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  • Big Mac index

    Bun fight

    Oct 15th 2010, 14:18 by The Economist online

    Why China needs more expensive burgers

    A WEAK currency, despite its appeal to exporters and politicians, is no free lunch. But it can provide a cheap one. In China a McDonald’s Big Mac costs just 14.5 yuan on average in Beijing and Shenzhen, the equivalent of $2.18 at market exchange rates. In America the same burger averages $3.71. That makes China’s yuan one of the most undervalued currencies in our Big Mac index, which is based on the idea of purchasing-power parity. This says that a currency’s price should reflect the amount of goods and services it can buy. Since 14.5 yuan can buy as much burger as $3.71, a yuan should be worth $0.26 on the foreign-exchange market. At just $0.15, it is undervalued by about 40%. The tensions caused by currency misalignments prompted Brazil’s finance minister to complain last month that his country was a potential casualty of a “currency war”. The Swiss, who avoid most wars, are in the thick of this one. Their franc is the most expensive currency on our list.


  • Food prices

    Corn fed

    Oct 14th 2010, 15:11 by The Economist online

    Another agricultural commodity surges

    THE US Department of Agriculture's unexpected warning that America’s production of corn (elsewhere known as maize) would drop by 4% in 2010 has sent prices rocketing. They rose by 8.5% on October 11th, the biggest one-day rise in 37 years, and by mid-week corn was trading at $5.88 a bushel. The fact that prices for other crops such as soyabeans and wheat are also bubbling makes it difficult for farmers to judge which will be the most profitable crop to sow for next season, and that may hamper an immediate supply response. The concentration of farming in a few big countries means that a hungry world is dependent for its food on stable production patterns in a small number of places. Whether Russian wheat or American corn, problems in one country can send shock waves through global markets.


  • Richest women

    The great wealth of China

    Oct 13th 2010, 14:55 by The Economist online

    The richest self-made women in the world

    ZHANG YIN, who made her money in the paper industry, is the wealthiest businesswoman in the world, according to Hurun Report, a Chinese magazine. Its ranking of the 20 richest self-made women (those who earned their money) combines its own findings with those of Forbes and the Sunday Times. Over half of the women in the top 20 are of Chinese origin, perhaps because of a communist ethos of gender equality, perhaps because previous generations of Chinese left so little wealth to be inherited. The richest non-Chinese is a Spaniard, Rosalía Mera, one of three on the list to have made her fortune in fashion.

  • Global hunger index

    Feed the world

    Oct 12th 2010, 14:29 by The Economist online

    How hunger has changed across the developing world

    TWENTY-NINE countries suffer from “alarming” levels of hunger, most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a report published on Monday October 11th. The “Global Hunger Index” (GHI) gives developing countries scores based on three indicators: the proportion of people who are undernourished, the proportion of children under five who are underweight, and the child mortality rate. The worst possible score is 100, but in practice, anything over 25 is considered “alarming”. Scores under five, meanwhile, are indicative of “low hunger”. Since 1990 the overall level of the index has fallen by almost a quarter (though the data do not cover the period of the global recession beginning in 2008). Two-thirds of the 99 countries counted in 1990 have reduced their populations' hunger levels. Kuwait, Malaysia, Turkey and Mexico have been the most successful, cutting their scores by over 60%. Those where hunger has increased include North Korea, Comoros and Congo. Congo's GHI score fell by over 60%, the worst of any country.

  • Public opinion on gay marriage

    Agnostic about gay marriage

    Oct 11th 2010, 13:45 by The Economist online

    Attitudes to gay marriage among religious groups in America

    THE debate over gay marriage is at the heart of many races in America's mid-term elections. On Sunday October 10th Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, said that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that homosexuality was acceptable and that he would veto any gay-marriage bill. But that view places him in a minority. For the first time since the Pew Research Centre began conducting polls on the subject in 1995, fewer than half of Americans (48%) are opposed to gay marriage, while 42% are in favour. All religious groups are more accepting than they were in polls taken between 2008 and 2009. The most notable shift has been among white mainstream Protestants and Catholics, 49% of whom are now in favour, and that figure was even higher for those who attend church less than once a week.

