Venezuela's ports were nationalised in 2010 during a recession. However, now especially during the festive period imports have almost doubled. This has caused a large build up in the ports. Venezuela have just joined the trade bloc, Mercosur. This will cause a larger increase in imports due to the removing of trade barriers. Therefore, the poor infrastructure must be improved. A new container terminal has been suggested to try to cope with this.

IT'S election season in America, which means that China is in the rhetorical crosshairs. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have been complaining about Chinese economic misbehaviour, but Mr Romney has attacked Mr Obama especially viciously on the subject of currency manipulation and the administration's failure to label China a manipulator and slap it with tariffs. The article is tring to decide whether China should have a number of tariffs put on it to try to stop the number of exports or whether it is to late for this action.

MITT ROMNEY'S dense comments about the dependency of Americans who pay no income taxes were dense not only because they seemed to write off a significant portion of... This article talks of how the amount of people who pay no tax is very high and tax cuts are currently being discussed to try to decrease the burden on the middle class. The upper class currently has quite a high tax rate. This is trying to distribute the income more fairly.

Brad Delong goes through the changing american economy and showing how the unemployment rate affects the real GDP.

Jan 11th 2012, 15:07 by C.O. | LONDON SCOTT SUMNER recently wrote a nice post entitled "The myth of the pro-German ECB". I disagree with his argument that the Balassa-Samuelson effect explains higher inflation rates in the European periphery (isn't this effect based on productivity gains in the tradables sector?), but in my view he is right on his main point: monetary policy by the ECB was too tight for Germany. This article is about how Germany seems to be the only country in the eurozone not failing because of the reduction in aggregate demand from the euro. It explores the reasons for this.

This article is about how the falling prices may not be good news for everyone. It may mean that jobs are harder to get when businesses don't want to employ more people. It may symbolise the fact that a recession is about to happen or is happening.

Jan 26th 2012, 15:07 by E.G. | AUSTIN MATTHEW YGLESIAS, writing at Slate, is perplexed by Barack Obama's plan to "boost the economy by hindering trade". He argues that in his state-of-the-union address, the president evinced "a strikingly retrograde, self-contradictory, and confused agenda of reviving American prosperity through mercantilism". He says that due to macroeconomic events out of their control people are losing jobs and the economy is shrinking.

This article is about how in China the state always has control of the market and doesn't allow things like monopolies and ologopolies to exist that often and that they are always the ones who decide what happens in the end even if it seems as though the consumers are the ones that are making the decision.

The telephone market has two monopolies. 1 has over 70% of the landlines the other over 70% of the mobiles. This means that there are two extremely powerful companies which have a lot of influence in the market and how the mnexican population spend.

This article is about how a social networking site for scientists can become more efficient as the scientific community is still very fragmented.

This article is about how the UK's recession is continuing and it talks about how even though the tax revenue has increased this year, the spending continues to rise.

This article starts by talking of how natural disasters in Thailand are increasing production costs for many different businesses. This may be because the organisations now have to try to make their buildings earthquake-proof and after natural disasters have to spend a lot of money on trying to repair whatever damage was done.

Schooling and education is a public good as it does not recieve a profit however, this article shows that at the moment it may be costing the government too much and they have decided that they have to cut back on what they are spending on it. No other companies would provide it as they will not get a profit out of it.

Hey, This article is about how the current economic climate is affecting many industries in the eurozone and how this may be making our situation worse in the long run as less money is being fed into the economy. Hannah

The government has installed tight price controls as they have the world's highest inflation rate at the moment. They imposed these strict price controls on basic goods however, food prices have still risen up to 9 times as high as they were before. However, the price controls may be doing some good as Venezuela has been in the same situation before and after the price controls they had in place were lifted, prices rose from 40% to more than 100%.

This article talks of how, in recent years, governments have given more support in agriculture than they used to. However, in the last year the support has decreased. This may be because there are many economy's that have been suffering recently.

This shows that if oil was an elastic product then the prices for it wouldn't rise so much, but because it is a necessity, people are willing to pay more for it and they have to put up with the rise in prices.

This article shows how demand for Italian bonds are falling even though prices are falling. This is because they are becoming far too low and until the yield falls again there will be a decrease in demand.

Due to the unique shape of the demand curve there may be two or more places where the market is at equilibrium. This means that producers may be able to vary their prices more and still be able to get the highest possible profit from their products.

This article talks about how putting taxes for fossil fuels may help to reduce the the consumption of fossil fuels. This is necessary because fossil fuels are become very scarce and we are running out of them as they are a non-renewable energy source. However, not everyone wants the tax to go up as this would mean increased spending when they cannot afford to do this. Many energy companies will be able to push this increase of tax onto the consumer as it is an inelastic product and the demand will not decrease much if the price is increased.