the facts.

Countless factories and farms around the world depend on migrant workers. But the pandemic is making life increasingly difficult for migrant labor – as we find out in our report here from India and Germany.

The UN estimates there were 164 million migrant workers in the world in 2017. But Covid-19 related travel restrictions and curfews have put a halt to the usual waves of labor migration. Some workers returned to their family homes after losing their jobs.