Blog
Chinese exports mini-fact
4th January 2011
The Christmas edition of The Week magazine has a selection of Statistics of the Year which have been published during 2010 and I like this one from Prospect Magazine - China now exports as much every six hours as it did in the whole of 1978. Could be used to illustrate the speed of growth of trade with the rest of the world?
Others given that are perhaps less immediately memorable, but do illustrate some points:
Each day consumers in the UK throw away 1.3million unopened yogurt pots, 440,000 ready meals, 5,500 whole chickens, 5.1 million potatoes and 1.6 million bananas (source - The Daily Telegraph; wasted resources, negative externalities and associated costs)
Only five FTSE-100 companies have a female chief executive (source - The Independent; labour economics and equality)
22% of English 16-19 year olds are functionally innumerate, and 17% are illiterate (source - TES; wasted resources, government failure, labour economics and equality issues, negative externalities…..)