How well does Flanders perform?

Child care
Flemish daycare for pre-school children has scored a disappointing 6 out of 10 in a new report by UN children’s organisation Unicef. The Innocenti report card sets 10 benchmarks for judging daycare in advanced nations, such as entitlement to parental leave, priority for the disadvantaged, access for under-threes, staff training, public funding and outreach for critical services. Flanders performed badly on parental leave, lack of a national policy plan, spending less than 1% of GDP, level of staff training and child-staff ratios. ‘Only six OECD countries meet eight or more of the benchmarks, and they are the same six countries that top the table of government expenditures on early childhood services (Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, France and Norway),’ the report concludes.
www.unicef.org

Corruption
Belgian companies are the least likely to resort to bribery when dealing with foreign officials abroad, according to the latest ‘Bribe Payers Index’ issued by the corruption watchdog group Transparency International. The report surveyed executives from 22 leading trading nations on their use of bribery to grease the wheels of foreign trade. Belgium is least likely to bribe, coming in ahead of Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Mexico, China and Russia were the most likely to bribe. The report looked at three common types of bribery: money paid to high-level politicians and parties; money paid to low-level officials to ‘speed things up’; and using personal family contacts to win public contracts.
www.transparency.org

Environment
Belgium scored 25th out of 60 nations in this year’s Climate Performance Index, calculated by the watchdog group Germanwatch – a fall of 10 places on last year’s results. The top three places were empty. ‘No nation did enough to prevent climate change,’ the report says. ‘Carbon dioxide emission increases are running far ahead of all the promises and policies to reduce them.’ The four best performers were Sweden, Germany, France and India. At the bottom of the list, as always, are Saudi Arabia, Canada and the United States. Belgium’s low place was blamed on the lack of policy on tackling climate change, which is considered too expensive and difficult to implement.
www.germanwatch.org

Robotics
Belgium has more robots per head of population than the United States and nearly double the European average, according to a survey carried out by the International Federation of Robotics. Belgium has 89 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, compared to a European average of 50 and a US total of 86. Japan has by far the most, with 295. At the end of 2007, about one million industrial robots and 5.5 million service robots were in operation worldwide. By 2011, the federation says, the total will have grown to more than 18 million.
www.ifr.org