“The Notion of the Competitiveness of Countries is Nonsense”
A 2004 book by Martin Wolf provided the intellectual foundation for the competitiveness fad. Ironically, Wolf debunked his own thesis in it.
Read more...A 2004 book by Martin Wolf provided the intellectual foundation for the competitiveness fad. Ironically, Wolf debunked his own thesis in it.
Read more...A new study tries to justify high pay for supposedly top performers. But all it really does is prove that feedback loops are powerful.
Read more...An important element of how income inequality is becoming institutionalized in the US.
Read more...It should come as no surprise that real estate kingpins buy political favors on a regular basis. A new study estimates the payoff.
Read more...Yves here. I’m quite interested in reader reactions to this scheme. My big reservation is that the amount of the scrip devised by the authors, the TCC, has to be limited to the an amount of discount of future tax payments that is deemed to be credible. Given that Bill Mitchell has estimated that Greece […]
Read more...A review of the pros and cons of various parallel currency options for Greece.
Read more...Hillary Clinton does not want to talk about past economic controversies.
Read more...Slavery and periods of low pay to labor are correlated with low innovation .
Read more...Paul Krugman’s latest column fingers some valid targets but lets way too many other equally deserving ones off.
Read more...As readers know all too well, there is so much obviously half-baked economic research that this site could turn itself over to shredding examples and only scratch the surface. But we have established the Frederick Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity to highlight outstanding examples of economic shillery in which the attempt at analysis is obviously cooked so as to produce a pre-determined outcome.
Read more...Why does Paul Krugman find it so difficult to admit to past error?
Read more...Dave here. This is a readable discussion of inequality between nations, but the conclusions suffer from the conceit that people – particularly people in poor countries – have universal freedom, wherewithal and mindset to pick and choose what country to which they want to emigrate. But other than that nitpick, worth a read. By Branko […]
Read more...As many other central banks in the Asian region, the People Bank of China (PBoC) has been on an easing mode for a few months now and more seems to be in the store. The once relatively polarized debate on what the PBoC monetary policy stance should be has increasingly leaned towards additional easing. Some analysts are even proposing full-fledged quantitative easing (QE), in the form of US Treasury sales to raise funds for assets locally, such as local government bonds and other hardly–performing assets. There is no doubt that the PBoC could, thereby, bring another big stimulus into the already heavily massaged Chinese economy as it would help debt-saddled local governments to clean their balance sheets and, at the same time, allow banks’ to lend further. As if this were not enough, any additional easing – capital controls permitting- would also push the RMB to a more depreciated level, bringing thereby an additional push to external demand.
Read more...Mankiw tells us in his most recent NYTimes column that economists agree that Free Trade is good. He links to a poll in which, essentially, mainstream economists of different persuasions, some Keynesian and some not, and different political views, some liberal and some conservative, say that trade agreements are good. He backs his argument by suggesting that theoretically the argument is at the heart of the economics profession since the beginning; I guess an argument of authority.
Read more...A new paper shreds the myths that justified the misguided application of austerity and wage-rate reduction policies in Greece and the Eurozone.
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