"I had a lot of adrenaline too, a physical energy that I brought from sports, an activity which, like dance, requires discipline, competitiveness and persistence.
More should be done to squeeze public spending; efficiencies could be found without salary or benefit cuts à la grecque.More important, France requires a competitiveness shock to relaunch investment and growth.
Restoring competitiveness requires reducing wages relative to Germany.
Sara Bianchi, Kerry's policy adviser, acknowledged yesterday that competitiveness requires that some overseas customers must be supplied from production facilities abroad.
Without the ability to devalue, the restoration of competitiveness requires painful austerity measures and wage restraint.That leads to another potential flashpoint for 2011: the lack of global co-ordination.
He makes a strong case: sustaining economic growth and competitiveness requires China to get beyond mere labour-driven manufacturing and into the knowledge-based business of discoveries, inventions and other advances.Yet doing so will be hard, not least because of the country's well-earned reputation for pervasive academic and scientific misconduct.
A fast marked diffusion of these technologies requires their cost competitiveness against conventional technologies such as internal combustion engine vehicles and fossil-fired power plants.
The increasing emphasis on higher education in China, India and other emerging economies is testimony to the near-universal agreement that success in this world, not to mention national competitiveness, requires more, not less, higher education.
Part of the problem, he said, is the competitiveness, which requires an unyielding focus on one's company, and "part of it is because of that libertarian strain — we're just all out building stuff, and everything else is kind of extraneous".
