According to Oded Galor it has become evident that in the absence of a unified growth theory that is consistent with the entire process of development, the understanding of the contemporary growth process would be limited and distorted. He quote Copernicus to the effect that:
?It is as though an artist were to gather the hands, [...]

And no, it isn’t gout, though plenty of port and fine stilton are to be recommended in any event.
No, the ailment here is an economic one. The EU Commission has just been lenient with Portugal: she has three years, not two, to put the deficit straight.

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, [...]

BusinessWeek spills a lot of ink on the rise of the car industry in Central and Eastern Europe. The idea that a lot of manufacturing is headed east is nothing new, but to see the numbers and changes laid out so explicitly gives a much clearer idea of the challenges that Western societies are facing.
Volkswagen [...]

It has become conventional to distinguish between two groups of countries within the eurozone. On the one hand there are the older, relatively richer countries, who tend of late to have been suffering from ’sub par’ growth. On the other hand we have the more recent, and relatively poorer, members like Spain and Ireland, where [...]

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All of this begs the question: why does the Italian manufacturing sector exhibit such
a high degree of inertia in its product specialisation in the face of such [...]

In a letter to the Financial Times published last week, Michael Woolfolk of the Bank of New York makes a curious contrast:
It may end up that signing on to the euro currency will require the move to a market-based economy. This will certainly not be easy for welfare-based economies, and it may not ultimately be [...]

Morgan Stanley team members Steven Jen and Eric Chaney (joined by Takehiro Sato and David Miles) debate today the interesting question of whether the eurozone economies have entered a liquidity trap (LT). Those who have no idea what one of these would look like could do worse than read Paul Krugman’s classic article on the [...]

There is a consensus view emerging that the economic impact of last Thursday’s terrorist attack will be minimal. I beg to disagree: it *may* not be. The reasoning behind this is economic not WoT/political. The apparent stylised fact we are being offered is that “a look at previous terrorist attacks… suggests that any impact [...]

China’s campaign to buy up ‘known brands’ continues. This time it is the US centenarian bicycle manufacturer Huffy. This bid has an interesting twist: Huffy is in bankruptcy, apparently for problems with a defined benefit pension scheme. IMHO this could be the tip of a looming iceberg. Best known canditates for forthcoming problems here would [...]