The reluctance of EU countries, particularly France and Germany, to contribute to rebuilding Iraq certainly reflects their governments’ policies and their publics’ preferences. The Washington Post reported that the EU will contribute $256 million, and that US contributions will be roughly $20 billion. That’s more than 78 time as much. While the final figures may [...]

OK, before anyone tries to get us round to the painful reality that I’m a tiresome old bore: some titilation for you. Unfortunately, this is not about ’sexual tourism’, except, that is in the most general sense. (Although if anyone wants to pick up on this in the comments, I think we’re in the same [...]

Another quiet Saturday morning here in Barcelona. This post is definitely for those looking up at the grey sky, and feeling the need for some pretty mindless entertainment. Power Point presentations: ever been subjected to one of them. Or put another way: what was life like before Microsoft? Well Peter Norvic has been thinking [...]

Even though it may appear that this post runs along much the same lines as my last two or three, I should warn you: appearances are sometimes deceptive. The origins of what I want to say here stretch back in time two or three days to some comments I made on an earlier post [...]

The sinking of a boatload of Somali immigrants off the island of Lampedusa seems to have set off something akin to a feeling of collective remorse in Italy. (Would that the human tragedy that is occuring on a regular basis just off the straits of Gibraltar could provoke a similar reaction here in Spain!) Indeed [...]

One of the things about living in an island state is that you rarely cross over national borders on land. To get to any other country from Britain you have to fly, sail or travel underground and all these have their various formalities for border crossing and, like most Britons travelling abroad, my travels within [...]

I found this article from Dagens Nyheter (temporary link) very interesting.
“‘If anything, I think we work more effectively now than we did before, even though we’re almost twice as many’ an EU diplomat tells Dagens Nyheter.
‘People stop to think one more time, if what they’re going to say really adds something new or [...]

I’ve added a new blog to the blogroll that has quickly become one of my favorites.
Col Lounsbury is a financier currently in Jordan, involved in Iraqi reconstruction. He’s a scathing critic of the administration’s efforts.
He’s quite bright, extremely knowledgable about Middle Easter culture and society. He’s also a delight to read, with a [...]

Well it certainly seems to have gone eerily quiet over here. Meantime the Intergovernmental Conference has been working its weary way onward. Perhaps it’s a measure of the magnitude of the boredom that no-one has felt sufficiently inspired to get down to writing about it. This definitely hasn’t been the case with fellow blogger Eurosavant, [...]

The Economist has a couple of useful pieces this week ( here and here ) comparing the politics of immigration in the US and the UK. Meantime US economist Richard Freeman has an NBER paper where he argues we should “Stop spending so much time thinking about the WTO. Technology transfer, international migration, and [...]