That’s the dilemna posed by the latest paper from Laurence Kotlikoff Hans Fehr and Sabine Jokisch: Will China Eat Our Lunch or Take Us to Dinner. Simulating the transition paths of economies in the U.S., EU, Japan, and China the paper develops a dynamic, life-cycle, general equilibrium model to study their interdependent demographic, [...]

UK property prices have been hovering dangerously around the zero price growth mark for the last couple of months. Year on year growth is of course dropping substantially and we are now just below the 3% annual mark. Definitely one to keep watching.
UK house price inflation fell in August according to the Office of the [...]

I think this is no longer news, but the OECD held a press conference yesterday to inform us that we are all living longer, but we still aren’t working longer, and that somehow these two facts don’t fit with our existing pension arrangements. Well perhaps it isn’t exactly news, but it still needs to sink-in [...]

I just put up a post on the economic situation of Finland. Now I am putting another. Why the sudden interest? What is there about the Finnish economy which could be of interest to more people than the five million or so who actually live there?

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Chief OECD economist Jean Philippe Cotis wasn’t only proferring recommendations to the Federal reserve yesterday. He was also not backward in coming forward with his opinions about future growth in the eurozone. Even if Cotis isn’t exactly my favourite economist I feel here he may be a little nearer the truth.
The occasion for M. [...]

Both New Economist and MacroBlog seem very upbeat about the prospects for the German economy. Macroblog cites Bloomberg and says “Things are definitely looking up“. New Economist is rather more guarded, pointing to the IMF forecast, and the recent Federal Statistics Office announcement that second quarter growth came in at 0%. But New Economist find [...]

2000-2004: Under the rule of the Social Democrat Party (PSD) and Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, Romania enjoys four consecutive years of rapid economic growth. Romania’s GDP increases by an average of nearly 6% per year; for the first time since the end of Communism, the country has four years without a recession. [...]

The UK economy showed its weakest year-on-year performance for 12 years during the second quarter of this year, and manufacturing seemed to enter recession. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth on a 12-month comparison stood at 1.7 percent during the second quarter — the weakest 12-month performance since the first quarter of 1993.
The annual growth rate [...]

I argued recently that John Snow should check out some economics before arguing that structural reforms in Europe and Japan would resolve the problem of global economic trade imbalances. Well……….
I was thumbing through the economics working papers section of the OECD yesterday, and I found this:

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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, [...]