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The country of 4.7 million people climbed seven spots to 102nd in the World Bank’s annual “Doing Business” report this year, lagging behind China, Vietnam and Namibia. Moody’s Investors Service lowered its outlook on Costa Rica to negative from neutral in September, citing a rising debt burden and widening budget deficit. Moody’s rates the country Baa3, putting it in the same category as Turkey and Iceland.

In a Bloomberg survey published last month, Costa Rica was ranked fourth behind Russia, Argentina and Ukraine on a list of countries confronting the biggest loss of investor confidence. The survey cited data including the rising cost of credit default swaps and the currency’s performance against the dollar.

California-based Intel, whose processors run more than 80 percent of personal computers shipped worldwide every year, originally chose to establish operations in Costa Rica after studying sites in Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, according to a 2000 case study by Harvard University’s Center for International Development. The company’s $600 million investment at the time represented about 4.2 percent of GDP, prompting the company’s then-Vice President Bob Perlman to say Intel’s arrival was like “putting a whale in a swimming pool,” according to the study.

n 2013, about 21 percent of Costa Rica’s exports of goods came from Intel, according to investment promotion agency CINDE

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in some government agencies overstaffing was considered to be around 50 percent. Yet so bloated were the managerial ranks that one in five departments did not have any employees apart from the department head, and less than one in 10 had over 20 employees.

Wages in the public sector were on average almost one and half times higher than in the private sector.

Public sector wages account for some 27 percent of the government’s total expenditures.

St. Charles noted that 144 patients tended to use the emergency room the most. Taken together, they averaged 14.25 trips each over 12 months. These patients drove much of the area’s Medicaid spending.

The majority had unmet mental health needs, even though most had Medicaid, which provides mental health coverage.

It stationed community health workers in emergency rooms, who could help assess why patients had turned up.

Of the 144 patients in the study, only 62 percent agreed to work with a community worker on a plan for their care. The others proved difficult to track down or did not want to participate.

Emergency department visits fell by 49 percent. On average, the program generated about $3,000 in savings per patient.

“I’m reassured by people talking about the role primary care providers need to play,” said Ern Teuber, the clinic’s executive director. “Still, when we start talking specific dollars, the perception is there isn’t enough money to go around and that somebody has to lose.”

It’s a huge issue, and there’s no doubt that hospital business models are going to have to change,”

“Medicaid by itself isn’t enough to change things,” he said. “For a lot of hospitals, it’s maybe 7 percent of their business. We have another 600,000 people the state covers.

The election of 1989 marked the first time in more than 60 years that a civilian president had handed power to an elected successor.

the repeated recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the hyperinflation of 1989-90, the economic crisis of 2001 and now the possibility of another crisis to come.

But three deep-lying explanations help to illuminate the country’s diminishment. Firstly, Argentina may have been rich 100 years ago but it was not modern. That made adjustment hard when external shocks hit. The second theory stresses the role of trade policy. Third, when it needed to change, Argentina lacked the institutions to create successful policies.

Railways transformed the economics of agriculture and refrigerated shipping made it possible to export meat on an unprecedented scale: between 1900 and 1916 Argentine exports of frozen beef rose from 26,000 tonnes to 411,000 tonnes a year. But Argentina mainly consumed technology from abroad rather than inventing its own.

External shocks duly materialised, which leads to the second theory for Argentine decline: trade policy.

Argentina raised import tariffs from an average of 16.7% in 1930 to 28.7% in 1933. Reliance on Britain, another country in decline, backfired as Argentina’s favoured export market signed preferential deals with Commonwealth countries.

an existing policy of import substitution deepened; the share of trade as a percentage of GDP continued to fall.

High food prices meant big profits for farmers but empty stomachs for ordinary Argentines. Open borders increased farmers’ takings but sharpened competition from abroad for domestic industry.

