大象传媒

We count the pennies, as a curtain of austerity falls over Britain. Will radical cuts in public services smash the tender flower of economic growth? Can you put a price on a rainforest in Kenya, and does swearing at work upset your colleagues? Plus, the big idea from one of the world's great thinkers, Hernando de Soto.

It's been a week of angry protests about austerity cuts in Europe; in Britain in reaction to swingeing spending cuts, in France to campaign against the rise in pension age.

Around half a million jobs will be lost in British government and councils, as parts of cuts worth $130bn in the next four years. Britain's finance minister said the measures were needed to avoid a Greek-style crisis.

Bronwyn Curtis, head of global research at HSBC, Nick Jones, from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, who wrote a report on the job losses, and Hugh Morgan Williams of the Canford Group which supplies broadcast equipment debated whether the cuts would damage confidence and growth so much that the country would sink back into recession.

A thriving economy is one where people own houses and goods and can prove it legally. But this is not the case in many poor nations. So the battle is to give land rights to millions who are invisible to their governments. They can then borrow against property assets to build businesses. That is the big idea of economist Hernando de Soto, of the Instituto Libertad y Democracia think-tank in Peru. He explained how he persuades governments his approach works.

The conservation of living species sounds like it's a million miles away from the world of business. It's not. Environment ministers and scientists have been meeting in Nagoya in Japan, to discuss targets for slowing down the galloping rate of extinctions, which has severe economic consequences. Kenya's largest forest is estimated to be worth nearly $1.3bn annually, for example. But as the 大象传媒's David Shukman reports, the forest is under threat.

In many workplaces, one common complaint is about co-workers' bad language. But some argue swearing can be a positive force, that it can make workers bond together. Jim O'Connor, author of Cuss Control, and Yehuda Baruch, professor of management at the University of East Anglia discussed whether or not bad language at work could be justified.