Such behaviour has cost Turkey some support among Jewish Americans formerly ardent supporters of Turkey as a moderate Muslim republic that is friendly to Israel.

ECONOMIST: Strained relations between Turkey and America

Such behaviour carries a cost: while the city's debt is rising, its steep streets are increasingly pot-holed, its parks unwatered, its street-lighting patchier.

ECONOMIST: Bolivia: Local misrule | The

One is higher taxes, to make polluters pay the full cost of their anti-social behaviour.

ECONOMIST: When children should be screened and not heard

Offering insurance at a fixed, low cost will also have an unintended effect on behaviour: the sickest people will be the first to buy, since they expect the highest medical costs in the future.

ECONOMIST: Health-care promises

Although the direct, measurable cost of malpractice premiums is small, the effect on physician behaviour is enormous.

ECONOMIST: Alternative medicine

Financial penalties are considered ineffective, since companies can simply pay a fine and then pass the cost on to their customers in the form of higher prices, with little impact on corporate behaviour.

ECONOMIST: Regulation in Japan

But it was Germany that insisted on the pact's tough rules in the first place: it had feared that, once the single currency was adopted, irresponsible financial behaviour by one euro member country would cause suffering to all the others by raising their cost of borrowing.

ECONOMIST: Chirac storms the stability pact | The

For example, American deregulation in 1978 has fostered some successful low-cost competition to the benefit of consumers while antitrust laws remain entirely dormant in restraining incumbent carriers from wasteful anticompetitive behaviour against this competition.

ECONOMIST: Flying into trouble