Political economy of debts and deficits (4): Hypotheses explaining debt...
The fourth (and final) part of the PE of debts and deficits closes with the last three hypotheses explaining debt accumulation in the past 40 years in many industrial economies. In the end it includes...
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Graph(s) of the week: What is specialization?
According to the classical international trade theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo countries specialize in producing those goods and services in which they have a comparative advantage....
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Beware of leaders who use ideology, they steal the most!
In last week's issue of the Economist there is an excellent piece linking the usage of ideology in political rhetoric and rampant corruption. Kleptocrats like to (need to) use ideology to either...
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Graph of the week: The misery index
Recently I came across a new interesting index of economic development measuring the opposite of the usual wealth, prosperity, happiness and income p/c. This one ranks countries in reverse order, it...
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Is the World a safer place?
A bit of international relations and foreign policy this time (a slight digression from economics).Consider the following recent events:A passenger flight gets shot down by a surface-to-air missile in...
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"The state of humanity is improving"
In my previous blog post I called upon some of the evidence from a very interesting website called Human Progress. Once you go to their website the first thing that welcomes you is the sentence from...
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Week links (9)
Some texts that caught my attention over the past few weeks:1. Argentina's defaultAs you may or may not noticed in these summer weeks, Argentina has declared a bankruptcy for the second time in 13...
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Argentina's default - what's it all about?
Two weeks ago Argentina has once again declared default on its debt (the last time being 13 years ago during the infamous Corralito in 2001). This makes it their 9th default since they got their...
View ArticleWhat happens if the "right" people don't hold power?
A bit of bureaucratic wisdom by Sir Humphrey Appleby (Yes Minister TV series).If the video doesn't work, see it on this link.
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Gerrymandering explained
What is gerrymandering? The simplest explanation would be: instead of voters choosing their politicians, politicians choose their voters. Confused? Take a look at the following video from Ezra...
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Corruption and re-election: the curious case of Croatia
First of all apologies to my regular readers as there hasn't been a lot of blogging activity during the past two weeks. The reason for that is primarily my busy schedule as the academic year has...
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Liberty in the long run
Back to blogging after a short break. I recently came across an older, 2010 article from Scot Sumner on Econlog, where he discussed the neoliberal revolution that began in the late 1970s. A very good...
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Imports and exports - two sides of the same coin
International trade seems to be one of the most misunderstood areas of economics for the average layman (the leading position of the most misunderstood area of economics is still being held by monetary...
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Jean Tirole wins the 2014 Nobel prize in economics
It's that time of the year again - the Nobel prize announcements. As always, the last in line is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Albert Nobel, or colloquially the Nobel...
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Railway links: or how does one solve the problem of monopoly in infrastructure?
Here is a map showing the service of Amtrak train company, America's government subsidized passenger railroad company.The map depicts Amtrak's stations across the US, where the size of the circle...
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The ECB stress test: same old, same old
The ECB performed another stress test on Europe's biggest banks. Here is the full report and here is the brief presentation. This stress test represents a yearlong audit of Europe's largest lenders to...
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In memoriam: Gordon Tullock
More than a decade after Mancur Olson, and almost two years after James Buchanan and Elinor Ostrom, another champion of public choice theory has passed away, at the modest age of 92. Gordon Tullock,...
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Graph of the week: A country divided
This weekend Germans celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A symbolic event that represented the end of an era (both the Cold War and communism in Eastern Europe were finally...
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Two faces of modern entrepreneurship
The Atlantic had a very interesting recent text on the "Mysterious Death of Entrepreneurship in America" where they tell the tale two breads of entrepreneurs, one thriving and the other one hopelessly...
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The German Social market economy
I've spent the entire last week in Germany, as a part of a delegation of Croatian economists and economic experts, organized by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS). The idea was to visit the main...
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