  • African governance

    Democrats to kleptocrats

    Oct 8th 2010, 15:03 by The Economist online

    Which are the best- and worst-run countries in Africa?

    ONCE again Africa’s worthiest and perhaps happiest countries are offshore, according to Mo Ibrahim’s latest measure of all-round governance, which scrutinised data gathered last year. The yardsticks applied by Mr Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born telecoms magnate and philanthropist, judge countries on a mix of four main criteria: “safety and the rule of law” (looking at the murder rate and corruption, among other things); “participation and human rights” (the little matter of being able to chuck out a bad government peacefully); “sustainable economic opportunity” (including such things as fiscal management, free markets and inflation); and “human development” (in essence, education and health care). For more on the index of African governance, see article.

  • Effective tax rates

    Let's get fiscal

    Oct 6th 2010, 14:31 by The Economist online

    Which government takes the biggest bite out of an income of $100,000?

    LOOMING debt and demographic crises have many governments searching for new revenue sources. Some governments have less room to raise taxes than others. An analysis by KPMG, a consultancy, compares effective tax rates—net of offsets—and social-security contribution rates across 81 countries. Unsurprisingly, European countries top the list. As a result austerity measures across much of Europe must focus on cutting spending. At just under 40%, the total burden of taxation in India is quite high relative to that in China. But a thin social safety net means that China’s residents must save a high share of their disposable income as insurance, offsetting some of the growth effect of low tax rates. For low rates, nothing beats living in a banking centre, a petro-state, or (naturally) a tax haven.

  • Nobel prizes in physics

    Good things come to those who wait

    Oct 5th 2010, 13:40 by The Economist online

    It takes ever longer for physicists to win a Nobel prize

    ONE of Alfred Nobel's original rewards, the Nobel prize in physics has been awarded 104 times to 188 scientists between 1901 and 2010. As time has passed, so the laureates have generally had to wait ever longer for recognition from Sweden's Royal Academy of Science. In 1924, 1957 and 1987, the prizes rewarded research from the previous year, whereas Ernst Ruska shared the 1986 award for work he had done on the design of the first electron microscope 54 years earlier. This year, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov have managed to buck the waiting trend. Their award was for "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene" that they carried out as recently as 2004. (See Babbage for more.)

  • Germany's unification

    United they stand

    Oct 4th 2010, 12:03 by The Economist online

    Twenty years after unification eastern Germany still struggles along

    IT COST a fortune, created long-standing grievances on both sides and annoyed the British and French. But most Germans wouldn’t have had it any other way. The 20th anniversary of the unification of Germany, on October 3rd, was an opportunity for the country to look at how East and West have fared since. Some inequalities have proved frustratingly persistent: western states remain far wealthier than their eastern counterparts (although they have been helped by the westward migration of cheap Ossi labour), and unemployment in the East is around twice the rate in the West. No eastern state has seen its population grow in the last two decades; hardly any western states have suffered a decline. Yet polls show that most people, on both sides, continue to believe that unification was the right idea.

  • Silver

    All that glitters is not gold

    Oct 1st 2010, 15:01 by The Economist online

    A lesson in how not to invest

    MANY are seduced by gold, but its less illustrious cousin, silver, is now attracting considerable attention. On September 30th, demand from investors and industrial users helped push the price of silver to $22 per ounce, a value not seen for over 30 years. But unlike record-breaking gold, it is extremely unlikely to surpass its peak of 1980. That was when the Hunt brothers, Texan oil barons who were at one time the world's richest men, tried to corner the silver market in the belief that inflation would destroy the value of the dollar. Buying up around a third of the world's silver supply, they pushed its price up from a low of $1.26 in 1971 to nearly $50 in 1980 ($140 in today's prices). Changes to the way that regulators dealt with leverage in the market meant their position was unsustainable, though. Over the course of three months the price collapsed to $15, leaving them to contend with heavy losses.

