Comparison and Contrast - Text 2

Comparison - Contrast

The following text contains examples of comparison and contrast. It is an excerpt from an article in "The Conversation” by Francis Teal from the University of Oxford, and you can access the full article here.

The first part of Francis Teal's text contains a discussion of the differences in productivity of two countries, Ghana and South Korea. This is the part we will discuss here. "In the 1950s, Ghana was twice as rich as South Korea. By 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, South Korea’s income was more than ten times higher than Ghana’s. Yet these differences in productivity between the overall economies of the two countries are modest compared with the differences that appear to exist in the productivity of their manufacturing firms. My colleague Simon Baptist and I set up such a comparison and were surprised by the size of these differences. You could argue that rich countries simply have more resources so their companies are bound to be more productive – or have higher levels of output per worker. But my research suggests that this is not the answer. The surveys covered the main sectors within manufacturing, textiles, garments, furniture, food and electrical goods. While the sectors are the same, clearly the type of firms within them will be very different across the two countries. Median output – the amount of garments or furniture produced per employee – is nearly 20 times higher in South Korean manufacturing firms than in Ghanaian ones. Whereas in South Korea the median worker produces US$193,000 of output a year, the comparable number in Ghana is US$10,000. If you look at this in terms of the value added to the products by the worker, the differences are even larger: the average Korean worker produces US$117,000 and a Ghanaian worker only US$3,000, nearly 40 times less in terms of added value. The Ghana data comes from a panel survey of the country’s manufacturing firms over the period from 1991 to 2003 and the South Korean data is for the period 1996-1998." (Teal, n.d.)