Growing & Slowing Down Like China
China is a middle income country and - measured at PPP exchange rates - the largest economy in the world. China's phenomenal economic growth has mostly come about from investment and copying...
How Much Does Management Matter?
Productivity varies greatly across countries and traditionally, economic theory has looked at the importance of variations in the quantity and quality of factor inputs such as land, labour and cost...
Do patents help or hinder innovation?
Innovation matters because there are limits to simply copying or imitating what rival firms have managed to achieve. Do patents help or hinder innovation?
Vertical restraint and monopoly power
Vertical restraints involve exclusive deals between businesses. To what extent do they break the norms of market competition and lead to higher monopoly profits and a loss of consumer welfare? or...
Western Mongolia's Road to Development
I used to have an A level student who insisted that bridges were the answer to more or less every development challenge. Naturally, building bridges is better than constructing walls (!) and he did...
A Short Primer on the Chinese Economy
Here is a very useful twenty minute primer lecture from Chatham House on the Chinese economy. Since undertaking economic reform in 1978, China has experienced the fastest sustained expansion by a...
Is Iceland's tourism surge sustainable?
The growing number of tourists visiting Iceland has lifted tourism's contribution to Iceland's economy but there are real fears that the boom has parallels with the boom and bust before the Global...
Deutsche - The World's Most Dangerous Bank?
This article provides some of the historical backstory to the mounting problems of Deutsche Bank - a bank that appeared to have come out of the Global Financial Crisis in reasonable shape but...
Defending Globalisation - Special Report from the Economist
One of those must read enrichment articles for students interested in globalisation and its discontents. Naturally the Economist favours a world with fewer tariff and non-tariff barriers but there...
Shut Down Points: The Rise and Fall of Blackberry
It has taken some time, but since 2010 the decline in market share for Blackberry handsets has been nothing short of calamitous. The number of sales has collapsed from over 50 million in 2010 to...
Oil slump hits Indian remittance incomes
I've just started looking at the interconnected nature of markets - and this is a lovely example.
Sub-Saharan GDP growth may fall below 2% claims World Bank
I make a point of having a look at the Africa Pulse report because it is packed full of useful analysis and comment on some of the key factors shaping growth and development outcomes for this...
Quantitative Easing - BBC Briefing Room
A good resource for students and teachers. In this episode of the BBC radio 4 series, The Briefing Room (broadcast in September 2015), David Aaronovitch explores how QE works and examines the...
Britain must build more homes warns Nationwide
I suspect that this might be the gravest supply-side threat for the British economy going forward. The issue is that we aren't building houses for a variety of reasons - planning legislation and...
Behavioral Economics of Pro-Social Plastic Bag Tax
Which works best, the carrot or the stick? In this short interview one of our favourite behavioural economists Joe Gladstone, Assistant Professor at University College London, discusses the plastic...
Artificial Intelligence and the Future
This really is superb enrichment stuff for students and their teachers!
Spotify in talks to acquire SoundCloud
Spotify needs scale and a broader range of users - will a bid for the German-based business SoundCloud make good commercial sense in the increasingly contestable global market for digitally...
New series of resources from the Bank of England - The Knowledge Bank
Our friends at the Bank of England have been working hard at devising and presenting a new series of interactive resources on their website called The Knowledge Base. They have a set of information...
China in 2031 - A Look into the Future!
Here is a presentation in Prezi format from some of my Year 13 students who won an internal competition dissecting projections for the Chinese economy over the next fifteen years. I have also...
Chinese peer to peer losses mount
Another interesting insight into the financial sector in China. Because of state-control of the financial sector, the interest rates charged to commercial borrowers (largely SOEs) are lower than...