Some interesting facts!

The Christmas edition of The Week magazine has a selection of Statistics of the Year which have been published during 2010 and I like this one from Prospect Magazine - China now exports as much every six hours as it did in the whole of 1978.

Others given that are perhaps less immediately memorable, but do illustrate some points:

Each day consumers in the UK throw away 1.3million unopened yogurt pots, 440,000 ready meals, 5,500 whole chickens, 5.1 million potatoes and 1.6 million bananas (source - The Daily Telegraph; wasted resources, negative externalities and associated costs)

Only five FTSE-100 companies have a female chief executive (source - The Independent; labour economics and equality)

22% of English 16-19 year olds are functionally innumerate, and 17% are illiterate (source - TES; wasted resources, government failure, labour economics and equality issues, negative externalities.....)