Why healthy people have high coverage and those most at risk don’t
A serious problem in countries with private health insurance is that some people get under-insured or have no insurance at all. This under-insurance problem was one of the motivations for Obamacare...
What Full Employment Means
This is an excellent short piece from the Economist exploring the concept of full employment
Short Videos on Price Fixing
Here is a selection of short news videos on real world examples of price fixing in markets
Credence goods and misbehaviour by unscrupulous sellers
Credence goods exist when the seller has specialist knowledge unavailable to the buyer and this information asymmetry can be used by some to gouge higher prices and extract consumer surplus.
Further intervention suggested in Fixed Odds Betting Terminal market
Here's a fascinating example of intervention in a market and potential government failure that you may wish to share with students. An all-Parliamentary report has been released on the Fixed Odds...
Paris experiments with driverless buses
They are small and travel slowly but this short clip hints at further moves towards a smarter and more sustainable transport economics for one of the world's great cities.
Rapid Bus Transit and Growth in Dar es Salaam
A great development economics clip, with the World Bank looking at how the development of the new Rapid Bus Transit system in Dar es Salaam has improved the transport situation in this most...
Alibaba buys Moneygram
Interesting merger story from the US today: the finance arm of Alibaba, Ant Finance, are buying money transfer firm, MoneyGram, subject to regulatory approval. One wonders what Mr.Trump makes of...
Finland aims to be tobacco free by 2040
The Finnish government has introduced a staggeringly ambitious aim to make their country tobacco free by 2040. technically this aim requires consumption of all kinds of tobacco to fall below 2% of...
Economics News Quiz - w/e 27 January 2017
Here's this week's 6-question multi-choice quiz based on news stories relating to Economics.
Tesco Goes for External Growth with Booker Takeover
A classic example here of backward vertical integration as retailer Tesco has agreed a takeover of wholesaler and logistics business Booker Group.
Keynes's General Theory tops ranking of most influential scholarly books
This week we learned that John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) had been voted the most significant scholarly work for modern Britain.
Universal Healthcare without the NHS
We British like traditions. A well-established one which comes round every year is the “winter crisis” in the NHS. Health provision is a political hot potato not just for this government, or indeed...
Can we avoid the next financial crisis?
This is a quick video primer on the underlying causes of financial crises featuring three Nobel Laureates - Joseph Stiglitz, Paul R. Krugman and Robert Engle.
Will China rule the world?
An introductory level analysis of the reasons for China's growth, with five Nobel laureates offering a perspective on why China has grown and whether it will become the world's biggest economic power.
The evolution of taxation by cartoonist KAL
This is a fantastic introduction to taxation as part of fiscal policy. On a sheet of graph paper, I'll first get my students to firstly design their own optimal income tax system (and contrast with...
Inequality and Hyper-Globalisation
Paul Krugman, Angus Deaton and Joseph Stiglitz look at aspects of inequality driven by globalisation and pervasive rent-seeking in this short video. Over the long run can we ever close the enormous...
Can Game Theory avoid wars?
Another in the UBS Nobel perspectives series: this time Robert Aumann and Roger Myerson look at the application of game theory to war, starting from the perspective that military preparedness and...
Theresa May's 'Modern Industrial Strategy'
It may be worth reminding students that this year's exams were probably written before Theresa May became Prime Minister and, as such, she's unlikely to get a mention in any questions (I could be...
What is the role of manufacturing in today’s economy?
Manufacturing is in the spotlight as a way to revitalise economies.
The Economist takes a look, and
I’ve summarised some of the article.