Education

With rolling debt crises blasting Western economies already weakened by the recession, hopes are resting on the developing market dynamos of Brazil, Russia, India and China to power countries and corporations back to growth. Keeping those engines humming is due, to a greater and greater extent, to the new power of women.

Across the developing world, women are increasingly outperforming men in the tertiary education system: in Brazil, 60 percent of college graduates are female.

With a population of 1.3 billion, you wouldn’t expect it to be difficult to find people in China. But for luxury retailers, people are the one thing that simply can’t be found.

Finding qualified managers in China, already difficult for companies making the Eastward move, is becoming even more difficult as companies move into second-, third-, and fourth-tier cities. And as more companies vie for a place in the People’s Republic, demand is only increasing.

East Asia’s booming economies have for years been the envy of the world, but a shortfall in one crucial area – babies – threatens to render yesterday’s tigers toothless.

Some of the world’s lowest birth rates look set to slash labor forces in Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, where fewer workers will support more retirees and their ballooning health care and pension costs.

A group of lawmakers is seeking to increase tobacco taxes for a second straight year to curb rising health care costs.

Efforts to raise taxes have been complicated by the Japanese government's ownership of a controlling stake in Japan Tobacco Inc., the world's third biggest publicly traded cigarette maker. Nearly 40 percent of Japanese men smoke, compared with 22.3 percent in the US and 22 percent in the UK, according to a World Health Organization report last year. Smoking kills an estimated 100,000 people a year in Japan.