Word: gap
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Trade across the Mediterranean Sea has gone on from time immemorial, well before the Phoenicians grew rich on the Greeks' passion for purple dye. But El Phil's anecdote sums up the current dilemma faced by this ancient cradle of commerce. Today an enormous economic gap separates the northern and southern shores of the Med. Too often it is bridged by the illicit and perilous transit of desperate human beings, instead of by the sanctioned flow of commerce...
...latitude allows El Phil to ship fresh peaches and plums during the weeks from mid-March to mid-April when there's space on supermarket shelves throughout Europe. "We harvest after the end of production in Chile and South Africa, and before Europe begins," he says. "We exploit that gap." Such built-in potential in the agriculture sector, until now largely untapped, could fuel the kind of economic development so badly needed across the Maghreb region that spans North Africa, where unemployment remains stuck near...
British universities have been even busier than those on the Continent in responding to the challenge from the U.S., but the private funding gap remains enormous. While U.S. public investment in higher education, relative to GDP, is similar to that of the U.K., eye-popping tuition fees and generous philanthropists have endowed American higher education with more than six times more private investment...
Plugging that gap means tapping a university's endowment. That "is no different from U.S. universities," says Alison Richard, vice-chancellor of Cambridge. "But our endowment isn't sufficient, so it's a real stretch." Private donations invested by Yale University are currently worth some $23 billion; the endowment fund of rival Harvard is $35 billion. Dozens of other American universities boast funds valued at more than $1 billion. Even Britain's wealthiest universities are poor by comparison. The central endowment fund at Oxford is about $1.3 billion, and Cambridge's stands at roughly $2 billion. (The universities' individual colleges...
...Sullivan's new book, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap (Scribner), was published in February