Managerial Insights

2023-04-26 Cecilia Attanasio Ghezzi

China's Rise (also) Depends on Diplomacy

"Chinese Diplomacy Warms Up," headlines one of the most recent issues of Caixin, the most respected economic weekly magazine in China.[1] Since the (so far failed) attempt to accredit itself as a mediator in the peace process between Russia and Ukraine on February 24, there has been a lot of activity in Beijing, with visits from several leaders. From our point of view, the most important visit began on April 5 when the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Beijing for a three-day official visit. Their intention was to demonstrate ...

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2023-04-20 Fabrizio Perretti

Poor but ... poor

Dino Risi's famous film “Poveri ma belli” (“Poor but beautiful”) was made in 1956. Two more would follow[1], thus composing a trilogy in which poverty is explicitly referred to in the titles, but is associated - unlike neorealist cinema - with the genre of comedy. Italy in the 1950s is a poor country that has just emerged from the devastation and material destruction of World War II. The 1953 parliamentary survey had indicated that "on average, families in a state of misery would turn out to be 1,357,000, or 11.8 percent of the total; and those in a poor condition 1,345,000, or 11.6 percent. ...

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2023-04-18 Donato Masciandaro

Swedish Lessons for the ECB

A good central bank is one that is understood; if it is also credible, it becomes excellent. A bad central bank is one that must be interpreted; if it also creates macroeconomic damage, it becomes terrible. From this point of view, in February the ECB took a step forward, unfortunately taking two steps back in March. Let's start with February. How to judge what the ECB did and said, also through the words of President Lagarde? Economic analysis allows us to make the question more precise: what have we understood about the reaction function of the ECB? The concept of a reaction function is what ...

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2023-03-28 Cecilia Attanasio Ghezzi

The Old Face of the New China

On March 13 the so-called “two sessions,” or “lianghiui,” were closed in Beijing: the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the National People’s Congress that take place almost simultaneously. Like each year, approximately five thousand delegates met for about a week to discuss and ratify the direction that the world’s second-largest economy will take and who will be the state leaders who manage it. Their role is the closest thing to our parliament, but when they meet the decisions are already made, and the exercise mostly resembles a public ritual. Indeed, everything ...

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Il lavoro bancario in Italia, dal 1990 a oggi

2023-03-21 Roberto Ruozi

Bank Employment in Italy: the Prospects for the Future

On January 23 of this year, the Financial Times published a long article by O. Walter and K. Martin, who discussed some considerations shared during the recent Davos Forum regarding the prospects for employment in banks, with specific reference to the situation in the U.S., but also to that of some European banks. The central point of the article concerns the fact that the main American banks – among which Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of New York Mellon are cited – and some large European banks, citing UBS and Credit Suisse (the protagonists of global economic news in recent weeks, ...

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2023-03-17 Gianmarco Ottaviano

The Role of the State in the New Phase of Globalization

In the period after the Second World War, the design of global markets was executed based on a strong trust in the ability for self-regulation under the auspices of multilateral international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. The idea was that globalization could produce benefits in terms of economic development and wellbeing for all of the countries in the world. This did happen in large part, in the sense that a series of indicators of poverty and exclusion, especially in developing countries, showed improvement in part thanks ...

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2023-02-15 Donato Masciandaro

The Fed Floats between Wall Street and the White House

The beginning of 2023 has seen the Federal Reserve continue to pursue rate rises, but at a slower pace. The Fed perseveres in its policy of “getting by”: decisions are made meeting by meeting, and the only goal seems to be to avoid mistakes, floating between the desires of the financial markets, that believe inflation “has fallen,” and those of the Biden administration, that claims it is “still high.” Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues are pursuing the same policy inaugurated last year, that does not entail any transparency on the future path of interest rates, thus not allowing ...

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2023-02-01 Cecilia Attanasio Ghezzi

China Surrenders to Covid

Draconian measures such as lockdowns, quarantines, tests, and electronic health codes disappeared without warning or a plan to prepare the immense countryside – where the population is older and there is a chronic lack of hospitals, doctors, and medicines – for the health crisis they would have to face.[1] Among other things, the decision was made in the middle of winter when the virus spreads more rapidly, and with the mass travel foreseen for the Lunar New Year holidays, that this year fell on January 22. It is impossible to avoid asking what the cost in human life will be. On January 13, ...

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2023-01-25 Fabrizio Perretti

The China That Is Also a Part of Us

An argument exists that we should never write about China, because historically it is a country where the system always exists with what can change it, and by the time we describe it, it has already changed. Yet much has been written about China, and the numerous descriptions oscillate between two extremes: that based on the misunderstanding of China being far away, “mysterious,” incomprehensible, and inexplicable; and on the other hand, that of a China that is close, that we can interpret with the categories and logics familiar to us, and where “we ourselves are also Chinese in our own ...

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2023-01-23 Gianmarco Ottaviano

Reglobalization: From the Supremacy of Economics to that of Politics?

Starting from the time of the Second World War, precisely to counter some of the causes of the conflict – as well as to stem some of its consequences – an international, diplomatic, and political movement arose aimed at achieving integration of the markets in various countries; integration that was global and multilateral, meaning that it would leave nobody out. This, for two reasons: first of all, with the aim of stability, i.e. to avoid the creation of opposing blocs; and secondly, for reasons of inclusiveness, to prevent a situation in which large industrialized countries would reach agreements ...

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