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Due to big events like the Olympics, the country receives a lot of overall income due to all the visitors of the such events. It will boost up the GDP since it measures all the assets produced in the economy and due to the event more assets are produced than normally.

It's a great article about the relationship between the consumption, the investments, the government spending and the economic growth. The investments of the firms in the UK and the government spending of the UK government related to the Olympics have brought important benefits to the consumers. The consumption (Consumption is the total spending by consumers on domestic goods and services) in the UK have increased and this have produced an economic growth in the country. Also we can't forget that it have brought other benefits like tourists, fame, sponsors, new companies, new stadiums...

In this article the author talks about the slow down in the economic growth of 16 leading emerging markets. Earlier compare to the Eurozone countries, UK and the US, the economic growth of those 16 countries was far higher. After this short period of stagnation, the world economists ask whether the growth, which depends a lot on exports, will increase or not. It weather will "wobble along, buffeted by worries in the developed world"; or temporary stop and then "bring back the days of the strong growth". Right now, the world economy is in the state of the recovery, in the past it went through the recession that started in 2008 and the trough. The fall in indicators mostly stopped, and the economic health very slowly continues to recover from the past.

"The index covers 16 leading emerging markets, including India, Brazil and China, which all saw their rate of growth fall. Rates of economic growth in these countries have been far higher than in developed nations, often coming in at about 10% a year." I think that the author is trying to say that Brazil in China have the highest rates of economic growth and not UK and the US. The exports in these two countries are very important; China is the country which more products export in the world. Their economic growth is slowing because of the recession in the other counties where the consumption has decrease and the people try to save money so the imports of products from China is not so high as it would be in a period of economic growth in all the world. I think that only in few countries the economy started to recover from the recession, in most of the economies are in stagnation. This suggest us the probably the worst part of the recession is behind us and the economies will start to recover, however these fluctuations in economic activity do not follow a mechanical or predictable periodic pattern so we can´t be sure when the recovery will start.

UK unemployment has risen to 1.2million, resulting in a youth unemployment rate of 21.9%. The british government, which insists the deterioration in the jobs market are due to the eurozone debt crisis, have been criticised for ignoring domestic problems . "Overall, the rise in unemployment and weakness of earnings growth relative to inflation continue to place substantial pressures on household finances - squeezing real incomes, suppressing confidence and leading to increased precaution among consumers. This can only be bad news for economic growth in the short-term." said Scott Corfe, senior economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research. Government's work programme and work experience schemes have been created in attempt to is get a significant number of young people off benefits and find exmployment.

The cement company Lafarge, says that UK faces a 200 million tonnes shortfall due to slow planning procedures. There is an extremely high demand currently in the UK. If this continues or increases, then the countries capacity to supply will begin to decline after 10 years. Out of the 200 million tonnes, only 60 is recyclable which leaves the rest to be extracted from primary sources. Since the procedure to quarry materials from primary sources requires authority permission, the process is very slow. This slow process is going to create the shortfall says Lafarge.

House prices in the UK have fallen for the third month in a row. Although the government has supported in mortgage borrowing, but the consumer's uncertainty surrounding the economy and their ability to afford the houses still causes the decrease in price in the market. The increase in demand is believed to be driven by seasonal factors compounded by the Olympics. It is believed that the house prices will continue to decrease slowly over the remainder of the year. There is also the first decline in supply in September after seven months of growth. I think this article fits perfectly under the topic of demand. The basic law states that as price falls, the quantity demanded of the product will usually increase. However, this does not fall under the basic law behind the demand curve, but it indicates that price of houses have fallen as a result of an increase in demand. The Europe's economy isn't doing very well at the moment and it causes more hesitant in how they consumers choose to spend their money. Price may be low, but they may choose to spend their money elsewhere. This does, however, support the supply law. As price falls, the quantity supplied is dropped. Suppliers wouldn't want to produce or supply to any products that isn't very well demanded.

The article talks about Britain's key services factor showing a growth in output. The purchasing managers index (PMI) shows an increase from 51.5 to 51.8. A figure above 50 suggests that the sector is growing.This pust away triple-dip recession fears as figures show a 0.3% decrease in Britain's economy for the last 3 months of 2012. Confidence has increased for service companies, which contributes to more employment of the sector. Some economist suggests a brighter economy growth in March, but some economists are still reluctant to believe, stating that a triple-dip recession is still possible. This relates to business cycle as we can notice how several factors can contribute to the business cycle. Here, we can see that output for service facts are increase, though contradicting to output in manufacturing and construction factor. Service sector is the biggest of Britain's sector. This suggests that Britain is still in a recession or possible a trough. It has probably reached its lowest point, but hasn't yet emerged to a full recovery just yet.

