Tag archive for ‘growth’
Growth in a Buddhist Economy
I have just returned from Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom of unmatched natural beauty, cultural richness, and inspiring self-reflection. From the kingdom’s uniqueness now arises a set of economic and social questions that are of pressing interest for the entire world. Bhutan’s rugged geography fostered the rise of a hardy population of farmers and herdsmen, and [...]
Why Growth is Good
Economic growth is slowing in the United States. It’s also slowing in Japan, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Canada. It’s even slowing in China. And it’s likely to be slowing soon in Germany. If governments keep hacking away at their budgets while consumers almost everywhere are becoming more cautious about spending, global demand will shrink [...]
Angela Merkel: The World’s ‘Most Valuable Leader’
Forget Barack Obama. Forget the Hu Jintao/Wen Jiaboa duo, or David Cameron or Vladimir Putin. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is the world’s most important leader. The latest report showing Germany’s economy growing at a blistering annual rate of nearly 9%, well into recovery from a US-made economic collapse, is just further evidence of the obvious. Despite [...]
The Case for Public Investment
The fiscal crises now besetting several OECD countries risk replaying the long agony of over-indebtedness in Africa. In Africa the process was directly overseen by the IMF. Its model of debt sustainability implicitly assumed that public investment was entirely unproductive: this was the implication of the absence from the model of any link between public [...]
The End of Social Europe?
As a further round of economic crisis unfolds, many European social democrats seem frozen like a hare in a car’s headlights. They have nothing new to say about how to deal with fiscal deficits – except that the cuts must not occur all at once and that the most vulnerable must be shielded. Otherwise, economists [...]
Markets, Sustainability and the End of Politics
Within a capitalist economy there is always a settlement between the interests of capital and the interests of labour. As Shelley reminded English workers nearly 200 years ago in his poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, the greatest power always rests in the hands of labour since ‘Ye are many – they are few’. Under a [...]
Timing is NOT everything – Exit Strategies must also be credible and above all just
The battle-lines are already drawn up over when to begin withdrawing the stimulus measures that appear, for the moment, to have averted the widely feared global economic meltdown: on the one hand the inflation and deficit hawks who cannot wait for monetary policy to return to normal, and for fiscal policy to reign in the [...]
