The word "yardsticks" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to a measuring device such as a ruler or tape measure. For example, "The carpenter used a yardstick to measure the length of the shelf before cutting the boards."
Instead, they talk about the need for a decent capitalism without any yardsticks to measure what that would look like.
That put it ahead of Congo, Guinea-Bissau (sometimes deemed a narco-state), desolate Chad, repressive Eritrea, the civil-war-ravaged Central African Republic, and Somalia, which is still widely viewed as a failed state.The WJP report, issued in Washington, counts 18 African countries among those it measures, and uses eight yardsticks to assess how the rule of law is experienced.
Infosys, a technology firm, leapt in a generation from a start-up to a global blue chip, owned by institutional shareholders and measured against that most Western of yardsticks, the stock price.
Economists at Goldman Sachs, using a similar approach, reach a similar conclusion: the yuan is 10% too cheap.Using a range of yardsticks, the International Monetary Fund reckons, like the BEER studies, that it is hard to find strong evidence that the yuan is much undervalued.
By the conventional yardsticks, he has it all: thumping majority in Parliament, thumping support in the country.
The certificate's designers drew on the yardsticks used to test commercial products and services".Accountability" has been a buzz-word among providers of succour at least since 1994, when it emerged that refugee camps in Congo were sheltering those responsible for Rwanda's genocide.
Much the same message emerges from another valuation method, which, rather like the price-to-dividends ratio for equities, measures the relationship of house prices to rents.Yet such yardsticks are not the final word.
In other countries, the top of the pay scale is often higher (see chart), but it takes much longer to get there.The government plans to offer teachers the chance to earn, in time, up to £40,000 but only if they pass rigorous appraisals of their performance, in which the improvement in pupils' exam results will be one of the yardsticks.
But it explains why progress in fighting piracy tends to be measured by unusual yardsticks.
Central bankers should do their job stabilise prices, secure financial stability and, in America's case, maximise employment whatever the politicians get up to.By those yardsticks central banks have hardly done too much.
To be published in America in January; $29.95 Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukIn this section Punchline From yardsticks to metre rule The first cut is the deepest A terrible beginning The bold standard ReprintsFIRST the good news people are much nicer than they used to be and they are becoming steadily less violent.