  • Bank bail-outs

    The luck of the Irish

    Sep 30th 2010, 14:23 by The Economist online

    Ireland's property hangover continues

    ON SEPTEMBER 30th, the Irish government revealed the full extent of its financial-sector bail-out. Anglo Irish Bank and other lenders that made bad commercial-property bets are to be provided with fresh capital to the tune of 20% of GDP this year. As a result, Ireland’s budget deficit is forecast to rise to 32% of GDP and its gross government debt to 96% of GDP. These huge costs contrast sharply with those in other countries that have had to rescue their banks. Ireland’s financial sector is so large relative to national income that, if it is not propped up, it has the ability to “bring down the sovereign”, according to Brian Lenihan, the finance minister. But Ireland does have some breathing space: it doesn't need to borrow from the bond markets until early next year as it has enough cash to cover immediate needs. The government will just have to hope that the public finances don't deliver any more nasty surprises in the intervening period.

  • HIV/AIDS treatment

    On the right path

    Sep 29th 2010, 11:05 by The Economist online

    Access to HIV/AIDS treatment is increasing for those who need it most

    THE latest dispatch from the war on AIDS brings good news. At 5.25m, the number of people in poor and middle-income countries who were being treated for HIV infection at the end of 2009 was up 30% from the end of 2008. Eight countries achieved coverage of 80% or better and 21 others covered more than half of those in need. Though the new figure still represents only about a third of those who could benefit, the rate of increase is impressive. The news is doubly welcome, too, because it is now agreed that treatment, which has the effect of making people less infective, is an important way of stopping the spread of HIV as well as being desirable in its own right.

  • Public opinion on reducing deficits

    Dealing with debt

    Sep 28th 2010, 12:07 by The Economist online

    Which countries would prefer to raise taxes or cut spending

    THANKS in part to the extraordinary measures taken to stop the global economic crisis turning into a worldwide depression, government budgets around the world are awash in a sea of red ink. Now that the worst is past, governments must think about how to reduce their deficits. Most will have to slash spending, or increase taxes, or do both. A new survey by GlobeScan and PIPA for the BBC World Service asked over 22,000 people in 22 countries which of these paths they would prefer their governments to take. A majority preferred a cut in spending to increased taxes, though the margin by which they did so varies. More than 80% of those polled in France favoured spending cuts, while only 8% supported tax increases. Britons were more divided about the relative merits of these two approaches, with just under half favouring spending cuts. Over a third of Britons favoured higher taxes, the highest such share for any country surveyed.

  • Israeli settlements

    Settling in

    Sep 27th 2010, 15:54 by The Economist online

    Israeli construction in the West Bank and Gaza

    ISRAEL’s ten-month moratorium on construction of settlements in the West Bank expired late on Sunday September 26th, and building has resumed in some parts. Peace Now, an Israeli anti-settlement pressure group, estimates that construction on over 2,000 dwellings could now begin or resume. Over the last two decades official statistics (which exclude East Jersualem) show that settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza has tended to intensify around the time of peace talks, as Israeli prime ministers have sought to placate right-wingers. The last freeze was brought in by Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, but from the first contained loopholes. It was formally cancelled by Binyamin Netanyahu when he was elected four years later. This in part accounts for the drop in government construction during the '90s. The shift towards private construction reflects a general trend throughout Israel, though it is less pronounced in the settlements than elsewhere.

  • Obesity rates

    Fat of the lands

    Sep 23rd 2010, 15:42 by The Economist online

    The bulging problem of obesity

    ONE IN six adults in the 33 mostly rich countries of the OECD is obese (measured as a body mass index of 30 or more) according to a report published on September 23rd. The fattest countries are the United States and Mexico, where around a third of adults are obese. Britain's adults are the biggest in Europe. By contrast, Asian OECD countries Japan and South Korea are the leanest. Governments will count the eventual cost: health-care spending on an obese person is 25% more than for someone of average weight. And the problem is not confined to the rich world. In rapidly developing countries such as China, Brazil and India obesity rates, though still low, are growing fast as the dietary habits of the ever-increasing middle classes change.

