It’s that time of year again – when academic economics, thanks to the Nobel Prize announcements, is thrust into the public gaze. That the economics Nobel is mistitled and has quite a different status to…
Jean Tirole has won a deserved Nobel prize. The French economist from Toulouse 1 Capitole University has made some significant contributions to almost all fields in economics, but it is his work in the…
In a world where too many go to bed hungry, it comes as a shock to realise that more than half the world’s food production is left to rot, lost in transit, thrown out, or otherwise wasted. This loss is…
After the global financial crisis in 2008, economics was in disarray. Even the Queen was moved to chide economists for failing to warn about the build-up of debt in households and banks in the major economies…
What does genuine economic progress look like? The orthodox answer is that a bigger economy is always better, but this idea is increasingly strained by the knowledge that, on a finite planet, the economy…
Anyone listening to the Scottish Independence debate may wish to have a care for the English regions. Take the West Midlands, equal to the population of Scotland, cradle of the industrial revolution and…
While Edinburgh and London wrestle over the future of the pound, it has has been sinking. The slide (especially against the US dollar) is widely seen as a knee-jerk reaction to the possibility of Scotland…
If you want to understand the sometimes confounding moves played by Russian premier Vladimir Putin, then you could do worse than look at the accounts. On the face of it the country has seen 14 years of…
Ask ten people what they think about Africa’s rising cities and you get ten different opinions. The only thing they will agree on is that traffic is awful. In truth, 52 cities with more than a million…
Political wrangling over food prices has a long history, and a difficult future. We have become used to ever-cheaper food, but a closer look at what’s happening shows that what we buy and how much we pay…
Unpredictability is omnipresent in life, from dealing playing cards, through contracting an illness or getting promoted, to the rise or fall of equity markets. For those attempting to make the calls on…
When the carbon tax was introduced, there was a lot of discussion about winners and losers. The Labor government limited the number of businesses that had to pay the tax, while it also gave carbon tax…
Even Angela Merkel now seems to agree that austerity has run its course. When Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, together with other European leaders, led a fresh charge against the ill-fated policy…
Brian Cox, Mary Beard, Mick Aston, Niall Ferguson are all (just about) household names. They each have academic success – and their own television programs (“Wonders of the Solar System”, “Meet the Romans…
The UK government’s senior adviser on science has made an entirely sensible call for researchers and policy makers to move the climate change debate towards workable strategies and solutions. The trouble…
When FIFA awarded the 2014 World Cup finals to Brazil seven years ago, it looked as if the tournament would be a coming out party for the country. Now, the picture is far more mixed. It has become fashionable…
Few economics books have caused quite the stir which accompanied the release of the English version of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century. And there can be few who are not familiar with…
Since the 1950s, with a few rare exceptions in the 1970s, the middle class – all over the world – has been getting worse off. Specifically, the middle class’ purchasing power, as with that of the working…
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is enjoying another moment in the sun. Australian politics is starting to move to the beat of its drum as Treasurer Joe Hockey talks about an “end to the age of…
There’s something to be said for the suggestion that politicians habitually cite academic papers they have never read and thus use them as convenient props for measures they would have implemented anyway…