In comments to the post on Kosovo, Alex Harrowell asked the following reasonable question:
“How can you have something that’s both a “mineral resource grab” and an “economic black hole”?”
The short answer: you can, because it’s Kosovo.
Here’s why. There has been no serious investment in those mines since the Yugoslav economy hit the skids in [...]

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 [...]

News today which is of more than passing interest from the Czech Republic. The South Korean industrial group Hyundai has announced that it is going to build its first European car plant at Nosovice. The factory - which is scheduled to cost around one billion euros - should begin production in October [...]

Two bits of news this week appear to be unrelated. The interesting question is whether appearances are once more deceptive.
Firstly the US Treasury note situation:
At 6:23 am ET. the 10-year note yielded 4.393 percent while the two-year note yielded 4.396 percent.
Or as the FT puts it:
Yields on 10-year US Treasuries briefly fell below those on [...]

The Chinese economy could be 20% bigger than previously estimated. Since almost everything about Chinese data should have ‘best guess’ status, this probably hardly comes as a surprise, and indeed the estimate itself should be treated with the customary caution, but yes, that is the conclusion which is apparently being drawn from the latest [...]

The idea that there was a global savings glut now having gone out of fashion, some are presently arguing that what we have is an investment dearth (my own view is that these two effectively mean the same thing, since the issue is a relational one). More evidence for this investment dearth hypothesis comes today [...]

John Snow obviously had had sight of the document ( and here pdf ) when he went round lecturing us that Europe may become a non-favoured environment for US FDI:
“Foreign investment in France and Germany fell sharply in 2004, reinforcing concerns that inflexible labour practices and weak domestic demand are driving investors elsewhere.
In France, inward [...]

This is a very convenient moment to put up this post. Alan Greenspan has just admitted that he’s human like the rest of us, and that he doesn’t have a very good explanation for why long-term interest rates have been falling at a time when he and his Fed colleagues have been busy raising [...]

South Korean manufacturing giant Hyundai has picked Slovakia as the site for a new $870m (?466m) car plant, one of the biggest deals in the car sector this year. The factory, which will open in 2006, is intended to produce up to 200,000 vehicles a year under Hyundai’s Kia brand. The north [...]

I’ve been trying to understand exactly what happened at the WTO ministerial conference in Cancun. That they’ve come apart is pretty clear, but there is a certain amount of ambiguity about why and who is to blame. The crux of the matter appears to be the “Singapore issues”, for which you can find [...]