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Want to see global GDP grow more rapidly? Stop focusing on specific economies and industries. Instead, focus on women, says The Atlantic 's Derek Thompson . Thompson argues that a concerted effort to grant more women access to jobs around the world, especially in emerging market economies, will have a direct impact on global growth. And that means first giving women "access to better education." Women drive economic growth -- more than China, more than the Internet, and more than banks. In the U.S., the growth of female employment added 2 percentage points per year to GDP growth. In Europe, working women accounted for 25% of the continent's new wealth in the last 20 years, as I've reported. But internationally, there are still 1.5 billion women of prime-age who are not in the "formal global economy," according to the Women's Economic Opportunity Index. In the poorest African countries, women's participation rate is high, but many work in the informal economy (selling cheap wares to tourists on the street, for example) with scarce pay. In lower-middle income countries -- those undergoing the early stages of industrialization -- women are half as likely to be working as men, and in many Middle Eastern countries fewer than one in five women are working at all. If there is an opportunity to intervene on the part of international worker, it is hard to find more opportunity than in improving the lot of women in these developing countries. Read The Most Important Pro-Worker Policy in the World: Education for Women here .

If salary matters most to you, you will want to try to get a job in Switzerland. In Mercer 's latest International Geographic Salary Differentials , Switzerland dominates the rankings (of course, this report doesn't cover how expensive it is to live in Switzerland ). Some other interesting findings from the report include Venezuela as the place with the highest gains in salary over the last year. The full report is available for purchase, here . But here are some of the key findings (full size graphic available here ):

Advances in the field of behavioral economics ought to make us at least aware of what goes into making good decisions, if not make us better decision-makers. The McKinsey Quarterly is featuring an interview with two people who are putting some important lessons about decision-making out into the world: McKinsey's own Olivier Sibony , and Chip Heath --co-author, with his brother Dan, of Made to Stick and Switch . The interview centers on the Heaths' latest book, Decisive , and Sibony's research on effective decision making among global business leaders. Here is an excerpt: The Quarterly: Is the right approach to suggest a couple of simple things senior executives can do or to recommend that they take a step back and look at a whole checklist or framework to create a healthier process? Chip Heath: I’m a fan of frameworks, but you don’t have to be 100 percent there to improve dramatically. One legitimate criticism of the decision-making field is that we have this overwhelming zoo of biases. In our most recent book, Decisive, we therefore came up with 4 intervention points in the decision process. Others propose 40 intervention points. Nobody will be successful intervening at 40 decision points. Olivier Sibony: We too have looked at this zoo of biases and tried to sort out what really matters to executives. When people ask me what will make a difference as they build decision processes, I emphasize three things. First, recognize that very few decisions are one of a kind. You are not the first person to decide on an acquisition. Lots of M&A happened before, and you can learn many things from that experience. Second, recognize uncertainty—have alternatives, prepare to be wrong, and have a range of outcomes where the worst case is real and not “best case minus 5 percent,” which is very common. Creating a setting where it’s OK to admit uncertainty is very difficult. But if you achieve that, you can make headway. Third, create a debate where people speak up. It’s the most obvious but also the most difficult. If you’re the decision maker, when you get to the debate you’ve already got an idea of where you want it to lead. And if you’re an experienced executive, you’ve already influenced your people, consciously or unconsciously. A good intervention point, for instance, is to ask subordinates if anyone disagreed with them about a recommendation they bring to you. If everybody agreed, that’s a sign that there may have been “groupthink.”3 Chip Heath: All of the things you’ve highlighted are things we grappled with in designing the WRAP process we propose in our book (see sidebar, “Four principles for making better decisions”). A Wider set of options means you’re going to have more debate. By Reality-testing assumptions, you look at the reference class of events. If you make a decision about restaurants, you read reviews because that’s your reference class. Yet if you’re making a merger decision, you won’t look at the reference class of companies in similar situations. Why do this research for a $200 dinner but not a $200 million acquisition? Then there is the process of actually making a decision. It’s now slightly more complicated because instead of one option you’ve got two, and you’ve done some due diligence on both. When you find yourself agonizing about a choice, it’s important to step back and Attain some distance. Finally, you should be Preparing to be wrong at the end of the process—that’s about hard-to-acknowledge uncertainty. Read the full interview here .

