When they introduced the euro, European governments were expecting that the new currency would rival the dollar on international markets. Twenty years later, the euro is still far behind on that account. A recent paper by Ethan Ilzetzki, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff (Why is the Euro (...)
A new type of virus is holding the world in suspense by evoking images of the worst Hollywoodian nightmares. It is known that it spread out of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, China, and then quickly propagated throughout mainland China, at least for the moment. The mortality rate of this (...)
As shown in Peter Higgins’ book “Immigration Justice”, two distinct positions dominate the immigration debate. The nationalist position assumes that states should favor the interests of their own citizens over those of foreigners. By contrast, the cosmopolitan position claims that residents are (...)
A few weeks ago, the bodies of 39 people were found in a lorry trailer in Essex. They were Vietnamese migrants, including eight women, three boys and twenty-eight men. The eldest victim was 44, the youngest 15. This was just one in a series of dreadful events that have occurred in Europe over (...)
Many people share the opinion that Mafia is a typical Italian phenomenon, something about which only Italians should worry. This opinion is wrong. Data recently released by Europol show that thousands of criminal organizations active in Europe can be labelled as of mafia-type, with about 70% of (...)
In May 2018, Giuseppe Conte became prime minister after an electoral campaign in which Italians were being told that a honey and milk Age was about to begin. It was clear to everybody that an unknown professor of Law, with no political legitimacy (he had not figured prominently in the electoral (...)
«From now on our nation’s answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare: it will be the dignity, the power, and the ethic of work. Today we are taking an historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life…The new (...)
«Would you be willing to donate one of your organs to an organ donation service immediately after your death?». This question was asked to a sample of Europeans through an Internet based enquiry promoted by the European Commission and completed in September 2006. It was included in a survey aimed (...)
Despite plenty of terrifying predictions about populist coalition victory and its consequences, the latest European election provided a rather different outcome. No tsunami materialized, no earthquake. Nothing that would wipe-out the political equilibrium at the heart of the European Union as (...)
There is no doubt that wealth mirrors taxpayers’ ability to pay better than other measures such as income. There is also no doubt that private wealth is much more unequally distributed than income, and that the dispersion in the distribution of wealth has been increasing in recent decades. (...)
Press freedom in Europe is more fragile now than at any time since the end of the Cold War». This pessimistic and rather surprising statement appears at the beginning of the 2019 Annual Report published by the Council of Europe, which is the continent’s leading human rights organisation, (...)
Paris has decided to recall its ambassador from Rome, further deepening one of the worst crises between the two neighbouring countries in recent European history. The dramatic (some say theatrical) move was motivated by the repeated verbal attacks that prominent Italian political leaders – Luigi (...)
The OECD Jobs Strategy was launched in 1994 in response to high and persistent unemployment in the member countries. Although unevenly spread across the labour force, at the time unemployment was indeed perceived as the main policy challenge facing the advanced countries.
The Jobs Strategy (...)
The Community of Advantage by Robert Sugden has just been published by Oxford University Press. The author is a professor at the University of East Anglia, a member of the British Academy, and an influential economist. In his youth, influenced by Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan, Sugden worked (...)
The European Fiscal Board (EFB) - an agency established in 2015 by the European Commission to evaluate the implementation of EU fiscal rules and to advise the Commission on fiscal policies suitable to the euro area - has published its second annual Report (10th October 2018). The Report reviews (...)
If one wonders what Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Jeremy Corbyn and Matteo Salvini have in common, the answer is that each of them has been labelled populist, a word whose meaning is therefore being diluted as a result of loose usage. As emphasized by the BBC commentator Lionel Shriver, starting (...)
Economists use the per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the main indicator of the level of material well-being achieved by a country. The GDP is the cake with which we feed ourselves; the portfolio to draw on to meet our material needs. In recent years, there have been many critical (...)
In order to achieve a satisfactory degree of socio-economic cohesion, the European authorities have long recognized the importance of convergence in per capita levels of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). As the fulfilment of this objective requires that relatively poor regions exhibit per capita (...)
A paper by economists Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales (GSZ) has recently made headlines and received widespread approval within the academic community. Their contribution, titled Long-term Persistence, provides the empirical test of a hypothesis put forward in 1993 by American (...)
After some months of amazing promises made by politicians pledging whatever might have warranted to them a parliamentary seat, the judgement day has finally come, as Italy’s general elections were held on March the 4th. Apparently, something like a tsunami materialised. In reality - however (...)
Italian general elections will be held on March the 4th, and these weeks will be remembered as a time when promises abound and all Italians are assured that from March on they will bask in eternal happiness. This is great news for Italians, after all what they suffered during the past years: no (...)
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