It is a good thing I am not a journalist, since I often forget to write down the source of interesting comments I hear on, for instance, television. Come to think of it, this makes me a lousy blogger too. Anyway, recently my beloved Arte had an item on India as an emergent world [...]

The International Monetary Fund has released a staff analysis of economic competitiveness in the southern Euro area — France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.  It’s a fairly technical document – written as a series of papers with a brief overview chapter at the start, which probably means that many of its messages will be missed.  But [...]

New Europe-based weblog Escape Indifference has an interesting post on higher education in Germany called Not welcome in Germany. Chris Osman, the author of the weblog, is a student at a German university. In his post he compares German universities with their American counterparts and finds the Unis lacking in both quality and openness. He [...]

On April 24, nine EU commissioners flew into Beijing, where according to Der Spiegel their mission will be to balance Tibet and trade. What this seems to amount to in practice is Peter Mandelson calling on the Chinese government to unequivocally come out against the wave of boycotts promoted by the fenqing and targeted primarily [...]

One of Nicolas Sarkozy’s worse ideas is the retention de securite, a change to the law that would allow for prisoners who complete their sentences to not be released if the government thought they were of “particular dangerousness” - this being an executive decision and hence very likely to be taken for reasons of low [...]

What really strikes me about the slowdown we are currently seeing in the eurozone economies is not so much what we are seeing, but how we are seeing (or if you like interpreting) it. The core of the issue is to be found - as is ever the case - in the details. And [...]

I’d like to come up with more thoughtful and respectful titles for these posts. But, well.
Stupid #1: In the wake of the NATO summit, and Greece’s veto of Macedonian membership, there’s now a boycott campaign in Macedonia against Greek goods and Greek-owned businesses. Since Greece is one of Macedonia’s largest investors and [...]

Maybe to many readers of this blog Slovakia’s application for membership of the eurozone may well not appear to be the political and economic event of the year. That rapid judgement may well turn out to be wrong. What is at issue here is the future course of the collective applications for zone membership of [...]

This analysis from Reuters of the dynamic between the EU and Serbia in the run-up to Serbia’s general election 3 weeks from now points to an extremely ham-handed attempt by some EU countries to influence the outcome, which seems like a strange way to handle an election in any country, let alone one with as [...]

Slovakia has recently taken some important “baby steps” on its path towards future euro membership. In particular the government in Bratislava has now officially asked the European Central Bank and European Commission to assess whether or not it is now ready to adopt the currency on 1 January 2009.
The response of the European Commission [...]