“One-third of the country—the commodities industry, engineers and regional industries like wine and tourism—is ready to compete,” says Sergio Berensztein, a political analyst. “Two-thirds are not.”

Property rights are insecure

Statistics cannot be trusted: Argentina was due this week to unveil new inflation data in a bid to avoid censure from the IMF for its wildly undercooked previous estimates.

hort-termism is embedded in the system

“We have spent 50 years thinking about maintaining government spending, not about investing to grow,” says Fernando de la Rúa, a former president who resigned during the 2001 crisis.

The country’s Vaca Muerta (“Dead Cow”) shale-oil and gasfield is estimated to be the world’s third-largest. If Argentina can attract foreign capital, the money could start flowing within a decade.

Carefully taught, the assignments can help make math more concrete. Students don’t just memorize their times tables and addition facts but also understand how arithmetic works and how to apply it to real-life situations. But in practice, most teachers are unprepared and children are baffled, leaving parents furious.

On national tests, nearly two-thirds of fourth graders and eighth graders are not proficient in math. More than half of fourth graders taking the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress could not accurately read the temperature on a neatly drawn thermometer.

On the same multiple-choice test, three-quarters of fourth graders could not translate a simple word problem about a girl who sold 15 cups of lemonade on Saturday and twice as many on Sunday into the expression “15 + (2×15).” Even in Massachusetts, one of the country’s highest-performing states, math students are more than two years behind their counterparts in Shanghai.

A 2012 study comparing 16-to-65-year-olds in 20 countries found that Americans rank in the bottom five in numeracy.

One study that examined medical prescriptions gone awry found that 17 percent of errors were caused by math mistakes on the part of doctors or pharmacists.

“I’m just not a math person,” Lampert says her education students would say with an apologetic shrug.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, cognitive scientists studied a population known as the unschooled, people with little or no formal education.

For instance, many of the workers charged with loading quarts and gallons of milk into crates had no more than a sixth-grade education. But they were able to do math, in order to assemble their loads efficiently, that was “equivalent to shifting between different base systems of numbers.”

Studies of children in Brazil, who helped support their families by roaming the streets selling roasted peanuts and coconuts, showed that the children routinely solved complex problems in their heads to calculate a bill or make change.

The cognitive-science research suggested a startling cause of Americans’ innumeracy: school.

The answer-getting strategies may serve them well for a class period of practice problems, but after a week, they forget. And students often can’t figure out how to apply the strategy for a particular problem to new problems.

In the process, she gave them an opportunity to realize, on their own, why their answers were wrong.

At most education schools, the professors with the research budgets and deanships have little interest in the science of teaching

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.

Some of the failure could be explained by active resistance.

A year after he got to Chicago, he went to a one-day conference of teachers and mathematicians and was perplexed by the fact that the gathering occurred only twice a year.

More distressing to Takahashi was that American teachers had almost no opportunities to watch one another teach.

In Japan, teachers had always depended on jugyokenkyu, which translates literally as “lesson study,” a set of practices that Japanese teachers use to hone their craft. A teacher first plans lessons, then teaches in front of an audience of students and other teachers along with at least one university observer. Then the observers talk with the teacher about what has just taken place. Each public lesson poses a hypothesis, a new idea about how to help children learn.

The research showed that Japanese students initiated the method for solving a problem in 40 percent of the lessons; Americans initiated 9 percent of the time.

Finland, meanwhile, made the shift by carving out time for teachers to spend learning. There, as in Japan, teachers teach for 600 or fewer hours each school year, leaving them ample time to prepare, revise and learn. By contrast, American teachers spend nearly 1,100 hours with little feedback.

“Sit on a stone for three years to accomplish anything.”

In one experiment in which more than 200 American teachers took part in lesson study, student achievement rose, as did teachers’ math knowledge — two rare accomplishments.

Examining nearly 3,000 teachers in six school districts, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently found that nearly two-thirds scored less than “proficient” in the areas of “intellectual challenge” and “classroom discourse.”