  • The Millennium Development Goals

    Meeting targets

    Sep 22nd 2010, 13:27 by The Economist online

    A progress report on the the Millennium Development Goals

    ON SEPTEMBER 22nd world leaders wrap up a three-day UN-sponsored summit in New York to discuss progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. These are broad development targets that were set at a similar meeting ten years ago. Most of the goals involved reductions by 2015 from 1990 levels, and there has indeed been progress towards them, at least on a global scale. But what happens globally can be dominated by what happens in one or two countries. For example, in 1990, 62% of the world’s poor people lived in just two countries, China and India. A dramatic fall in China’s poverty rate, from 60% to 16%, has therefore had a big impact on global poverty, which seems set to meet its 2015 target. But that is small comfort to the poor in many other countries where poverty has barely budged. Goals such as those involving primary enrolment and reductions in child mortality are unlikely to be met, though some, such as access to clean drinking water, are likely to be exceeded.

  • Censorship of The Economist

    Blacked out

    Sep 21st 2010, 13:55

    Where The Economist is censored

    SINCE January 2009 The Economist has been banned or censored in 12 of the 190-odd countries in which it is sold, with news-stand (as opposed to subscription) copies particularly at risk. India has censored 31 issues and at first glance might look like the worst culprit. However its censorship consists of stamping “Illegal” on maps of Kashmir because it disputes the borders shown. China is more proscriptive. Distributors destroy copies or remove articles that contain contentious political content, and maps of Taiwan are usually blacked out. In Sri Lanka both news-stand and subscription copies with coverage of the country may be confiscated at customs. They are then released a couple of weeks later (sometimes sooner if the story is also reported by another news outlet). In Malaysia the information ministry blacks out some stories that it judges may offend Muslims, among other things. And in Libya, four consecutive editions were confiscated in late August/early September 2009, the first of which featured a piece critical of Muammar Qaddafi.

    Images can also prompt action. The cover of last year's Christmas issue showing Adam and Eve was censored in five countries. Malaysian officials covered up Eve's breasts. Pakistan objected to the depiction of Adam, which it said broke a prohibition on depicting Koranic figures.

  • Standards of living

    Beyond GDP

    Sep 20th 2010, 14:31 by The Economist online

    A new global comparison of standards of living

    MANY people complain that conventional measures of GDP fail to capture a country’s true standard of living. But their attempts to improve on these conventional metrics are ad hoc. In a new paper* Charles Jones and Peter Klenow of Stanford University propose a new measure of standards of living based on a simple thought experiment: if you were reborn as a random member of another country, how much could you expect to consume, in goods and leisure, over the course of your life? America, for example, has a higher GDP per person than France. But Americans also tend to work longer hours and live shorter lives. They also belong to a less equal society. If you assume that people do not know what position in society they will occupy, and that they dislike being poor more than they like being rich, they should prefer more egalitarian societies, everything else equal. For these reasons, the authors calculate that France and America have about the same standard of living.

  • Pope visits

    Mobile Pope

    Sep 16th 2010, 14:30 by The Economist online

    Where the pope likes to go on his official travels

    POPE BENEDICT XVI began his state visit to Britain on Thursday September 16th. He finds a country where Catholics, once discriminated against, are conspicuously successful in public life and where the Catholic Church has enjoyed a boost in its fortunes since the European Union expanded in 2004. This may mean Britain receives more visits from popes in the future: the country is low on the list of countries visited since 1964, when the Vatican began counting such trips systematically. However Britain will not be the most comfortable place for the current pope to visit. His elevation from Cardinal Ratzinger to Benedict XVI prompted the Sun newspaper to run a headline that read, “From Hitler Youth to Papa Ratzi”. Since then, reporting of his papacy in Britain has been dominated by the Church's mis-handling of child-abuse scandals.

