For decades, governments and companies around the world have focused almost exclusively on tariffs as the biggest impediment to global trade. Despite tariffs dropping to a 30-year low, reform efforts have stalled in recent years and international trade remains seriously constrained.

The chip manufacturing story has some compelling and awkward moments. For instance, Samsung managed to land Apple as its first massive computation chip customer when the original iPhone was heading to market. Apple needed someone to make the ARM chip that would give the iPhone its low-power consumption and zip, and Samsung said it was up to the task. Of course, the two companies are competitors now.

The National Retail Federation estimates that nearly $9bn was lost by merchants in returns fraud in 2012. And according to a report from ThreatMetrix, online fraud resulted in about $3.5bn in lost revenue in North America last year.

UHC announced that its member academic medical centers achieved record supply chain savings and value of $400m in 2012. The saving amount represents five percent of UHC members' record aggregated spend of $8.1bn and includes cash returns as well as operational savings.

While more than half (53 percent) of all companies in the S&P 500 Index and Fortune 500 published sustainability reports in 2011 "” up from 19 percent the year before "” companies in the U.S. are less likely to obtain third-party assurance than their global peers, according to a report by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Assurance refers to third-party validation of a sustainability report's contents.