Online Articles

Two distinct patterns have been characterizing the news media landscape lately, First, according to the World Press Trends data, for example, daily print newspaper circulation between 2012 and 2017 has declined by 20 percent in Europe, 12 percent in North America, and 31 percent in Oceania. Of course, Internet and social media have played a crucial role in explain this dynamic. But there is more to it.

Good news in the fight against the Corona pandemic have accompanied us during the last few weeks. On November 8th, the Mainz-based pharmaceutical company BioNTech and its American partner Pfizer announced that their vaccine is more than 90 percent effective in the decisive third round of tests. Exactly one week later, the US-based company Moderna presented similar promising data. The duo became a trio a week later: AstraZeneca also reported that its phase-3 tests were successful.

This year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize came as a real surprise. The World Food Programme (WFP) of the United Nations received the award “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.” In betting agencies, the most popular candidates were the World Health Organisation and Greta Thunberg. Very few had the WFP on their betting slips.

The Coronavirus has infected more than 48 million people and caused more than a million deaths. Numbers are still on the rise. This virus has not only taken people’s lives but also people’s jobs, businesses, and wealth. In a sentence, it has created an unprecedented global economic crisis.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, comparing political and economic system appeared to have become a futile exercise. Western democracies had outperformed the socialist-communist social systems. Yet, thirty years later we see that no “End of History” has occurred, and that the fundamental question of economic systems is back. Despite being an authoritarian one-party state, China has become a global economic and military superpower. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rigorous action taken by the Chinese government is sometimes praised as effective and superior to that of the West.

Vivian in Pretty Woman, Tralala in Last Exit to Brooklyn, Fantine in Les Misérables – sex workers are commonly featured in popular culture. Social perceptions of a sex worker’s daily life are inevitably influenced by how sex work is portrayed in fiction. Some of these perceptions turn into stereotypes that are also reflected in policymaking, which often frames sex workers as either vulnerable victims of human trafficking or as drug-addicted survival sex workers. A UK Conservative Party Human Rights Commission’s report, published in 2019, calls for implementation of the so-called ‘Nordic Model’, which makes buying (but not selling) sexual services illegal. In fact, according to leading sex work researchers, occupational reality is a lot more diverse than the report suggests, with many sex workers exercising more economic agency than commonly expected.

Although we live today in an interconnected global economy, where international trade is the norm, and most of the products we use daily are manufactured abroad, agriculture remains one of the most protectionist industries. All over the world, the agriculture sector is heavily subsidied and protected by governments from foreign competition. For example, in the United States, 20 billion dollars are allocated from the federal budget every year to subsidize the agricultural sector, while Europe gives 72 billion dollars every year in support of the agricultural industry. Today, due to these subsidies, several trade disputes keep the World Trade Organization (WTO) busy.

As a reaction to COVID-19, governments are making extensive financial aid available. However, beyond helping out households and companies in need, aid also attracts opportunists. Because of this, the OSCE is expecting corruption to increase. Yet, this danger differs across countries, even within Europe, where corruption is less problematic than in other regions. In Scandinavian countries, corruption within the civil service affects people’s lives very mildly. In some countries of Eastern and Southern Europe, the situation is more complex but not hopeless, as shown by recent encouraging developments in a number of countries, e.g. Estonia.

In recent years, the word “populism” has been everywhere. The first figure shows the rising use of the term by considering the frequency with which it was googled over the 2004-2020 period. As one can see, the US Presidential elections raised considerable interest. Queries reached a peak at the beginning of 2017, when Donald Trump took office. A burst of interest in populism also went hand in hand with Jair Bolsonaro’s political fortunes in Brazil. He was indeed depicted by the International Press and by many neutral observers as an ultra-right-wing populist, who took the presidency of the world’s fourth-largest democracy by virtue of people’s frustration, disillusion and anger.

While Europe’s GDP declines (12.1% in the Eurozone and 11.9% in the EU) and the debate on the EU next 7-year budget becomes heated, the relations between specific countries and the EU went largely unnoticed. The fact in point is that on July 10, the ECB welcomed Bulgaria and Croatia to the ERM2, aka as “the Euro’s Waiting room”.