First, it is important that expectations be kept modest.

The door is now open to an initial agreement with modest goals.

That should make them more humble, more vulnerable and more human.

Summit communiqués have become modest if wordy affairs.

And those payouts are modest compared to the research and development efforts they stimulate.

Further aid packages for Greece may seem impossible to avoid, because the losses imposed on Greek debt holders have been too modest.

The old fogey ends his letter with an irritating question 'Do the ladies have a responsibility to be more modest in their attire?'

With bilateral trade worth only about 5 billion annually, Russia s economic interests in Iran are fairly modest. But it fears Iran s ability to cause trouble, particularly by stirring up unrest among Russia s Muslim citizens.

With bilateral trade worth only about 5 billion annually, Russia s economic interests in Iran are fairly modest.

But, as a significant component of Europe s policy toward its most crucial neighbors, the successes of the Barcelona Process were modest a great idea on the launch pad had difficulty getting off the ground.

These steps are important, though delivery will be prolonged and the likely impact modest, at least in the near term.

Fiscal stimulus by these three countries together with smaller contributions from France and China could have continued the necessary healing.

And they are able to act quickly with relatively few people, and with modest resources compared to the vast, expensive bureaucracies of democratic governments.

The merits of bio prospecting have been examined carefully, and the returns are in fact very modest, ranging from just 0.20 per hectare in parts of California to 20 in Western Ecuador.

Until recently, only a few organizations or governments, including the World Bank, the American state of Massachusetts, and the French region of Île de France, issued green bonds, and generally the amounts involved were modest.

This is also what one would expect from economic theory in conditions approaching a liquidity trap, the impact of unconventional monetary policies on financial conditions and demand is likely to be modest.

Likewise, Franklin Delano Roosevelt s foreign policy objectives and style were modest and incremental in his first presidential term, but became transformational in 1938 when he decided that Adolf Hitler represented an existential threat.

But, even were a revived Franco American effort to succeed in getting the UN organ to endorse targeted penalties to hamstring the financial underpinnings of the Revolutionary Guards and other Iranian elites, the proposed measures appear to be too modest. They arguably add little to three prior sanction resolutions that ban the export of nuclear and ballistic missile technology and conventional arms, and that freeze the assets and travel of a handful of Iranian officials.

Economist Yasheng Huang compares China to India, and asks how China's authoritarian rule contributed to its astonishing economic growth leading to a big question Is democracy actually holding India back? Huang's answer may surprise you.