If aggregate demand were to expand, would there be sufficient spare capacity to allow aggregate supply to expand to meet the additional demand? This is the question addressed by the podcast and article below.

UK expects an increase in the Consumer Price Index to 3pc by June 2013 and to remain above 2pc until early 2016. In comparison, wages are only expected to rise at an average of 1.5pc. This will put more pressure on household as they have already seen a higher cost of living, which has risen four times more than wages. The recent increase is a result from petrol prices and energy bills. The bank's aim has been at 2pc, but the Chancellor may change the mandate. Another interesting point is the Chancellor may change the target inflation measures to CPIH- includes housing costs- and RPIJ, which is an alternative way of calculating retail prices. This article obviously relates to inflation rate. We can see the use of CPI as a measure for inflation rate. We can see that inflation rate does affect people with high cost of living and also people which has fixed income. Here, although many people does not have fixed income, they are still affected by the inflation due to the slower increase in the wages. We can also see that in order to reduce inflation, it does not only involve the government, but also the banks of those countries.

In this article, the author talks about the Bank of England. Because of the recession, Bank of England tried to stabilize the state of the economy. So it has kept its stimulus programme of quantitative easing (QE) unchanged and also held interest rates at 0.5%. Quantitative easing is is an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to stimulate the national economy when standard monetary policy has become ineffective. A central bank implements quantitative easing by buying financial assets from commercial banks and other private institutions, thus increasing the monetary base. The first quarter GDP figures, showing growth of 0.3%, were also felt to have reduced the need for more QE. Also, industrial output rose 0.7% in March from February, a bigger increase than forecast. Manufacturing output rose by 1.1%.

This article talks about the relationship between the success of a country at the olympics and its Human Development Index. The countries that had a higher HDI won more medals than countries with low Human Development Index. Nevertheless, Ethiopia hasn't followed the trend. With HDI equal to 0.33, Ethiopia came 29th in the end of the games. It is not surprising that there is a relationship between HDI and number of medals. In developing countries sports are often not as popular as in developed countries. In the US students are encouraged to develop both educational and extra-curricular skills. While on the other hand, in lots of developing countries education is the only aspect that values.

Here we have an article about the current value of the Euro. It is a perfect example of a situation when a country (in this case a group of countries) would like to have a weaker currency. Why the euro zone wants a weak currency? Because the country within UE are trying to increase employment and a low exchange rate means more exports and more domestically produced goods. The bad side of the weak currency is an increase in inflation however the rate of inflation in Europe is very low and unemployment is very high, so the European central bank will try to balance both values.

This article disclose a description of the situation about education in Asia. There are a lot of kids who want to get an English-language education in countries like USA or UK, but they would like to stay closer to their families, because not everybody can easily leave home and go to foreign country alone. Because of the high demand for schools that give international-level-education in English, there are more and more schools like that. But still I think supply of that type of education and schools is miserable, and that might be one of the reasons why the prices are so high. For example, in Kazakhstan we have a British school - Haileybury. It has an IB program as well as Riverstone International School does, the one that I go to. But! Riverstone is situated in Idaho, USA, and charges about $15,000 for one year of High School. Haileybury - aroung $32,000. The reason why I mentioned the location of Riverstone is because of the huge difference between being in US and Kazakhstan. Staying here in America helps to study English and understand cultural difference, being back in Kazakhstan, helps to stick to your family, but one will never fully undestand that international tone and go beyond certain level of English. Plus the prices are very different even if we would add tickets, insurance, etc, to go to America is even cheaper and has more benefits and positive sides. So in the conclusion, I just want to say that these type of schools is demanded by a lot of Asian (and not only Asian) students, but can be afforded only by affluent middle classes. Thus I hope there would be more supply of that type of schools, which led to competition between schools and cheaper prices (or our education system will change and we will have one standard system everywhere).

This article demonstartesh how shops are closing because there is not a high enough demand for there products, therefore meaning not enough money is being made.

This article describes the effect of raising taxes on the people. Tax payed by the rich can be used by the government for man reasons such as implementing new policies, improving public amenities, and to benefit the poor. The article says that raising taxes has two main effects, one that people work less since work is now less rewarding. It also may cause people to feel the need to work longer hours because the might need to make some more money to keep the household running. One important determinant of the effect of tax rates is the relative position compared to other countries. Another is the international mobility. This mobility occurs because people believe that in other countries with lower taxes their pay will be greater and they can live a better life. The greater the mobility, the greater the elasticity of supply with respect to changes in taxes.

