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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As Italians head to the polls this weekend in order to pick what will be their 62nd government in 65 years (in an election which is being held three years early to boot, due to the collapse of Romano Prodi’s outgoing administration) one odd detail seems to stand out and sum up the multitude of [...]

My co-blogger on Global Economy Matters Manuel Alvarez in his post on last weekend’s Spanish election called it “Zapatero’s election to lose”, meaning by this that the opposition scarcely seemed credibly poised to win, and their best chance of victory rested on the possibility that Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero might somehow or [...]

As I have just indicated in my last post Hungarians went to the polls yesterday in a vote over whether or not to scrap government-imposed fees on visits to doctors and hospitals introduced as part of a belt-tightening adjustment programme, designed to bring what was at the time of its introduction [...]

Question: how would you have known they were holding a referendum on the government’s difficult and unpopular economic adjustment package in Hungary on Sunday? Answer: just take a look at what happened in the Hungarian financial markets last Friday.
It should not have been too difficult to see all this coming, yet financial analysts [...]

During the Autumn of 2006 we had quite an exchange of opinion on this blog about the future destiny of the Hungarian economy, largely between me and Doug Muir. At the time Doug was relatively optimistic, and I much less so. We nearly even had a bet about whether Hungary would enter recession during 2007, [...]

Russia has been in the news over the last few days, as much as anything for its recent attempt at “unfair” (the term is the one used by the OCSE) elections. Both Alex and Doug have already commented on this (and Manuel Alvarez has a useful summary of the electoral system and the outcomes it [...]

The IMF is not amused, or at least better put, the IMF is not amused with Croatia. The reasons for their lack of amusement are many and various, but in particular they are displeased by the rising level of consumer and corporate indebtedness, and doubly so due to the fact that the debts are either [...]