As India's global economic footprint grows, a marked rise in trade-related controversies in areas like labour standards, product safety and intellectual property seems all but inevitable.

ECONOMIST: As India's clout grows it will reshape the world around it

Thirty years after Thatcherism began to work its cruel magic in Britain (see article), continental Europe still tends to favour a larger state, higher taxes, heavier regulation of product and labour markets and a more generous social safety-net than freer-market sorts like the Iron Lady would tolerate.

ECONOMIST: Europe's economies

In the euro's first decade, southern Mediterranean countries enjoyed the benefit of lower interest rates, but they failed to reform their labour and product markets to make their economies more competitive for a world in which they had lost the safety-valve of currency devaluation.

ECONOMIST: Europe and the euro

That's partly because Britain's labour and product markets are more flexible than many of its neighbours': the labour market has a safety valve in the form of the 1m workers who arrived from central and eastern Europe over the past four years and are now beginning to go home.

ECONOMIST: Britain's economy