Selecting candidates for membership of the ECB Executive Board based primarily on nationality ahead of competence is likely to have a negative effect on the quality of monetary policy in the Eurozone.
Although the central bank can never be an entirely technocratic institution, the selection process for the ECB President and members of the Executive Board is significantly worsened by intergovernmental trade-offs involving appointments to other European institutions.
Mexico's persistent bilateral trade surplus with the United States implies that Mexico is following policies that keep the peso artificially weak against the US dollar.
The existence of a multi-year trade deficit of Country A with Country B implies that B has successfully tilted the playing field in its favor in terms of such policies as tariffs, non-tariff barriers, and the exchange rate between them.
How should economics be introduced to undergraduate students? Since the crisis and the Great Recession began more then a decade ago, many young people have complained that what is taught in intro courses seems to bear no relation to the pressing issues that they hoped the subject would help them to understand – poverty, inequality, globalization, environmental sustainability, financial instability, robots and the digital economy.
China’s worldwide investments have expanded dramatically over the past decade, particular in infrastructure projects. In the European Union and elsewhere, this has raised some concerns about security and other geopolitical and economic matters. So we invited our European panel of economic experts to express their views on whether Europe’s governments should consider favoring local firms for public infrastructure projects over potentially lower-cost bidders from elsewhere in the world.
Over the course of 2018, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on approximately $283 billion of US imports, with rates ranging between 10% and 50%. In response, US trading partners, especially China, retaliated with tariffs averaging 16% on approximately $121 billion of US exports.
Recent nominations to join the board of governors of the Federal Reserve have raised concerns about political threats to the independence of monetary policy-making. The Economist has explained the dangers of weakened central banks, not only in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. And economists and economic journalists have questioned the economic ideas of President Trump’s latest Fed picks, both of whom have now withdrawn their names.
The recent scandal of rich and famous people buying places for their children at elite colleges has led to a renewed public conversation about the system of legacy preference in admissions at many top US universities. We invited our US panel to express their views on the likely effects of legacies on potentially high-achieving applicants from less advantaged backgrounds and on wider society.
When more affluent people move into an urban neighborhood, the influx can raise house prices and the value of local amenities, leading to the displacement of long-time lower-income residents – a process sometimes known as gentrification. We invited our European panel of economic experts to express their views on whether governments in Europe should be doing more to counter this phenomenon via a range of housing market policies.
