Italy and Spain have seen sharp rises in unit labour costs and their labour-productivity growth has stalled or gone into reverse.

ECONOMIST: Europe's economies

David Miliband, the former Labour foreign secretary, has lobbied for a heart-surgery unit in Newcastle to survive the implementation of an NHS review of children's heart-surgery provision.

ECONOMIST: The next big row about the NHS

Cotswold is a midwife-led unit for women with low-risk pregnancies who are not expected to need any interventions in labour, including epidurals.

BBC: Cotswold Maternity Unit in Chipping Norton closed

But short-time schemes are expensive: in the first quarter of 2009 unit labour costs in industry rose by about 25%, thanks to subsidies paid to idled workers.

ECONOMIST: Charlemagne

Unit labour costs fell by an annual average of 1.4% in 2000-08 in Germany, compared with a decline of 0.7% in America and rises of 0.8% and 0.9% in France and Britain respectively.

ECONOMIST: Germany

China still has perhaps 200m underemployed rural workers who could move to factories over the next two decades, so wages for low-skilled workers are rising more slowly than productivity, reducing China's unit labour costs.

ECONOMIST: More pain than gain