The eight-week programme generated an immediate spike in car sales, with almost $3 billion spent on the popular rebates.
Last December the UN's world food programme announced that the spike in food prices meant that it was struggling to meet its commitments to feed 49 million people in 12 of the world's most hunger-stricken countries.
"In Spain, for example, where there was little investment in labour programmes, we saw a spike in suicides.
The Today programme (Radio 4) can expect a spike this week in its audience figures.
"The impact of the movies is hard to quantify, but whenever a programme is on, we see the traffic spike on our website".
Estimates from the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (UCDP) begin at 0.3 in 1989, spike to 14.5 during the Rwanda genocide in 1994, and fall to 0.1 in 2008.
Then they cut to an outside broadcast from Colchester – where Stacey Solomon startlingly proved that even a programme entirely constructed from crescendos can always spike the volume.
Each programme cost less than $10million £6.15mm) and helped to avoid the spike in inflation that so-called "weapons buy-back" programmes tend to cause.
Nadene Ghouri reported from Freetown on an education programme that is trying to get teenage mothers to return to school, following a spike in pregnancies among girls during the crisis.
By linking agricultural training and asset creation, the programme has already made Ethiopian families and communities far more resilient to drought, famine and food price spikes.
