Fermenting Nicely - The Rise of Microbreweries
Britain now has 361 independent brewers of craft beer, up from 291 in 2014 as evidence grows of the surge in popularity of craft beer-making and consumption in the UK. It is a good example of how...
Maersk Oil's Culzean Gas Field Given Go-Ahead
I put this here because it represents an addition to the UK's supply-side capacity but the fact of the matter is that with world oil prices being so low at the moment, I wonder whether production...
Graduates Stuck in Non-Graduate Jobs
Another supply-side bottleneck - the issue of getting the young into appropriate work is covered in this Katie Allen piece in the Observer. It starts with the contention that a large proportion of...
NHS Treatment Price Tags - An Exercise for Students
Many economics teachers bring the economics of health care into their teaching at an early stage of a new course. It is a terrific issue to look at when considering the basic economic problem of...
Europe's Orphan - The Future of the Euro
In this interview on the Financial Times website, senior journalist Martin Wolf reviews ‘Europe’s Orphan’ by the FT's Martin Sandbu.
Beyond the Bike Channels
Two teachers cycling new and old Silk Roads en route to China in an epic educational and charity project. Please follow the Beyond the Bike team as they start their epic journey!...
Autumn 2015 Lectures in Economics
Here is my pick of free-to-attend autumn lectures in Economics - offering superb enrichment opportunities for ambitious and curious students and CPD for passionate teachers. I will add to the list...
Brazilian Economy Falls into a Deep Recession
After a decade of solid growth, one of the BRIC nations Brazil has fallen into recession. Unemployment is rising, inflation is high and businesses are being hit by a surge in energy prices as the...
Subscription Video-on-Demand and threats to Broadcasters
This is an excellent background article on the continued rise of Subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Sky Now. These media platforms are lavishing big...
Buns, Tax and Zero-Hours
An unusual and wide-ranging, but relatively short interview here with the newly-installed CEO of McDonald's in the UK.
Google Rejects EU Competition Probe
This really could develop into a remarkable story: Google has formally rejected the EU Competition Commissioner's assessment that it has been abusing its dominance in the market for internet...
Search for a Balanced UK Recovery Continues
UK GDP continues to head in the right direction - the figure for Q2 growth in real national output remains unrevised at 0.7% and this is a clear indication that the economy is on the right track in...
250 Years of Capitalism - Positives outweigh the Negatives
Economics is often described as the dismal science, but it often contains cheerful material. A paper by the leading American economic historian Joel Mokyr made for exuberant holiday reading....
China's money crisis explained with colouring pencils
A neat idea from BBC Newsbeat!
The Invisible Hand - BBC's A History Of Ideas
Adam Smith used the metaphor of an ‘invisible hand’ to describe how individuals making self-interested decisions can collectively and unwittingly engineer an effective economic system that is in...
Hysteresis Effects from the Global Financial Crisis
The financial crisis and the Great Recession have left Europe worse off than before due to falling investment and low productivity alongside an ageing population. That is the central message of a...
Is New York City Too Small?
The NIMBY-ism (‘not in my backyard’) of local politics leads to a bias against large cities that constrains national productivity growth. That is the central conclusion of a study by Frederic...
Huge Rise in Net Inward Migration into the UK
New figures show the highest rate of net migration on record in the UK economy sparking a fresh debate about the economic and social costs and benefits from a sustained period of the influx of...
Game Theory and the 2008 UEFA Champions League Final
Just starting game theory with my A2 students and economists hold in high regard the penalty kick as a real-life example. Technically the kicker and the goalkeeper play a zero-sum game – any gain...
E-cigarettes - Government policy to combat demerit good or government failure example?
It struck me has I was reading this BBC report on the various UK government approaches to e-cigarettes, that the rise of the e-cig offers students a useful example on various fronts when preparing...