Patrick Messerlin , professor of economics at the Institut d' Etudes Politiques de Paris, thinks European leaders are right to look to Asia to build new trade agreements. Trade liberalization, Messerlin says, are the right prescription for Europe's stunted economic growth. But new trade agreements must be with the right partners. And you might be surprised as to which Asian economies Messerlin argues make the right partners for the EU. From Vox : The first question focuses on the ‘growth’ dimension of trade policy. Preferential trade agreements will only be able to boost domestic growth if the economies of the EU’s preferential trade agreements partners fulfil three main conditions. They should be big enough to generate economies of scale and scope capable of having a substantial impact on the EU’s relative prices – changes in relative prices are the source of welfare gains. They should also be well regulated because modern economies are intensive in norms and dominated by services, the efficiency of which depend largely on the quality of the regulatory schemes in place. Finally, they should have a wide network of good-quality preferential trade agreements, capable of offering EU firms opportunities to access the economies already covered by those preferential trade agreements (the ‘hub’ quality) without waiting for longish negotiations with the EU. As Table 1 shows, Japan and Taiwan – apart from the US – are the only economies in the world that meet these three conditions since the EU already has a free trade agreement with South Korea. China (possibly India in the long run, but not Brazil or Russia) may offer better growth opportunities when it comes to size. But, it still scores poorly on regulatory quality, while Japan and Taiwan score better than many EU member states. When it comes to the ‘hub’ criterion, Japan has a wide network of preferential trade agreements in east Asia (a region that EU negotiators are very slow to negotiate with) while Taiwan has massive operations in China which have been recently strengthened by a key preferential trade agreement, making Taiwan a privileged hub with respect to China. The capacity of Japan and Taiwan to meet all three conditions indicates the need for a resolute EU pivot to east Asia – an outcome echoed by general equilibrium calculations (Kawasaki 2011). Read The much-needed EU pivot to east Asia here .

Sheryl Sandberg thinks the tech sector could hold the key, or perhaps hammer, needed to break the glass ceiling. With the startup mentality and lack of slavishness to old rules, Sandberg says the tech sector provides the "freedom" for women to climb the ranks. Sandberg has been making the rounds to discuss her book, Lean In , and last week she visited with a lot of old friends and classmates in Boston. She spoke with WBUR 's Curt Nickisch and made the case for the tech sector: I think technology is a great career for a woman. Talk about a career where you can make your own hours, where people expect you to be very much on your own terms. I think it’s fantastic. Take a listen to Nickisch's report:

Don't confuse the below video as being about a potato chip factory. It is better to view it as a short history of manufacturing in America. The video is from Planet Money , and it provides an interesting lesson in how technology has changed business. We hear so much about manufacturing getting so much more efficient over the last half-century, it is helpful to have a clear example of how exactly that takes place for one company: Secrets From The Potato Chip Factory from Planet Money on Vimeo .

It has been more than a decade since Richard Florida got our attention with his book, The Rise of the Creative Class . Even with the tumult of the last several years, Florida has not changed his position. He continues to believe that workplaces that tap into, and encourage, the creativity in workers will reap benefits in today's global economy. In this Big Think interview, Florida discusses the continuing rise of the creative class:

Elon Musk has his eyes on the stars. But we aren't talking about his commercial space ventures. He believes that we will soon turn the corner on solar energy and most of America's power will come from the sun. In this interview with Ted curator Chris Anderson , Musk discusses his various business ventures (Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Solar City). The lessons here are not in Musk's waving the flag for his own ventures, but rather in how his core belief in what the future holds drives his investments.