The nearby port town of Shantou was one of the mainland's early Special Economic Zones but has lagged other booming coastal areas.
But several other people involved in the project said that the commercial market in Harlem was lagging behind the retail boom in other parts of Manhattan.
Originally equipped with a 2.3-liter turbocharged engine that required premium fuel, sales lagged despite the boom in crossovers.
Travel spending by these younger travelers rose 20 percent in 2010, making them the fastest-growing age segment, according to American Express Business Insights, though they still lag the baby boom generation in overall spending.
The Insead assessment offers a stark contrast to other appraisals based on single measures that have portrayed the United States, the nation that invented the global data network, as both lagging and declining in the broadband boom.
These supply lags encourage a boom-bust cycle.
Mr. Metzger, who is also an economics lecturer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said that while the locally brewed beer business is booming nationally, it is lagging in Texas, where the laws governing distribution are restrictive.
Chicago, the "stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders," as Carl Sandburg wrote, is in the midst of its biggest building boom since the 1920's, lagging behind only Atlanta and Phoenix in the number of construction permits issued in the last two years.
So for investment banks that largely missed the technology boom in the United States over the last five years, lagging behind the powerhouses Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Goldman Sachs, Asia has become a place to reinvent themselves, too.
Since the peak of the boom in 2006, however, incomes in those states are lagging behind the national average.
