Blog

Should the ECB Helicopter Adjust Its Dropping Zone?

| 4 February 2015
Monetary, Blog | Tags: Inequality, QE
“Let us suppose that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1000 in bills from the sky…” This pleasant image conveyed by Milton Friedman’s famous metaphor is taken to new heights by Mario Draghi, who promised to inject €60 billion ... continue reading

Inside CETA: Unpacking the EU-Canada free trade deal

| 12 December 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: Employment, Environment, ISDS, Subsidies
How are sustainable development objectives treated in the latest major preferential trade agreements?  In late September, the European Union and Canada released the long-awaited text of a bilateral free trade pact, five years after launching talks, and almost one year on from announcing they had ... continue reading

Monetary Policy and Inequality – What Do Central Bankers Say?

| 24 November 2014
Monetary, Blog | Tags: Central Banks, Inequality
“Benign neglect” perhaps most aptly characterizes the attitude that central bankers have traditionally displayed toward the topic of economic inequality. Indeed, monetary policy and inequality have long been regarded as having nothing more in common than just the fact that they both coexist. In the ... continue reading

At Whose Service? Jobs and Services Trade in Developing Countries

| 17 November 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: Development, Employment, Poverty, Services Trade, WTO
Services-led Employment Growth? Creating jobs to match their ever increasing, relatively young labor forces is probably the biggest challenge that developing countries are facing in the medium term. Reducing unemployment is perhaps the most effective tool to achieve a wide range of development goals, such ... continue reading

Asia’s Poor Increase by One-Billion Overnight

| 16 September 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: G20, IMF, Poverty, Trade, WTO
The news has been exceptionally bad recently: carnage in the Middle East, race riots in the US, ongoing recession in the Eurozone and Japan, tension in the South China Sea, high youth unemployment virtually everywhere, the Ebola epidemic and so on and so depressingly forth. ... continue reading