At the present time some 66 countries have fertility rates which are below the level necessary for population replacement (TFR 2.1). Within the next decade the number of counries in this group is set to grow to the point where a majority of the world’s population will be living in regions where the existing [...]

One of the many reasons I continue to support the Turkish EU accession process is because I think it will be good for human rights and democracy in Turkey, and good for the Kurds. This latest spat between Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan and his Danish hosts, is simply another good example of this at [...]

The EU’s tug of war with Turkey over human rights continues. This weekend attention has been focused on an academic conference held at Istanbul Bilgi University to discuss issues arising from and surrounding the massacre of Armenians which took place following the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
The most surprising thing in fact may have [...]

Confronting Demographic Change is the title of a two day conference currently being organised by Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities Commissioner Vladimir Spidla. The emphasis of the conference is on gender and family impact issues.
You can find a background briefing paper here.
This is also an interesting presentation.
Here’s a summary of the objectives. It’s very [...]

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, [...]

There is a very interesting article in todays Financial Times. For the first time an executive board member of the ECB - Lucas Papademos - has spoken openly about the difficulties presented by having a single monetary policy for such a diverse set of economies. In fact these comments take on more significance in the [...]

Because no one has one. Well, no one has a public plan about how to handle one or more rejections of the European consitution in upcoming national referenda. But as the French referendum is approaching and the numbers do not look too good for the “yes” camp, unofficial Plan Bs are suddenly everywhere, if only [...]

Or the idea that while Russia can bring hundreds of millions of goodies for Kuchma and Yanukovych, the European Union, Poland and other countries to the west have things to offer too.
One publication from Ukraine sees the conference we mentioned as evidence that Germany has been plotting a coup in Kiev. (The URL in the [...]

On a day which sees the Parmalat heat being turned up to full blast, with a looming ‘cara a cara’ between former Chief Financial Officer Fausto Tonna and Parmalat chief legal counsel Gian Paolo Zini, and while in the United States a class action law firm has named investment bank Citigroup Inc and auditing [...]