Asia tops global school rankings; The link between sluggish laptop sales and low capex; What British polls say about voters

1 Asia tops school rankings (Sean Coughlan on BBC) The biggest global school rankings have been published, with Asian countries in the top five spots and African countries at the bottom. Singapore heads the table, followed by Hong Kong, with Ghana at the bottom.

The UK is in 20th place, among higher achieving European countries, with the US in 28th. The OECD economic think tank says the comparisons - based on test scores in 76 countries - show the link between education and economic growth. "This is the first time we have a truly global scale of the quality of education," said the OECD's education director, Andreas Schleicher.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32608772

2 Laptop sales and sluggish capital spending (Katie Allen in The Guardian) One of the striking features of the economic recovery in the UK and elsewhere is how sluggish capital spending has been – especially considering that businesses can borrow at rock-bottom interest rates. Why is that? Well, if you are reading this on your laptop, and you use that same laptop for work, you may guess where this is going.

Paul Donovan, economist at the investment bank UBS in London, thinks he may have found an explanation in the changing way we work. The lacklustre growth in capital spending is peculiar, Donovan notes, because it has been accompanied by a significant increase in the number of businesses in many economies, including in the UK. So why haven’t we seen some start-up capital spending?

Donovan says: One possible explanation lies in the change in working practices. “In 2000, 32% of UK businesses were employers. By 2014, 24% of UK businesses were employers. So what on earth 76% of UK businesses were doing if they were not employing anyone – and the answer is that they were single person businesses where the owner was the sole person ‘on payroll’.

Self-employment now accounts for 15% of the workforce in the UK.” This matters for capital spending, because people setting up as self-employed - for example, as a consultant – may well make little or no upfront investment in kit.

Says Donovan: Twenty years ago, capital spending on computer equipment meant a desktop computer at least. These were not portable devices. Today that is not true. A laptop or a tablet device can easily provide the basic requirements for an employee.”

Donovan (writing on a laptop that he paid for, not UBS) concludes that we may well be missing a secret capital spending story. What this means is that investors looking for a “capex recovery” may be missing the point. The secret capex story may be that businesses make better use of non-business assets, and that part of the capex cycle ... masquerades under a ‘retail sales’ pseudonym.”

http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2015/may/12/what-laptop-sales-can-tell-us-about-sluggish-capital-spending

3 What the British poll says about the voters (Jonathan Eyal in Straits Times) The most striking feature about Britain's latest voting is that every single opinion-polling agency got its predictions disastrously wrong. So, what accounted for the pollsters' failure? First, it is obvious that the old techniques of collecting data are no longer working. Those who answered questions by phone tended to favour the Conservatives, while those answering online opted far more for Labour.

Yet the overwhelming majority of polling firms ignored this significant discrepancy and continued to rely just on Internet surveys. The reasons? Costs and convenience. Internet surveys are dirt-cheap to conduct, but telephone surveys are not, largely because most people no longer use their landlines, so they need to be contacted through their mobile phones. 

Another reason for the pollsters' failure is that they made the wrong ideological assumptions about British voters. They assumed that rising support for the UK Independence Party (Ukip), a nationalist movement which wants to pull Britain out of the European Union and restrict immigration, would come largely at the expense of the Conservatives.

It did not. The bulk of Ukip's votes came from the less-educated, poor members of the working class, people who usually vote Labour. They are the ones who feel threatened by immigration and who are attracted to a nationalist campaign.

The moral of the story? That politicians should not treat opinion polls as either science or gospel, and certainly not as a substitute for the hard job of governing. Another interesting conclusion from Britain's surprise electoral result which applies worldwide is about the aspirations of today's electorates.

Mr Miliband was persuaded by arguments that after years of economic austerity, "a mood of rising left-wing populism" was again becoming important. British voters did not like the five years of austerity which they experienced, but opted for five more years of the same, largely because they did not find Mr Miliband's alternative of more spending and more taxes very convincing.

Cameron’s victory signified a return to more traditional politics of common sense and common values, of less public relations and opinion polls, and more understated substance. Conservative perhaps, yet with a small "c".

http://www.straitstimes.com/news/opinion/eye-the-world/story/what-british-election-results-say-about-voters-20150513