The study, remember, argues that a doubling of the relative wages of civil servants is needed to reduce a country's score on the corruption index by a single unit.

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The relationship is strong enough, Ms Van Rijckeghem and Ms Weder reckon, to suggest that raising average civil-service pay from 100% to 200% of the manufacturing wage reduces corruption by about one unit in the corruption index.

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Lower unit labor costs are confirmed by the employment cost index.

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The IEA uses a complex calculation called the carbon intensity index to show how much CO2 is emitted to provide a given unit of energy.

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The four iShares index funds (see table below), issued by the Global Investors unit of Barclays (nyse: BCS - news - people ), sport a rock-bottom expense ratio of 0.15 versus open-end bond fund averages of around 1.00 and the 0.20 charged by low-cost leader Vanguard.

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Unit trusts on average perform about 1.5 percentage points a year worse than whatever index they are intending to outperform.

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