Centrica's 20% share of the pre-development expenditure will be written off as an exceptional cost in the group's 2012 results.

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Small firms account for only a small proportion of the economy and a correspondingly small proportion of investment and of research-and-development expenditure.

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Unlike Toshiba, which pioneered the laptop computer and has learnt to live with the jittery pace of development and capital expenditure of the computer industry, Hitachi still saunters to the 20-year product cycle of heavy-electrical machinery.

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Innovation is not driven by high expenditure on research and development, but by the company's insights into consumer habits.

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If it developed an indigenous population, looking after that population its elderly, its unemployed, and so on would be a new expenditure, probably for the department of international development, which deals with such issues on St Helena.

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Furthermore, lest anyone simplistically respond that Africans just emerging from conflicts need peacebuilding, not the accoutrements of armed security, it is worth recalling that acclaimed development economist Paul Collier and his colleague Anke Hoeffler found in their study on Military Expenditure in Post-Conflict Society that in the first five years after a peace agreement a given country's estimated risk of renewed conflict is about 44 percent.

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