Word: sectoral
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...takeover in 1949, mining went dormant for decades. Personal ownership of gold was banned as a bourgeois extravagance, and production rarely broke 20 tons a year. That started to change with economic reform in the 1990s. Small wildcat operations began to proliferate, and these relatively unsophisticated outfits dominate the sector today. While countries such as South Africa, Australia, the U.S. and Canada get most of their production from a few dozen large, efficient mines, China has an estimated 2,000 mines scattered throughout the country. And because of their sketchy practices, the smaller operators are "a problem," says Zhang Yongtao...
...class sizes in British high schools are among the largest of 30 Western countries. NUT members have resolved to launch a campaign to push for smaller classes amid reports that teachers are struggling to teach as many as 55 pupils at one time. Average class sizes in the state sector are 26.2 compared to 10.7 in fee-paying schools. A report by the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, found that children from poorer homes who were given scholarships to fee-paying schools dramatically outperformed their peers at state schools. They also went on to out-earn them, with almost...
...Something is about to change - but almost certainly for the worse. Higher labor costs, a strengthening Chinese currency and soaring raw-materials prices are bad enough. Now, a slowdown in global growth and a likely full-blown recession in the U.S. are about to stress-test China's manufacturing sector like never before - and could result in the shuttering of thousands of factories and cost hundreds of thousands of workers their jobs. Makers of low-end goods are already suffering. The Guangdong city of Huidong was home to 3,000 shoe factories at the beginning of 2007, but as many...
...fold. Although Chinese banks during the current boom have been able to reduce their unusually high proportion of nonperforming loans carried on their books, declining corporate earnings will diminish borrowers' ability to repay their debts. While it's difficult to assess the overall exposure of banks to the manufacturing sector, it's easy to imagine lenders getting caught in a Chinese-style credit crisis if manufacturing contracts sharply...
...might take place and can utilise their resources accordingly. "Police today don't go on patrol," says Ronaldo Marzagao, Sao Paulo's Secretary for Public Security. "They have a computer program that tells the squad cars where to go at what time, and what crimes take priority in each sector...