politics, economy and employment & labour
Funding an ecological transition in Europe via ‘green money’ bonds would be economically justifiable. To what extent can the money created by the central bank be used to finance investments in the environment? This is a question often asked today. The green activists respond with enthusiasm that the central bank—and, in particular, the European Central […]
Last week I saw a surprising statistic: the GDP of Russia is of the same order of magnitude as the combined GDP of Belgium and the Netherlands. In 2017 Russian GDP was 1,469 billion dollars (according to the International Monetary Fund). Belgium had a GDP of 491 billion dollars and the Netherlands 824 billion dollars; […]
There seems to be no end in sight for the Bitcoin bubble. This comes close to the great bubble developments that we have known in history, including the tulip bulb bubble in sixteenth century Holland, the South Sea bubble in the eighteenth century, and many others. These bubbles and today’s Bitcoin bubble are always driven […]
The new information technologies have created a whole range of companies that have become extremely profitable. The most successful ones are in the list of the top ten most valuable companies in the world. Valuable here means the monetary value of all outstanding shares of these companies; their capitalization as economists call it. Alphabet (better […]
The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, will not enter the history books as an enlightened leader. However, when in 2014 he had to decide to allow the Scottish referendum, he used his brain and opened the door for the referendum. It took place on October 14, 2014. Only 45% of the Scots voted for independence. […]
The British government has officially started the “divorce” procedure from the European Union. This procedure must be completed within two years. In April 2019 the UK will cease to be a member of the EU. Most divorces are painful affairs mainly because an agreement has to be found on who pays whom. The same will […]
The discussions about CETA, the trade agreement between Canada and the European Union, have focused almost exclusively on two questions. They are important but certainly not the most fundamental ones. In this article I first discuss these two questions and then turn to the more fundamental question of how far we should push globalization. The first […]
The mandate of Theresa May’s government, as she stated when taking over as the UK’s Prime Minister, is to “make a success of Brexit”. Although the detail of what success here means is unclear, there can be no doubt about what it means in general. It should be interpreted as keeping access to the EU […]
How should the European Union react to the decision of the British people to withdraw from the union? This is the question that is at the center of the political debate in Europe. The starting point in trying to answer this question is the observation that the European Union has a very negative image today, […]
It looks like Greece may get some debt relief. There is as yet no certainty about this because some German politicians continue to conduct rear-guard battles to prevent it. What is certain, however, is that all Eurozone countries, with the exception of Greece, have been enjoying debt relief since early 2015. That may seem surprising to the […]
The discussions about Brexit have centered around the question of whether it is in the national interest of the United Kingdom to remain in the EU or to leave it. It appears today that the British public is split about this question, so that the outcome of the referendum remains highly uncertain. The question of […]
How far does the UK’s draft renegotiation proposal go in reforming the country’s EU membership? Paul De Grauwe writes that the deal is largely an exercise in keeping up appearances, with most of the agreed terms making little substantive difference to the UK’s terms of membership. He argues that rather than pretending to have achieved real reform, […]
