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I recently berated Greg Mankiw (and the top ten world economists he pretends top cite) for the folly of suggesting that fertility rates don’t matter to economists. Well today Mankiw seems to be having (an implicit) rethink. Dependency ratios, it seems, do matter.
Now since dependency ratios are really a function of three factors - fertility, [...]

This anniversary guest post was written by the indispensable Jérôme Guillet, who normally writes for The European Tribune.
Laurence Parisot, the head of MEDEF, the French business
organisation, recently complained that:

There is one word who meaning for the public has changed in the past 25 years: “reform”. It used to be synonymous with progress, and now it [...]

There is not much market for reviews of books published almost a decade and a half ago, so without further ado, my thoughts on The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. This evaluation is overdue because I started reading the book when I bought it, back in 1997. I put it down around page 400 (which is [...]

Before moving in to the nitty-gritty of flexicurity; what it is and whether it can work as a universal European labour market model I should take the time to thank the AFOE team for allowing me a spell as a guest-writer here at the blog in the coming two weeks. In terms of presentation my [...]

Chris “Stumbling and Mumbling” Dillow has a very interesting post on signs of German economic recovery. Interestingly, the bellwether Ifo confidence index has shown a dramatic uptick, reaching its highest level since 1991. Dillow proceeds to examine its correlation with the DAX stock market index.
Now, as Chris points out, DAX-constituents are likely to be the [...]

Are the good times and the good life still going to continue to roll in the Italy of the twenty first century? This is the core question the Economist’s Europe editor John Peet asks in the latest Economist Survey: Italy, Addio, Dolce Vita. As Peet says:
Italy is approaching a crunch. Rather like Venice in [...]

I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large - Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 - so it takes a while if you go to [...]

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, [...]

Sunday’s Washington Post had an article by one Anne Dumas that’s been blogged here and there, provocatively titled What’s American and Envied by France?. It starts with a rather shocking assertion that has, unsurprisingly, been quoted in a lot of the bloggage:
[N]ot a single enterprise founded here in the past 40 years has managed [...]