There is a pretty mixed bag of numbers coming in at the moment. The German economy shows some signs of a recovery of activity (here), as is the French one (here). It is important to understand however that trend growth in Germany is now extremely low, and the economy is very export dependent. The [...]

Actually just after my Chinese visitor dropped by I received a Bulgarian one, my former ‘research assistant’, young Bulgarian anthropologist Yassen Bosev. And what did Yassen want? To tell me to Forget India, Let’s Go To Bulgaria. Only trouble was, I had some bad news for him: India’s minister of Disininvestment and Technology, Arun Shourie, [...]

“Madam Wang Haiyan, who runs a pre-school class from her home, reckons that she would have been earning half of what she is now and be less happy to boot if she had stayed in her job at a state-owned firm. “
Any one else round here old enough to remember Dustin Hoffman’s ‘Little Big Man’, [...]

After a weekend of semantic analysis the currency markets didn’t take long getting back to work - the euro was only a cent off its all time high by late morning. According to Dictionary.com the relevant meaning of volatility is: tending to vary often or widely, as in price - the ups and downs [...]

Once upon a time, there was a large, intellectually hegemonic, somewhat totalising ideology rooted in a heterodox school of economics. Its advocates proposed to make massive changes to the structure of society and claimed that only such a revolutionary realignment could alleviate the contradictions and failures of the existing order and save the world [...]

A post today on The Final Word, a Prague-based email bulletin put out by a local English-language Czech news digest, got me thinking. Titled “PPF spreads its tentacles,” it’s about the secretive Czech corporate conglomerate PPF and how it uses its media holdings to advance its numerous business interests.
It’s long been the Czech Republic’s [...]

OK I’m pushing the point quite hard here, but what I want to emphasise is that a European blog in a global world has a pretty broad reach. The latest round of US employment figures are in, and they are nowhere near as pretty as everyone (including even me) was expecting. Over 400,000 people stopped [...]

Slate has a delightful piece on the board of Black’s company, Hollinger International. It seems the directors, such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle, had little serious business experience and basically rubber-stamped Black’s plans.
Daniel Gross writes, “Most of these more or less honorable folks were basically idle directors. They showed up at meetings, ate lunch, [...]

OK, before anyone tries to get us round to the painful reality that I’m a tiresome old bore: some titilation for you. Unfortunately, this is not about ’sexual tourism’, except, that is in the most general sense. (Although if anyone wants to pick up on this in the comments, I think we’re in the same [...]

Via Crooked Timber and Mark Kleinman, I’ve just read this utterly stupid column from Forbes:
Europe’s Utopian Hangover
The EU is built on a fantasy–that men and women can do less and less work, have longer and longer holidays and retire at an earlier age, while having their income, in real terms, and their standard of living [...]