And government debt is rising due to overgenerous civil-service pay and benefits (including index-linked pay rises twice a year).

ECONOMIST: Charlemagne

Relational Investors, a hedge fund, worked with CalSTRS, California's state pension fund for teachers, to fight against overgenerous executive pay at Occidental Petroleum, an oil company.

ECONOMIST: Shareholder activism

But the euro zone's real problem is a crisis of competitiveness, a legacy of decades of entitlements, privileges, overgenerous welfare systems, inefficient bureaucracies, unnecessary and burdensome regulations and high taxes.

WSJ: Merkel Still Waiting for a Thatcher Moment

In its own report into the controversy, published on 2 November, Ofqual concluded that pressure on schools in England to hit targets led to overgenerous marking of coursework by teachers and that, as a result, external examiners had to raise grade boundaries in the June exams.

BBC: Heads challenge Ofqual to publish all GCSE grade research