Word: boosts
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...question is not as absurd as it may seem. Hosting the Olympics can boost the profits of host-city construction companies and tourism-related companies such as hoteliers. But is there a correlation between overall stock-market and economic performance and the Olympics? We decided to do a little historical research by examining stock-market indexes and GDP growth for the host nations for the past eight summer Olympics, excluding the stock market-less U.S.S.R. in 1980. What we discovered was interesting but inconclusive. On average, markets in host countries showed a 16.3% gain in their Olympics year...
...nations that appeared to benefit were smaller countries like South Korea where Olympics spending seemed to have a meaningful impact on overall economic activity. But China is the world's fourth largest economy. According to a 2007 report by Nomura Securities, China's Olympics outlays and tourism revenues will boost the GDP growth rate by a miniscule 0.25 percentage points in 2008. Moreover, Beijing, the host city where the impacts are strongest, plays a relatively small role in the national economy, contributing only 4.4% to GDP, according to a Credit Suisse study. Compare that with Seoul, host of South Korea...
...right to emit that much carbon in a year. Then the emissions are reduced, year by year. Like all diets, this one's hard to stick to. It's also expensive, since emitters have to invest in technologies to reduce their pollution. But there are incentives. Constraints on carbon boost prices, which means that alternative sources of power become competitive. What's more, if emitters come in beneath their limits, they can sell their extra allowances to other hungry companies. This means there's not just virtue in going green but money to be made as well...
...Branson and his team actually seem to have hope for air travel in the U.S., where poor service and perpetual bankruptcies have turned the industry into a sick national joke. Customer complaints soared 60% last year, a number that will surely get a boost from the 300,000 passengers who endured the abrupt cancellation in early April of nearly 3,300 American Airlines flights for inspections; there may be more at other airlines this summer. Crushed by high fuel prices, four airlines have declared bankruptcy since March...
What is increasingly clear, though, is that management attention to engagement leads to real returns. The Royal Bank of Scotland has found that in retail banking, a 10% increase in leadership effectiveness--as measured by a series of questions about direct and divisional managers--ripples into a 3% boost to customer satisfaction and a 1% reduction in turnover, which saves some $40 million that would be needed to replace workers. A study by Towers Perrin of 40 multinationals over three years found that companies with high engagement scores had operating margins that were 5.75 percentage points greater than those...