At this point, there is little that the European Central Bank can do to increase or maintain output in the Eurozone.
When the economy is operating below its potential, larger fiscal deficits are likely to increase demand and output.
When the economy is operating below its potential and monetary policy is at the effective lower bound, fiscal policy should prioritize increasing output over decreasing public debt.
In a case like the US women’s national soccer team where the revenues that they generate and their on-field performance both exceed those of the men’s team, there is no justification for lower pay.
Fining companies above a certain size that fail to provide the same remuneration to men and women employees performing comparable roles would be an effective way of closing the gender pay gap.
Christine Lagarde, currently head of the International Monetary Fund, has been nominated to succeed Mario Draghi as president of the European Central Bank (ECB). The announcement came as part of a package of appointments to other key roles in European institutions: the president of the European Commission; the president of the European Council; and the European Union’s high representative for foreign and security policy.
In May, the US Treasury published a report to Congress on the macroeconomic and foreign exchange policies of major trading partners of the United States. As Stanford economist and former Chicago Booth professor John Cochrane noted on his blog, this made clear reference to the possibility of currency manipulation:
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.
