And no, it isn’t gout, though plenty of port and fine stilton are to be recommended in any event.
No, the ailment here is an economic one. The EU Commission has just been lenient with Portugal: she has three years, not two, to put the deficit straight.

Just wanted to add a small note to Edward’s ongoing demographic discussion. Lance Knobel quotes Murray Feshbach, an honest-to-goodness expert on Russian demography.
If anything I would now say that I was underestimating the losses to the population of Russia in the future. The current official projection (medium) by the Russian State Statistical Agency is [...]

Really I realise I have been remiss in another important sense. I have long assumed that in fact the decision to reduce deficits was taken due to the coming fiscal pressure from ageing. This certainly was the background to the discussion. However now I look at the details of the SPG this area is not [...]

Don’t pick of a copy of Stasiland, by Anna Funder, if you have work to do. I did the first time, and I nearly missed a deadline. I did it again this morning, intending to write a review, and my productivity dropped like a rock again. Consider yourselves warned.

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Business week has just popularised what was previously a minority sport: debating the ‘global savings glut’ issue. Steven Roach has already responded. Really with all this high-powered economics going on, I feel sorry for the ‘layman’, since it must be kind of hard to reach a conclusion about whether or not to buy a house, [...]

BusinessWeek spills a lot of ink on the rise of the car industry in Central and Eastern Europe. The idea that a lot of manufacturing is headed east is nothing new, but to see the numbers and changes laid out so explicitly gives a much clearer idea of the challenges that Western societies are facing.
Volkswagen [...]

It has become conventional to distinguish between two groups of countries within the eurozone. On the one hand there are the older, relatively richer countries, who tend of late to have been suffering from ’sub par’ growth. On the other hand we have the more recent, and relatively poorer, members like Spain and Ireland, where [...]

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All of this begs the question: why does the Italian manufacturing sector exhibit such
a high degree of inertia in its product specialisation in the face of such [...]

In a letter to the Financial Times published last week, Michael Woolfolk of the Bank of New York makes a curious contrast:
It may end up that signing on to the euro currency will require the move to a market-based economy. This will certainly not be easy for welfare-based economies, and it may not ultimately be [...]

The expression ‘global imbalances’ has become somewhat fashionable of late. But what exactly are these imbalances, and why are they important. The IMF in its most recent World Economic Outlook draws attention to two of them:
The (current) expansion has become less balanced. Growth has been stronger than expected in the United States, where the ?soft [...]