Graphic detail

A tough fight now beckons between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama

WITH the Republican nomination now beyond doubt, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney must duke it out in around ten key battleground states. The videographic below examines how the race is likely to develop. (It is best viewed in full-screen mode.)

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American business sentiment turns bullish

GLOBAL business sentiment remains bearish but has improved since January, according to an Economist/FT survey of over 1,500 senior executives, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The balance of respondents who think the world economy will pick up against those who expect it to worsen rose from minus 28 percentage points to minus 5. In North America more executives are bullish than bearish for the first time in a year. In eastern Europe however, confidence has slumped. On jobs, the balance of firms expecting to hire over the next year has increased in all regions, but employment prospects in Europe are still gloomy.

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The ecological footprint of nations

THE ecological footprint is a measurement of the consumption and carbon-dioxide emissions of both individuals and countries. It is expressed by Global Footprint Network (GFN), an NGO, in terms of “global hectares”—the number of hectares of land and sea required to produce the quantities consumed and emitted. This is calculated from the average productivity of six overlapping sorts of area use: arable, forests, grazing land, built-up areas, carbon sequestration and fisheries. The GFN reckons the world had enough productive land and sea to apportion 1.8 global hectares per person in 2008, the latest year for which data are available.

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The euro area is ever-more reliant on Germany

The European Commission released its latest GDP figures on May 15th. In a rare bit of good news, the data are better than expected for some countries, most notably Germany. That country's economy surpassed expectations by managing to grow by 0.5% during the first three months of the year. As a whole, the euro area registered stagnant growth, and without Germany its economy would have declined by 0.2%.

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Facebook still has plenty to prove

ASSUMING all goes to plan, Facebook's eagerly awaited initial public offering (IPO) on May 18th will be the largest yet undertaken by an internet company. But despite the hype there are good reasons for caution, as the two charts below illustrate. Several high-profile internet firms that went public last year have seen their shares fall below their IPO price and stay there (chart 1). Facebook is admittedly in a different league to the likes of Zynga and Groupon, but worryingly the giant social network has seen a slowing of growth in average revenue per user (chart 2).

Continue reading "Floating Facebook" »

New data on the amount of plastic washing around the Pacific

MUCH of the plastic swirling around the sea ends up in the North Pacific Gyre, where four great ocean currents meet to create a swirl of water moving clockwise that is twice the size of the United States. Its less polite name is the North Pacific Garbage Patch. A new study led by Miriam Goldstein of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and published in Biology Letters has quantified the increase in scraps of plastic there between 1972-87 and 1999-2010. The number of small particles of less than 5mm in diameter floating in the areas sampled increased about 100 times (from virtually nothing).

Continue reading "The Plastic Ocean" »