Word: economisters
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...barriers fall, companies chase knowledge workers and efficiency just as much as they do cheap labor and access to new markets. In this new calculus, it is often surprising who comes out ahead. According to the Business Competitive Index, the Global Competitive Index's sibling measure developed by Harvard economist Michael Porter, the countries with the lowest wages relative to competitiveness - that is, the best values as investment locations - are Taiwan, Hong Kong and India, followed by Chile, Singapore, the Czech Republic...
Searching for an edge, many regions are applying the concept of clustering with renewed zeal. The idea of focusing a geographic area on a particular industry in order to achieve economies of scale has been kicking around since at least 1890, when the economist Alfred Marshall coined the term "industrial district" to refer to neighborhoods that contained both factories and all their workers. In the 1990s, Harvard's Porter started using the word "cluster" to get at the usefulness of companies in close proximity sharing infrastructure, ideas and employees - like high performance cars in Germany. Some predicted that a globalized...
...Australia generates 1.4% of global carbon emissions - mostly from coal-fired power stations - and that share is shrinking as Chinese and Indian emissions soar. No matter what Canberra does, the effects on the world's climate "are likely to be extremely small," says Australian National University economist Alex Robson, "almost certainly zero." Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull argues, with Howard, that climate change cannot be addressed without coordinated action by all major emitters. But Labor, he says, takes the view that "we must purify ourselves, regardless of how poor it makes us to become pure...
...Global Competitiveness Index is widely watched by countries that want to ferret out weak spots and by companies deciding where to invest. "We're taking the complexity of the world economy and simplifying it," says Jennifer Blanke, a senior economist at the WEF, "so that business and government can say, 'These are the obstacles going forward. What can we do to overcome them?'" In the overall ranking, the U.S. finishes first (same as last year) out of 131 countries, thanks in part to top scores in venture-capital availability (plentiful), domestic-market size (huge) and cost of firing workers...
...Switzerland, two moderately taxed countries, are at the top of the list, but so are Denmark, Sweden and Finland, where taxes are sky high. "There's always the debate about more government, less government, more taxes, less taxes," says Xavier Sala-i-Martin, the Columbia University economist who designed the index. "This suggests that is the wrong debate. We should be talking about what the government does and not its size...