Percentage of world’s engineering degrees.

I’m not sure how much this matters, but all the ‘China is the new America’ malarky is nonsense until China starts pushing the productivity frontier and stops ‘catching up’. 

This suggests that the EU and China and the ‘Asia-8’ might not be doing too badly here.

Source: European Council of American Chambers of Commerce: The Case for Investing in Europe: Why U.S. firms should stay the course by Joseph P. Quinlan, SAIS at John Hopkins and GMF: http://www.amchameu.eu/Portals/0/2012/ebooks/The-Case-for-Investing-in-Europe-AmChams-in-Europe/index.html

China vs. Europe’s periphery

Top graph shows change in personal consumption, bottom shows output. Both are in absolute terms.

[NB: that top graph is for ‘developing europe’ and the bottom is for ‘Europe’s periphery’]

Source: European Council of American Chambers of Commerce: The Case for Investing in Europe: Why U.S. firms should stay the course by Joseph P. Quinlan, SAIS at John Hopkins and GMF: http://www.amchameu.eu/Portals/0/2012/ebooks/The-Case-for-Investing-in-Europe-AmChams-in-Europe/index.html

Krugman has been using the 2011 data from this survey for a while to say that low sales are why SMEs aren’t investing. This seems to be changing.

Source: http://www.nfib.com/Portals/0/PDF/sbet/sbet201305.pdf