Word: basics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...public expenditure (almost a fifth) to education and gets more of its kids through primary school (more than 90%) than any other country in the region save Cuba. Investing in people--a concept too long ignored in Latin America--is what makes economies competitive. That's as basic...
Part of the way countries stack up results from how the WEF weights a nation's scores according to its stage of development. A fundamentals-driven economy like Egypt or Bolivia is judged more on basic requirements such as the reliability of police services and electricity supply; an efficiency-driven economy like Brazil or Latvia is gauged more by measures such as Internet access in schools and strength of investor protection; and an innovation-driven economy like France or South Korea sees more weight put on more sophisticated issues such as company R&D spending and marketing...
Take Kenya. The sub-Saharan nation ranks abysmally on many basic measures, such as favoritism in decisions of government officials (115th) and business impact of malaria (113th), but on some more sophisticated metrics it does quite well--eighth for legal rights tied to the financial markets and 31st for quality of scientific-research institutions. Skipping the basics while nailing the more complicated stuff is a counterintuitive yet increasingly widespread trend--think of the places in Africa that leaped from no phones to cell phones, bypassing landlines--but whether a country can excel in the long run without a more stable...
...84¢ in Malawi. Strong unions in India's tea-growing regions have fought to preserve those benefits. Tea-estate workers are paid on average $1.38 a day in northern India and $2.25 in the south, and because the estates are so remote, workers must rely on tea companies for basic services. "The only long-term, sustainable solution is for estates to give workers a stake in the earnings," says Samir Roy, head of the Defense Committee for Plantation Workers Rights...
...watched as tens of thousands of Burmese citizens took to the streets in nonviolent demonstrations and their country's military dictatorship responded with violence. I, like many other Americans, was awed and inspired by the courage of the Burmese people, who risked death and imprisonment in their demand for basic human rights...