Partly because many parents struggle to pay the fees, school enrolments are low, meaning poor productivity.
Poor productivity keeps Indian farmers trapped in a cycle of poverty, despite all the subsidies the government doles out.
Among individuals, team discord leads to stress, low job satisfaction, poor productivity, anger, despair, and physical ailments such as insomnia.
The entire biopharmaceutical industry is suffering a crisis of poor productivity in research and development, some of which is due to overregulation.
FORBES: Feed the Beast: Renewing the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA)
Most controversially, they suggest "poor productivity" is due in part to attitudes to work in the UK - which they compare unfavourably with countries such as Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong.
It is the combination of poor productivity growth and rising wages that has caused Italy's unit labour costs to rise so much faster than those in other euro members in the seven years since the euro started.
ECONOMIST: So easy to pinpoint what is wrong, so hard to put it right
One reason for the poor productivity performance is the endless delays in the massive programme designed to introduce electronic patient records across the NHS. The investment was supposed to transform care by providing a seamless network of patient information that would bind together care in GP practices and hospitals.
And all leave the problems they purport to address--sluggish productivity, poor communication, sagging morale, high turnover--essentially untouched.
Yet still people and small businesses that purchase software nowadays run into bugs, down services, connection errors, poor quality and other productivity killers.
FORBES: Here's Why I'm Grateful Microsoft Doesn't Build Airplanes
Labour productivity soars as poor economies shift workers from agriculture to a growing manufacturing sector.
Latin America's overall record of productivity growth is poor, thanks to a toxic mixture of burdensome regulation, a large informal economy and a lack of innovation.
Another brake on productivity growth is poor transport infrastructure.
Household and corporate savings have risen sharply, while the flip-side of the poor employment outlook is that US productivity has taken off.
Entrepreneurs and startups today have a clear opportunity, and a clear survival requirement in the new economy of mass customization, to avoid the customer satisfaction and productivity penalties implicit in poor engagement.
The assessment argues that modest outlays on rain-fed agriculture, in particular, could drastically improve the productivity of farming in poor countries and so help both to raise farmers' incomes and also to cut the need for an expansion of agriculture elsewhere.
Were these countries to open themselves to the latest seeds--and even if more developed nations remained ideologically GMO-averse, thereby crimping exports--the four would reap productivity gains, dirt-poor Bangladesh most of all.
In a recent study of seven different sectors of the Thai economy, McKinsey, a consultancy, found that poor government regulation was the single biggest barrier to productivity growth in almost every instance, whether in manufacturing or services, in export-oriented or locally consumed products.
Its taxes are high, education is poor, and its rapid growth in real wages is outstripping productivity in almost all sectors.
Productivity in the public sector is hard to measure and often poor.
They are still poor by EU standards, so can look forward to a period of fast productivity growth.
ECONOMIST: The financial crisis has made the euro look more alluring
While auto industry wages in Brazil have risen 125% in ten years, productivity has increased only 22% due to a lack of automation, poor training and high energy and steel costs.
While globalization has increased productivity drastically, and made the wealthy in this country a great deal more wealthy, and the poor in developing countries more wealthy, the vast middle has not seen nearly as many gains.
应用推荐