"It is a question of competitiveness, because people obviously make comparisons with other cities around Asia, in particular Singapore, " he says.

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But some academics have been looking back at the 1920s to make comparisons with the present day and they find similarities both in the nature of the economic problems and the adjustment efforts designed to alleviate them.

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Third, without a fully loaded cost mode for on-premise applications, it is impossible to make accurate comparisons with cloud infrastructure.

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But Ford was careful to pick the member of the Prius family that is most vulnerable to being defeated in spec comparisons that the company wanted to make with C-Max.

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Russians are often sensitive to outside criticism of their country or comparisons with others, even if they make them themselves.

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They found that those with the highest tendency to make such comparisons had the lowest scores in the notional race against 500 others.

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Yet, bonds with others often derail their decisions due to various factors, such as the difficulty of taking the perspective of others, the similarities people share with others, and the comparisons they make between others and themselves.

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Feminists' comparisons of beauty contests with cattle markets don't make much of an impression on most young women.

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Mike Hancock, the Lib Dem MP for Portsmouth South agreed that comparisons were unhelpful, but argued it was difficult to make decisions about shipbuilding contracts with the "unknown factor" of the referendum.

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