Such laws need to be revised, or scrapped, with small firms, of which South Africa has far too few, exempted from all but the most basic requirements in employment contracts.

ECONOMIST: South Africa

But Dino Kos, a former chief of markets at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who now works for Portales Partners, a research firm, notes that the yuan does not meet one of the most basic requirements of a reserve currency: other countries cannot use it to intervene in foreign-exchange markets because it is not freely convertible.

ECONOMIST: America��s debt crisis will be chronic, not acute