Think-Tank Policy-Wonking

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What better way to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon whiling the hours away before the imminent German election results and Barça’s next away match than leafing through think-tank papers?

Well at least I have found myself a good thread to feed me them:

“Policypointers is an online facility created to enable those involved in government, academe and the media to gain rapid access to the research and conclusions of think tanks around the world.”

Among the interesting links I found there was this one to the European Policy Centre Website.

And low-and-behold, the latest issue of their Challenge Europe Online Journal – Towards a European Area of Freedom, Security and Justice? – contains not one, but three (here, here, here) articles on migration policy and ageing in the EU.

Interestingly there seem to be a lot of proposals in the air for facilitating temporary economic migration. Since this is a lazy Sunday afternoon, I’ll leave that topic for another day.

On useful links, CapTVK sent me this one to a conference: “Ageing and Welfare Systems, What Have We Learned?” held (in 2003) by the Brusssels-based and influential CEPS (they also did a widely discussed “EMU at risk” report earlier in the summer).

You can download a very extensive summary of the proceedings which makes interesting reading.

And if you are not totally exhausted by all this there is a very amicable debate going on between me and Brad Setser over at his blog: on German consumer demand and on global financial imbalances.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".