Looking beyond the current woes of unemployment, or the need to work toward a more productive economy, one that can support higher wages and offset the growing burden of pensions and concurrent increase of health and education spending, with the future approaching faster than one might hope, the future of employment remains a big question […]
On Principles and Taboos
Major financial crises have always left huge amounts of debt in their wake, followed by incidents of nonpayment. Occasionally the reduction of debt has been concealed, as in the case of Germany, which, thanks to an annual inflation that averaged 17% from 1913 to 1950, reduced the value of its domestic debt to almost zero. […]
U.S. Labor Market: Supply Matters
The recovery of the U.S. economy had appeared to achieve a breakthrough in the final quarter of 2013. The economy grew at an annual pace of 3.2 percent in the last quarter. But the economy contracted again the first quarter of this year. This weak recovery implies that more jobs have been lost in the […]
The Future of Spain Economic Growth: the Elasticity of Employment
Nobody really knows what will happen in terms of Spain’s future growth. Obviously, whatever awaits will depend on many factors, both domestic and foreign. First and foremost, Spanish growth will depend on any and all future reforms and policy measures that the current and future Spanish governments may take. Unfortunately, the reform plans of the […]
How an increase in minimum wage backfires on the poor
Income inequality has increased in practically every industrialized nation in recent decades. The best measure of that change is the Gini index, named after the Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who designed it in 1912. The index values vary between zero, when everyone has exactly the same income, and 1, when one person has all of […]
