What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a quarter?

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That’s the [...]

I am very happy to be back here at AFOE, if not only, for a brief one-stop guest post about the economics of the German VAT hike and more specifically how market commentators and analists might just be reading the German economy somewhat falsely at the moment in the sense that they are not taking [...]

When scientific paradigms collide everyone should duck, at least that is the best advice I can offer at the present moment. The provisional German retail sales for January are now in, and they don’t make especially pleasant reading:
“European retail sales dropped for the first time in 10 months in January as spending in Germany [...]

I think I’d better rephrase that: more overall growth, but a very mixed bag. In deriving aggregate numbers for the zone, four big economies really matter: Spain, France, Germany and Italy. Now each of these economies actually has different characteristics, so it is not clear what ‘the general picture’ means here.
Spain is the European economy [...]

The International Energy Agency have just published their forecast for oil demand next year, and its more of the same, with the emphasis on more.
Global oil consumption is expected to increase by 1.75m barrels a day next year to total 85.2m b/d, suggesting that a recent fall-off in demand is temporary… For 2006, the [...]

As Edward suggests below, the macroeconomic effects of Katrina are just now becoming known, much less felt or sorted out.
One item that will be much more widely reported is that in addition to all of the petrochemical industry located there, New Orleans was the linchpin of the Port of South Louisiana. The port is [...]

Opening my McKinseyQuarterly Newsletter today, I find an interesting link to the McKinsey Global Institute’s latest contribution (free, but registration required) to the question whether Globalization is actually civilizing, destructive, or feeble - as Wharton’s Mauro Guillen put it in this paper with reference to Albert Hirschman’s analysis of the shifting social value attributed to [...]

One person who could rightly claim to know more about global ageing and its possible consequences than anyone else in the business is the German Director of the Manheim Research Institute for the Economics of Ageing Axel B?rsch-Supan. If there’s a conference being organised, he seems to be there. Actually his comments at both [...]

I was a little surprised to read in the Christmas edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (not yet online, subscription wall, in German) that Robert Mundell seems to have changed his mind. In his seminal 1961 paper about monetary integration, he famously stated that “the optimum currency area is not the world”. Now it appears [...]

Digital distribution changing industries? So very 1999.
Think again.

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The world of physical sales is a world of scarcity. Limited shelf space, limited distribution channels, limited display area; limits wherever [...]