Where women have the most and least economic opportunitiesMARKING International Women's Day on March 8th, the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Economist's sister company, has published its second Women's Economic Opportunity Index, assessing the environment for female employees and entrepreneurs across 128 countries. Nearly half the world's women of working-age are not currently active in the formal labour market. As governments seek to revive ailing economies, welcoming these 1.5 billion women into formal employment will become ever more important. The EIU's index brings together 29 indicators measuring access to finance, education and training, legal and social status, and the general business environment. The chart below shows how a selection of countries have scored this year and where conditions have improved or declined.
The lottery of life
Where to be born in 2013
Nov 21st 2012 | from The World In 2013 print edition
Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago, when The World in 1988 light-heartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in 1988, America indeed came top. But which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?
To answer this, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.
Its quality-of-life index links the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys—how happy people say they are—to objective determinants of the quality of life across countries. Being rich helps more than anything else, but it is not all that counts; things like crime, trust in public institutions and the health of family life matter too. In all, the index takes 11 statistically significant indicators into account. They are a mixed bunch: some are fixed factors, such as geography; others change only very slowly over time (demography, many social and cultural characteristics); and some factors depend on policies and the state of the world economy.
http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be-born-2013-lottery-life?fsrc=scn/tw/te/tr/thelotteryoflife
Dollar: the Steven Bradbury of currency markets
The Australian dollar has become the Steven Bradbury of currency markets - ‘winning’ by default because all its rivals fell in a heap.Like the Aussie skater’s unlikely Olympic medal win, the dollar remains at sky-high levels because of the sloppy performance of its bigger, and normally stronger, counterparts.By all rights, the dollar should have fallen back below $US1.00 in the past few months; commodity prices have fallen, economic growth has slowed and interest rates are lower and consumers and businesses are generally pretty depressed. But this week it climbed above $US1.05 to reach fresh three-month highs.ANZ interest rate strategist Andrew Salter expects it to remain around $US1.05 throughout 2013 and possibly hit $US1.10It’s not that the Australian economy is doing particularly well, he says, it’s that most major developed economies - Europe, Britain, Japan and the United States - are weak and likely to stay that way.Furthermore, the US Federal Reserve’s efforts to stimulate growth have pushed the US dollar lower against its Australian counterpart.‘‘The problem at the moment is that Australia at the moment looks ok but everything else in the world looks pretty poor,’’ he said.The stubbornly high dollar has caused significant pain to many Australian businesses and farmers - and the situation could get worse in 2013.Read more: http://www.watoday.com.au/business/markets/dollar-the-steven-bradbury-of-currency-markets-20121213-2bc0v.html#ixzz2F4oNIEyk
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