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International trade is essential for economic growth. Similar to last year, global trade is expected to grow less than global GDP in 2017. This is not good news, especially when…

IREF is a free-market oriented think tank based in France. It promotes ideas, debates, events, and rigorous academic research. With regard to research, IREF supports original research projects that lead…

Rule Flouting Politicians and the Willingness to Cooperate The market oriented democracy in the West enjoys a historically unprecedented period of wealth and peace today. This success is based primarily…

The EU is facing difficult challenges within its borders (weaker economic performance and Brexit) and outside (a more inward-looking America). The Commission has recently released a White Paper describing possible…

Kevin Dowd is professor of finance and economics at Durham University. Kevin has written extensively on the history and theory of free banking, central banking, financial regulation, and monetary systems.…

Greece’s government debt keeps Europe busy for almost 7 years now. The government debt ratio adds up to almost 180% of the GDP. According to Transparency International, Greece is ranked…

The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, has recently delivered in Westminster a rather uncontroversial Spring Budget. What has been greatly controversial, and rather embarrassing, was that the Chancellor…

In February 2017, the Italian government defused a heated confrontation with the representatives of licensed taxi drivers. They were asking for protection against forms of allegedly unfair competition, such as…

Governments around the globe are trying to limit the use of cash by their citizens. Most European countries already implemented upper limits for the amount of cash that can be…

Economists do not regard the world as a zero-sum game, but as a positive sum game in which all voluntary participants in an interaction are winners and no one loses.…