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Entries in World Economics (55)

Thursday
Jan192012

Nouriel Roubini - The Straits of America

New York - Macroeconomic indicators for the United States have been better than expected for the last few months. Job creation has picked up. Indicators for manufacturing and services have improved moderately. Even the housing industry has shown some signs of life. And consumption growth has been relatively resilient.

But, despite the favorable data, US economic growth will remain weak and below trend throughout 2012. Why is all the recent economic good news not to be believed?

First, US consumers remain income-challenged, wealth-challenged, and debt-constrained. Disposable income has been growing modestly – despite real-wage stagnation – mostly as a result of tax cuts and transfer payments. This is not sustainable: eventually, transfer payments will have to be reduced and taxes raised to reduce the fiscal deficit. Recent consumption data are already weakening relative to a couple of months ago, marked by holiday retail sales that were merely passable.

Read More:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roubini46/English

Wednesday
Jan182012

Nouriel Roubini - Fragile and Unbalanced in 2012

NEW YORK – The outlook for the global economy in 2012 is clear, but it isn’t pretty: recession in Europe, anemic growth at best in the United States, and a sharp slowdown in China and in most emerging-market economies. Asian economies are exposed to China. Latin America is exposed to lower commodity prices (as both China and the advanced economies slow). Central and Eastern Europe are exposed to the eurozone. And turmoil in the Middle East is causing serious economic risks – both there and elsewhere – as geopolitical risk remains high and thus high oil prices will constrain global growth.

At this point, a eurozone recession is certain. While its depth and length cannot be predicted, a continued credit crunch, sovereign-debt problems, lack of competitiveness, and fiscal austerity imply a serious downturn.

The US – growing at a snail’s pace since 2010 – faces considerable downside risks from the eurozone crisis. It must also contend with significant fiscal drag, ongoing deleveraging in the household sector (amid weak job creation, stagnant incomes, and persistent downward pressure on real estate and financial wealth), rising inequality, and political gridlock.

Read More:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roubini45/English

Wednesday
Jan182012

Kenneth Rogoff - Rethinking The Growth Imperative

Cambridge, United Kingdom - Modern macroeconomics often seems to treat rapid and stable economic growth as the be-all and end-all of policy. That message is echoed in political debates, central-bank boardrooms and front-page headlines. But does it really make sense to take growth as the main social objective in perpetuity, as economics textbooks implicitly assume?

Certainly, many critiques of standard economic statistics have argued for broader measures of national welfare, such as life expectancy at birth, literacy, etc. Such appraisals include the United Nations Human Development Report, and, more recently, the French-sponsored Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, led by the economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi.

But there might be a problem even deeper than statistical narrowness: the failure of modern growth theory to emphasise adequately that people are fundamentally social creatures. They evaluate their welfare based on what they see around them, not just on some absolute standard.

Read More:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoff88/English

Friday
Jan132012

Mark Weisbrot - The Economic Idiocy of Economists

The American Economic Association's annual meetings are a scary sight, with thousands of economists all gathered in the same place – a veritable weapon of mass destruction. Chicago was the lucky city for 2012 this past weekend, and I had just finished participating in an interesting panel on "the economics of regime change", when I stumbled over to see what the big budget experts had to say about "the political economy of the US debt and deficits".

The session was introduced by UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach, who put up a graph of the United States' rising debt-to-GDP ratio, and warned of dire consequences if Congress didn't do something about it. Yawn.

But the panelists got off to a good start, with Alan Blinder of Princeton, former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, describing the public discussion of the US national debt as generally ranging from "ludicrous to horrific". True, that. He asked and answered four questions.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/10/economic-illiteracy-of-economists

Friday
Jan062012

Travis Waldron, Tanya Somanader and Pat Garofalo - The 10 Craziest Economic Policy Ideas Of 2011

The economy continued to struggle through 2011, with persistently high unemployment, a foreclosure crisis that kept on burning, and banks behaving badly in a whole host of ways. And there were plenty of ideas from economists, lawmakers, and pundits about what to do about it. But some ideas were, shall we say, more…unique than othersHere are ThinkProgress’ nominations, in no particular order, for the ten craziest economic ideas of the last twelve months. Think we missed a good one? Let us know in the comments below:

Florida State Rep. Proposes Ending Ban On Dwarf Tossing To Create Jobs: In October, Florida state Rep. Ritch Workman (R) filed a bill to end the state’s ban on dwarf tossing — the practice of “launching little people for the amusement of an audience.” Workman may not condone throwing little people across his lawn, but he introduced the bill because he wanted to remove a “Big Brother law” that would create jobs: “Well, there is nothing immoral or illegal about that activity,” Workman said. “All we really did by passing that law was take away some employment from some little people.”
Read More: