Although this is clearly a sub-optimal labour market, things could be worse.
The optimal division of labour might be for South Korea to make the yarn, Taiwan to weave and dye it, and a Japanese-owned factory in Guangdong Province to make the zippers.
In terms of mitochondrial fusion, the field currently relies upon on semi-quantitative assays which, even under optimal conditions, are labour-intensive, low-throughput and require complex imaging techniques.
When the Emu was established in 1999, everyone knew it was not an "optimal currency area" because labour mobility across national borders was low and its members were prone to different kinds of economic shocks.
Indeed Robert Mundell, a Nobel-prize winning pioneer of economic thinking about "optimal currency areas", stressed that labour mobility was their crucial defining characteristic.
One-to-one care in labour is considered optimal [ 33], however, in early labour this is often not available.
The less flexible a country's labour market, the higher its optimal inflation is likely to be: and Europe's are notoriously inflexible.
Half-a-century after Mundell's original article was published, the most ambitious project yet for a single currency spanning and defying national boundaries remains far from being an optimal currency area, judging by the criterion of labour mobility.
To reduce the amount of labour and often cost intensive experiments Optimal Experiment Design (OED) is an indispensable tool.
For example, optimal tax considerations suggest, for reasonable values of labour supply elasticities, that the optimal schedule should consist of a relatively low benefit replacement rate which declines over the duration of the benefit spell.
