Chris Dillow (of Stumbling and Mumbling), responding to Gordon Brown’s recent speech to the Labour Party, says that “economic success requires that talent not be unlocked, and remain unused”. So Brown’s call for the development of “all the talents of all the people” is “purest wibble” because “all profits come from power, and this means [...]

This weekend’s election results in Serbia, and in particular the gridlock state of the political process and the resilience of the vote for the nationalist Serbian Radical Party (as ably explained by Doug in the previous post), pose new, and arguably reasonably urgent questions for all those who are concerned about the future of those [...]

The OECD estimates the current potential capacity growth rate of the Italian economy at 1.25% a year. Actually I suspect even this very low number is over-optimistic. Growth since 2002 has been as follows: 2003 - 0.1%: 2004 - 0.9%: 2005 - 0.1%. To be sure forecast growth for this year is somewhat higher, [...]

Since the withdrawal of the CPE and the resulting collateral damage to Dominique de Villepin, not to mention Nicolas Sarkozy’s unexpected appearance as a unity figure at the height of the crisis, it’s rapidly being promulgated as conventional wisdom that France “is ungovernable”/refuses to “reform”/cannot be “reformed”. There is only one problem with this discourse, [...]

I have learned via the unlinkable newsfeed site NOS Teletekst that The Netherlands will be opening its borders to East European workers coming from the new EU member states, starting January 1st 2007. Dutch Parliament pushed back the original entry date, May 1st 2006, that was proposed by employers. The big fear is abuse of [...]

The EU launched a new website today, EURES where one million jobs within the EU will be on offer. From the EURES-site:
EURES (EURopean Employment Services) brings together the European Commission and the public employment services of the countries belonging to the European Economic Area and Switzerland. Other regional and national bodies concerned with employment issues [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Financial Times reports today that the team lead by Wim Kok, set up after the March economics summit, and charged with carrying out a review of the Lisbon process, is likely to find that we are badly behind schedule. This is hardly surprising since the Lisbon agenda was rather stronger on rhetorical nicety (including [...]

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 [...]