  • US mid-term primaries

    Welcome to the tea party

    Sep 15th 2010, 14:30 by The Economist online

    Who supports the tea-party movement?

    ON SEPTEMBER 14th tea-party conservatives struck another blow to the Republican establishment when Christine O'Donnell defied expectations to win the Republican Delaware Senate primary, beating Mike Castle, a nine-term Republican congressman. The tea-party candidate may also secure the nomination for the New Hampshire Senate seat as counting continued on September 15th, and Carl Paladino was victorious in the New York governorship nomination against the party's experienced candidate. A recent poll by YouGov for The Economist suggests that the movement's supporters are older, whiter, richer and far more likely to be Republican than Democrat.

  • Oil

    Crisis and collusion

    Sep 14th 2010, 14:30 by The Economist online

    The 50 years under OPEC have been eventful

    OPEC, the cartel of oil producers, celebrates its 50th anniversary on September 14th. The organisation was founded in 1960 with the explicit purpose of manipulating oil prices by controlling supplies. It has generally proved successful. OPEC controls around 80% of the world's proven reserves and over 40% of the world's production among its 12 member states. The Gulf states that dominate OPEC have the biggest reserves and lowest costs, so can most easily turn the taps on and off when required to keep prices high. Despite the slow return to health of a sickly world economy, oil fetches a lofty $75 a barrel, which Saudi Arabia, OPEC's most influential member reckons is "ideal".

  • European banks

    Basel III - The Whimper

    Sep 13th 2010, 14:30 by The Economist online

    New rules on bank capital are not particularly tough

    ON SEPTEMBER 12th the Basel Committee, a club of supervisors and bank regulators, reached agreement on how much extra stuffing needs to go into the cushions to absorb losses and buffer the financial system against the next crisis. The committee’s package of recommendations, known as Basel III, will increase the minimum common equity that banks will hold to 7%. The committee has also included an additional counter-cyclical buffer of up to 2.5% of risk-weighted assets, which regulators can impose when they think credit is flowing freely. Analysis by Credit Suisse, an investment bank, predicts that all but the shakiest European banks will meet these requirements by 2012.

  • Contemporary art prices

    Hirst heist

    Sep 10th 2010, 15:43 by The Economist online

    Damien Hirst's art has performed poorly since a big sale in 2008

    IN 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. The collapse in the Hirst market can partly be ascribed to the recession. But more important are the lingering effects of a two-day auction of new work by Mr Hirst that Sotheby’s launched in London on September 15th 2008, the first session of which took place the very evening that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. The average auction price for a Hirst work in 2008 was $831,000. So far in 2010 it is down to $136,000.

  • Retirement

    Feet up

    Sep 9th 2010, 15:32 by The Economist online

    The French spend longer than most in retirement

    OVER a million French protesters took to the streets this week to contest the government’s plans to raise the legal minimum retirement age from 60 to 62. The French spend longer in retirement than almost anybody else. French women enjoy 28 years as pensioners and French men 24 years, six years more than the OECD average. Americans, by contrast, have among the shortest spells in retirement: just 18 years for men, and 21 years for women. France’s government does not, though, spend as much money on pensions as Italy’s, which devotes 14.1% of GDP to retirement spending, next to 12.5% in France and just 6% in America.

  • Higher education and wages

    Study leave

    Sep 8th 2010, 16:04 by The Economist online

    Plenty of university graduates are working in low-skilled jobs

    YOUNG people often worry whether the qualification for which they are studying will stand them in good stead in the workplace. According to the OECD, college and university leavers are better placed in the labour market than their less educated peers, but this advantage is not even in all countries. Young graduates living in Spain are particularly likely to end up taking low-skilled work, while those in Luxembourg rarely take anything other than a graduate job. American and British students appear to have the biggest incentive to study: British graduates aged 25-34 earn $57,000 on average. Their Swedish peers earn $37,400.

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On this blog we publish a new chart or map every working day, highlight our interactive-data features and provide links to interesting sources of data around the web.

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