On Sunday I took a stroll through the Central area of Hong Kong. The upmarket shops are of course still open - Prada, Armani, Gucci - but the streets are closed off, and occupied by hundreds - no, thousands – of Philippino women, mostly quite young.

These are Hong Kong's domestic servants. Anyone on a reasonable income can hire them, their minimum wage is 3200 Hong Kong dollars (divide by 13 to get UK pounds): some people, particularly the expatriates, pay more, but a number of people work out ways of paying less. And they have to have certain facilities like a room for themselves.

And they get Sunday off. So they congregate in their thousands in the streets of Central, squatting on the pavement, gossiping, and swapping photos of friends and family back home. The Western Union office does a fantastic trade as they all line up to send money home. The apparently modest income of a Hong Kong helper can support most of a family back home, in fact. So it's regarded as a great deal all round.

In the UK, by contrast, we seem to do our best to stop people hiring domestic help. Hire anyone in the UK and there is a mountain of paperwork to process. Try to bring a worker in from a poor country, especially a female one, and you ask the impossible. Pay less than 10,000 pounds a year and you're put in jail. So a simple way in which British families could improve their lives a bit, getting someone in to look after the kids, go shopping, clean the house, is closed off. And poor families in other countries stay poor. Isn't it time we opened up a bit, and made our aid to poor countries real and personal?

"The Nordic Tiger, largely unseen and unnoticed, stalks the world’s companies," writes the ASI's Dr Eamonn Butler in an article about Iceland which appears today in The Business newspaper. Many people have not woken up to the fact that there is a major entrepreneurial player on the EU’s doorstep. What was thought of as an icy home for fishermen has become an economic powerhouse with surging growth rates and booming industries. What happened?

It started when the reformist David Oddsson became prime minister in 1991. Taxes and inflation were high, and two of the three banks were state-owned and sluggish. He pulled the government out of commercial banking, with the result that Iceland now has 3 of the top 15 Nordic banks. He also went for flexible labour markets and lower taxes.

Big falls in company taxation were another key step. Capital gains tax is now 10%. Corporate taxes went from 30% to 18%, and asset taxes were filleted. Suddenly, businesses looked profitable again. Income tax is still high, but the 4% supertax looks to be on the way out, as does inheritance tax. The rate cut in corporate taxes actually resulted in larger revenues.

The privatization and deregulation of Telecoms has seen competition rise and prices fall, but other industries are surging ahead, and even fishing has been transformed by the introduction of tradable quotas to combat stock depletion.

Iceland has such abundant cheap energy in the form of geothermal and hydro-electric power that Alcoa ships ore there to be processed into Aluminium. There are plans to export that cheap power via an undersea pipeline to Europe. The country is a testament to what a determined people can do once governments step aside and give them the space to do it in.

Iceland is booming. This little economic powerhouse boasts a per-capita income higher than the UK, France, Germany, Austria – higher than nearly all European Union (EU) countries.

There are cranes everywhere, with new factories and apartments going up. One has the sense of a country on the move, an old country, but with a young and dynamic population determined to take it into the big league.

Few people believed at the start of the year that oil prices would have soared through the $65 a barrel level by now. Given that an oil price hike is generally blamed for triggering the 1970s recession, does it mean our economy is headed down?

Things are different. We don't have the inflation now, but oil prices do impact on growth, Graham Searjeant, Times financial editor, points out:

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a $10 per barrel change in the price of crude oil should affect the output of the world economy by about 0.6 per cent, other things being equal.

This time it is a simple market effect. The demand, mainly from China, given limited supply, is putting upward pressure on prices. Higher fuel prices mean that production and transport cost more, so less is bought and the economy under-performs.

High oil prices make it more worthwhile to develop new reserves. They make it profitable to develop hard-to-access supplies such as oil shale. They make it more worthwhile to develop alternatives to hydrocarbon energy. They encourage us to be less dependent on Middle East sources. They are bringing forward the hydrogen economy. In other words, they send market signals we respond to.

Those who want us less dependent on fossil fuels should find cause to celebrate the discipline which high oil prices impose.

In 1945 US forces were drawing close to the Japanese mainland. The Japanese resistance grew more fanatical with each approach. On Okinawa the Americans suffered 12,500 killed and 38,000 wounded. The Japanese lost 107,500 soldiers killed, plus 50,000–100,000 civilians. The military regime in Japan had infected a generation, much as the Nazis did in Germany, with a brutal ideology which glamourized killing and death. The highest honour was to die for the emperor, especially if this involved the death of enemies.

Japan's warlords calculated that if enough Americans were killed, the US might settle for a negotiated peace which allowed Japan to keep some of its conquests, and leave its military regime in power. The kamikaze suicide pilots who crashed their planes onto US warships were part of that design. The Japanese leaders thought that Americans would think the lives of their boys too valuable to spend on such a conflict, and if enough were killed they would stop. It did not matter to them how many Japanese lives this would cost, for these were not important.

Incendiary raids by US B-29s killed Japanese civilians in tens of thousands as their cities were leveled, but this barely dented their leaders' plans. US estimates were that an invasion of Japan would cost over half a million American lives, and several times that number of Japanese.

The US declined to play the game by the rules of Japan's leaders. The lives of their boys were too important. Sixty years ago today they unleashed the unimaginable.

It's time to scrap G8 meetings. They do more to focus disruption and dissent than to move along global progress. That makes the whole thing a huge security circus - costing money and effort that could be better applied to other things.

As Christopher Fildes reports, the G8 has 'just growed'. It started 30 years ago as an economic conflab between the US Britain, France and Germany on oil prices and exchange rates. Then Japan asked to tag along. Whereupon, says Fildes, "the Italians made a scene about being left out, and Canada was brought in as a balancing act. The party of four had become a Group of Seven."

When groupie Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became President of France, he wanted a grander event, and turned it from an economic chat into a summit spectacular. The Russians were invited in as consolation prize for losing the Cold War. And so it continues.

But does the G8 actually achieve anything which could not be achieved by the eight leaders having a video conference call every now and then? That would certainly spare the rest of us a lot of cost and disruption. Of course, Russia is down to chair the 2006 summit, so I guess we have to give them their shot. But after that, Fildes is right. It's time to erase the whole circus from the calendar.