debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
Last week The Guardian reported that the EU Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, László Andor, cautioned David Cameron about stigmatizing immigrants from other European countries as taking excessive and gratuitous advantage of British public services (Guardian, 25 March 2013). In an article in the right-wing Sun newspaper on the same day, the Prime [...]
The primary objective of the ECB is to maintain price stability, and it measures price stability in terms of the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP).[1] As the main European indicator of inflation, the HICP is therefore an extremely important policy variable. On account of methodological difficulties, Eurostat omits owner-occupied housing (OOH) from the HICP.[2] This is problematic, as [...]
I have just held an annual Roundtable for African central bankers. One of our themes was housing finance. Africa’s future is urban: cities facilitate productivity. But cities require huge investment, of which the largest component is the housing stock. In a developed economy such as Britain, the value of the housing stock constitutes over half [...]
A sure sign of a dysfunctional market economy is the persistence of unemployment. In the United States today, one out of six workers who would like a full-time job can’t find one. It is an economy with huge unmet needs and yet vast idle resources. The housing market is another US anomaly: there are hundreds [...]
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