Royal Mail has recently spiked their prices. This has resulted in a large decrease in number of stamps bought. A fall of 9% of mails have been sent with Royal Mail. They are certainly testing the elasticity of demand curve, but are they just putting themselves out of business? This article relates perfectly to price elasticity because this company, Royal Mail, is testing the elasticity of the market. They are taking a big risk, because if the elasticity is high, they may go right out of business. There are many free substitutes for sending mail, like E-Mail, Texting, and Social Networking. In my opinion, I think it is quite bizarre of Royal Mail to spike their price knowing that their demand has gone down. It will be interesting to see if they lower the prices again!

The ocean is one example of a common access ground. It's not exactly owned by anyone. The ocean is being explored more and more everyday. One way is through fisheries. The rapid increase in demand for fishes has led to the sudden decline of the fish populations. Take Bluefin tuna as an example. The increase in demand for tuna sushi has led to a huge depletion worldwide for the past 15 years. This has also led to an increase in price as the populations are becoming more rare. A Bluefin tuna once sold for more than £1m at a Tokyo auction. It is said that most of the tuna caught are shipped to Japan for consumption. Since the ocean has international access, coming up with regulations need to be communicated among many countries. 48 member nations of International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic came out and voted to maintain strict catch quotas. This relates to the tragedy of the common. Anyone can access the ocean and catch as much fishes as they like. They only take into account the money they can gain from catching more tunas. This shows a lack of consideration of the generation where some are only concerned about themselves. Without strict regulations, the population of tunas may become extinct in the near future.

It is a very interesting article because many people doesn´t know about the problem with the fish population. We are depleting all the oceans and we don´t think about the consequence of our acts. The problem is that we are really selfish because no one care about the future generation. We will leave them a completely depleted world (this idea is very present in the film Avatar) However it is very difficult to control the people from capturing too many or too small fishes or other animals. It is a tragedy of commons because it is the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one's self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to the group's long-term best interests.

In this article author describes the main news - new additional jobs and overall improving economic state of Australia: "Full-time employment jumped by 17,800 and part-time employment was up by 53,700." The total workforce has been increased, altogether, it served as a sign of the improvement in economic conditions of the country. To keep the growth at the same level, the monetary policy has been eased up. Previous rate cuts are beginning to have a positive effect on the economy. The housing market shows some improvement. But the strength of Australian dollar is the main source of concerns: "The Australian dollar jumped by more than half a cent to $1.036, as traders became less hopeful that another interest rate cut was on the way."

China's growth has slowed to its lowest rate since the financial crisis in 2009 with second-quarter growth of 7.6% - down from 8.1%. The Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, warned last week that the economy "still faces relatively huge downward pressure". Consumer inflation had been lower than expected and import growth, in addition to producer price deflation, has also worried investors. The government has already cut interest rates twice in a month and lowered the amount of cash that banks must hold as reserves three times since November. Several economists continue to remain optimistic and suspect China's economy will progress in the third-quarter.

This article's talking about Thailand's economic growth in the last three months of 2012 that it was recovering from the previous year's floods and had increased a lot more than what expected. On October-December period GDP had surged 18.9%, which most analysts had forecast a figure close to 15%. If we compared with the previous quarter, the economic grew by 3.6%, so we can say that even though last year the floods had impacted on many factories, but Thailand's government implemented different ways to help stoke domestic demand in an attempt to offset the decline in exports and sustain growth in the economy.

It is a nice article about the central bank in my country Poland. The central bank in poland uses changes in interest rates to keep the inflation rate within the targeted range of 2.5% plus or minus 1%. This week the central bank has reduced the key rate by 25 basis points to 3 percent. As we know, a decrease in inflation will lead to the increase in consumption and investment. The consumption is the total spending of consumers in domestic products. With lower interest rates, consumers will borrow more money from the bank and they will spend more, so the AD curve will shift to the right. Investment is defined as the addition of capital stock to the economy. Lower interest rates will encourage the producers to spend more on investment. Another thing to take into consideration is that the decrease in inflation will make the exports from Poland more competitive in foreign countries where the inflation rate is much higher. Targeting inflation, whether explicitly or implicitly, is said to be beneficial as it results in a reduction in inflationary expectations. If the workers do not expect higher inflation then they will not make demands for increases in wages any higher than the expected rate of inflation and this will keep the costs of labour from rising excessively. Poland has enjoyed uninterrupted annual growth for the past two decades, and for a while after the financial crisis of 2008/9 the economy continued to defy the global downturn. However last year gross domestic product growth slowed to about two percent, less than half the pace in 2011, as infrastructure spending tailed off and the gloom from the euro zone started to filter through to previously bullish Polish consumers.