Are the good times and the good life still going to continue to roll in the Italy of the twenty first century? This is the core question the Economist’s Europe editor John Peet asks in the latest Economist Survey: Italy, Addio, Dolce Vita. As Peet says:
Italy is approaching a crunch. Rather like Venice in [...]

As we all know raising the participation rates of older workers is both essential and a core component of the Lisbon Agenda, so here’s a timely report from the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society comparing policies directed towards older workers in the UK and Germany. More salacious material to stimulate all you [...]

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 [...]

Over on Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell - I think somewhat accidently, because I get the impression he believes Germans do *NOT* want to change their distorted labour incentive and tax systems - writes about the fundamental reason for the result of last Sunday’s election.

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Ok, now that Edward has already mentioned it, I might as well explain in a little more detail what I meant by saying that “on some level, the CDU might be afraid to win.”
Last Saturday evening, strolling through Stockholm’s Gamla Stan, Edward asked me about my gut feeling concerning the outcome of the German election [...]

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 [...]

Last year 700,000 new homes were built in Spain. A record number, and one which seems disproportionately high for Spains real future housing needs. In all likelihood the Spanish property market will one day crash, and prices drop considerably from their current highs. But what if they don’t? What if we ‘merely’ get a soft [...]

The papers this morning seem to be all full of ‘gloomy’ articles whose principal theme is that Europe has finally been plunged into a grave crisis by this weeks summit.
“People will tell you next that Europe is not in a crisis,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who holds the EU presidency, said after [...]

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 [...]

China is getting into car manufacture in a big way, but before going further with this, let me sidetrack you to another article in today’s FT. Here you will find two interesting details. Firstly, according to Arthur Kroeber, of China Economic Quarterly, ?Since 2003, China has gone from being a net importer of capital [...]