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. […]
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 […]
Squaring the Circle: Growth, Employment and Inequality
I need to confess to the reader that I have problems, but not solutions. Specifically, there are three problems. First, the rate of growth is decreasing in several countries: certainly in Europe, but also in Japan (my generation can still recall the years of the Japanese “miracle”), in the U.S. (what today is considered growth […]
Capital controls: the right time to talk about them?
In recent months, a number of emerging countries have been experiencing capital outflows. As expected, these outflows have tended to depreciate the currencies of emerging economies. More importantly, these outflows have also started raising doubts about the resilience of growth rates in the emerging world. Money started flowing out of emerging markets right after Ben […]