Well, I just lost a long post about the so-called Swedish model due to my own stupid carelessness the combined malevolence of Windows XP and MS Word.
Anyway, the main point was to say that the article on the subject (free for non-subscribers) in last week’s issue of The Economist was really a dishonest hack [...]

Just a bit of background info to accompany Doug’s post on AFOE:
“Everybody in Hungary knows that real income will decrease in the next two years … and very significant social groups will feel their interests hurt. If this simple rejection is transformed and mixed with national radicalism and social populism, then this is a dangerous [...]

Slovakia had elections this weekend. They don’t seem to have attracted much attention, but I think they’re worth a quick look.
Short version: a center-right government that was committed to controversial social and economic reforms got thrown out in favor of a left-wing populist.
Now, depending on what corner of the political spectrum you come from, [...]

Assuming that you, gentle readers, are not yet entirely absorbed by your preparations for the upcoming month of watching simple games of 22 men runnung after a ball before, well, Gary Lineker will hopefully be proven right again*, here’s some more interesting information about the country that is now officially run from the FIFA headquarter [...]

Do you want to save the Euro? Well one idea for how to do it has been proposed by University of Missouri-St Louis history professor John Gillingham: reissuing the 12 national currencies that were replaced with just one, while at the same time retaining the euro as a parallel currency that finds its market value [...]

Back in July I published a post about Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz’s hypothesis that those countries which sustain total fertility rates below 1.5 for any length of time may have fallen into a self-reinforcing low-fertility trap. Old Rottenhat (Ray to his friends) argued in comments that I had explained the reasons for the existence [...]

At the present time some 66 countries have fertility rates which are below the level necessary for population replacement (TFR 2.1). Within the next decade the number of counries in this group is set to grow to the point where a majority of the world’s population will be living in regions where the existing [...]

Despite appearances, and for all the stalemate it produced, yesterday’s German election has certainly confirmed that Germans are neither too afraid of change, nor too scared of instability. In fact, they chose both.

Read more… or Read more right here… »
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This is really a hybrid post, although perhaps the unifying theme - for reasons which should be clear by the end - is Denmark.
In the first place Danish journalist Kjeld Hansen has a hard-hitting article in EU Observer about just what does actually happen to all that money paid-out in the form of agricultural [...]

All is not well in the Netherlands. That was obvious in the June referendum vote, and it is also obvious in the recent economic data. The Dutch economy has been struggling to gain traction of late with poor growth and an actual contraction of 0.5% in the first quarter of 2005. Unemployment too has risen [...]