Prices are high, owing to trade restrictions and government support for inefficient state enterprises.

Bailing out inefficient automobile companies like General Motors only slows down the rate of progress.

And it has just retired 850,000 inefficient household refrigerators in favor of modern, energy efficient models, with millions more earmarked over the coming years.

These lack the scale to be efficient, the ability to exploit modern information technology, and the capacity to undertake research and development.

Former spies now sit atop the commanding heights of Russia s energy centric economy, but their role is not all that different from what it was in Soviet days.

It is not just that global supplies of resources are increasingly scarce, but also that supplies are increasingly falling into inefficient hands.

Obama should seize the initiative and make the meeting in Copenhagen next year not about bloated subsidies for inefficient technologies, but about lean investments in future breakthroughs.

Turn now to efficiency.

India is not about to become a second China it lacks both the means and the ambition.

What China lacked was not demand for consumption goods, but a supply of high quality financial assets.

Access to justice for women is lacking.

Owing to its underdeveloped financial system and inefficient capital markets, China would be unable to withstand an attack akin to those that triggered the Asian financial crisis without the protection of capital controls.

They lack organization and strategy.

They also lack a vibrant civil society.

It also lacks any pigmentation in its skin.

The police however lacked basic equipment.

Moreover, the measures as whole usually lack visibility.

The Japanese precedent matters all the more, given that, 16 years after the Asian financial crisis nearly wiped out decades of hard earned growth, Asia s banks and capital markets remain inefficient.

It would be counterproductive to focus on treating the symptoms, only to realize later that the unprecedented budgets for structural policies are neither economically efficient nor politically acceptable.

According to the Institute of Medicine, the US currently wastes more than 750 billion per year on unnecessary or inefficient health care services, excessive administrative costs, high prices, medical fraud, and missed opportunities for prevention.

Since then, these islands have been controlled by either the Soviet Union or its successor state, Russia. And, as elsewhere in Russia, their residents have been impoverished by consistently incompetent and corrupt government, whether run by Communists or today s crony capitalists.

But political leadership was sorely lacking.

Some states lacked the resources to pay.

This practice is also unwise.

The state of Palestine would lack legitimacy among Palestinians themselves.

It lacks support at home and respect abroad.

Unfortunately, the process lacks the necessary transparency and credibility.

Municipalities are lacking qualified solid waste managers.

The border units are not well equipped or resourced, however.

Perhaps the Government lacked the capacity to do so.

Of course, upward pressure on commodity prices also stems from supply side challenges. It is not just that global supplies of resources are increasingly scarce, but also that supplies are increasingly falling into inefficient hands.

Today, it is an accepted fact that the kindest thing you can say about the Bush administration is that it is completely incompetent, which is the line now taken by hard line Bush supporters like the National Review and the commentator Robert Novak.

In the meantime, the public should be cautious of politicians claims that deploying today s inefficient, expensive technology will result in windfall benefits at no cost.

The good news is that there are many ways by which improved incentives could reduce emissions partly by eliminating the myriad of subsidies for inefficient usages.

Lant Pritchett of the Harvard Kennedy School has coined a new name for India a flailing state a state where the government s extremely competent upper echelons are unable to control its inefficient lower levels, resulting in poor performance.

American courts in the nineteenth century were notably corrupt, sometimes incompetent, and often irrelevant, yet stock and bond markets grew, and continent spanning firms rose up and got the financing they needed to operate, expand, and industrialize the US economy.

A good illustration is Denmark, which early on provided huge subsidies for wind power, building thousands of inefficient turbines around the country from the 1980 s onwards.

Efficiency

Africa needed capital, but lacked savings.

After all, banks remain deeply unpopular in all developed countries.

Unfortunately, Israel is missing a coherent regional strategy.

Clearly, Turkey s political institutions lack adequate safeguards.

The majority of shortcomings resulted from organizational ineptitude.

It also lacks the means to compel others to follow its lead.

It is clear that modern Russia lacks global status in the Soviet sense.