Group items tagged

In 2008-09, there was a collapse of global trade. We were all very surprised. Output was not doing well, but the collapse in global trade was enormous. We realized at the time that the elasticity of trade with respect to global output was not 1, as you might think, but more like 3 to 4. So this explained it. And then it recovered like crazy.

This is still true. If global output goes down by 1%, global trade goes down by 3% to 4%.

What Europe needs to do:

Coal Protesters ignore benefits of coal exports

“Pretty much every human on earth can access all human knowledge,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist.

o how to measure the Internet’s contribution to our lives? A few years ago, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago and Peter J. Klenow of Stanford gave it a shot. They estimated that the value consumers gained from the Internet amounted to about 2 percent of their income — an order of magnitude larger than what they spent to go online. Their trick was to measure not only how much money users spent on access but also how much of their leisure time they spent online.

It’s true that the U.S. economy has grown faster than that of Europe for the past generation. Since 1980 — when our politics took a sharp turn to the right, while Europe’s didn’t — America’s real G.D.P. has grown, on average, 3 percent per year. Meanwhile, the E.U. 15 — the bloc of 15 countries that were members of the European Union before it was enlarged to include a number of former Communist nations — has grown only 2.2 percent a year. America rules!

Or maybe not. All this really says is that we’ve had faster population growth. Since 1980, per capita real G.D.P. — which is what matters for living standards — has risen at about the same rate in America and in the E.U. 15: 1.95 percent a year here; 1.83 percent there.

Broadband, in particular, is just about as widespread in Europe as it is in the United States, and it’s much faster and cheaper.

"I was amazed at how quickly and easily this guy was able to open the door," Peter said. The locksmith told him that locks are on doors only to keep honest people honest. One percent of people will always be honest and never steal. Another 1% will always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and steal your television; locks won't do much to protect you from the hardened thieves, who can get into your house if they really want to. The purpose of locks, the locksmith said, is to protect you from the 98% of mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.

What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.

but what would in normal times be a boon for the region may not help as much now, experts say.

Before the crisis, actions such as the European Central Bank rate cuts two weeks ago would have had a twofold effect in reviving the economy: Banks would have passed the lower rate on to their clients, while foreign-exchange markets would have marked the currency down, giving exporters better chances to sell their products abroad.

In today's polarized euro zone, it isn't that simple. For one thing, tThere is no certainty that euro-zone banks will pass on the cut in borrowing costs.

“For the last 30 years, both the private and public sector have done the same things to manage health-care costs,” said Bruce Goldberg, the Oregon Health Authority director who oversees the Medicaid program. “They’ve cut people from coverage, cut payment rates or cut benefits

t’s the math: In fiscal 2012, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and civil service and military retirement cost $1.7 trillion, about half the budget.

As a share of national income, defense spending ($670 billion in 2012) is headed toward its lowest level since 1940.

No region of the world has benefited more from cross-border banking, yet these achievements are now at risk

The threat to cross-border banks comes not only from their deteriorating balance sheets in the face of lower sovereign-debt quality and weaker growth prospects, but also from the policy response itself.

a European solution must take account of the network of foreign subsidiaries across Europe.

Early work on optimum currency areas by Robert Mundell had emphasised the symmetry or asymmetry of disturbances hitting different regional economies as a key criterion on which to gauge their suitability for sharing a common currency.

We now know that Kenen flagged a problem for which the Eurozone could have been better prepared. With an outsized capital-goods producing sector, Germany benefitted from a strong positive shock as a result of China’s emergence onto the global stage, given the Chinese economy’s voracious appetite for capital goods.

“A car tested for safety in the United States could be sold in Europe without further tests, while a drug deemed safe by Brussels would not have to be approved as well by the U.S. government,” according to a Reuters report that cited examples of the benefits of a free-trade agreement.

In fact, some economists view the German reform narrative as a myth

Wage restraint was instead a function of weak demand after the collapse of the reunification-fueled construction boom in the mid-1990s.

Even if one accepts the story, economists also point out that Germany undertook its labor-market reforms when the winds of the world economy were extremely favorable. The global economy was growing, and China and other emerging economies were sucking in machine tools and other capital goods in which German manufacturers excelled.

After meeting with Greek Labor and Social Security Minister Yiannis Vroutsis, Adedy cited the minister as telling them that Greece's coalition government plans to slash the payments by 22.7% after having already reduced the amount by 20%.

"I cannot accept the financing of the fund's deficits from the state budget by either imposing new taxes or additional social security contributions on the new generation of workers so that older workers can receive sums that are not in line with their contributions," said Mr. Vroutsis.

Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.

For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.

Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company

In times of panic, money tends to flee there from weaker member countries, causing fiscal and financial crises.

Part of the reason performance has disappointed is that its fall in productivity growth has partly offset the devaluation.