Archive
China Is Also Getting Old
The last Chinese census provided a picture of the very new China: 1.412 billion people, of whom over 60 percent live in cities and only 63.4 percent are in working age, versus 70 percent just ten years ago.[1] To be clear, over-65 people are now 13 percent of the total versus just 9 percent in the 2010 census. “China is growing old without first having grown rich,” wrote the New York Times,[2] paraphrasing the well-known maxim of Deng Xiaoping. And the trend won’t be easy to stop. The birth rate dropped for the fourth year in a row, such that in 2020 only 12 million children were born, ...
The Infrastructure of the Future? Car Parking for Sustainable Mobility
Italy sees sustainability and infrastructure as the key to revive the process of economic growth, that has disappeared over the past twenty years. There are many important areas of infrastructure, from traditional areas such as roads and railways, to new material infrastructure such as satellites, to immaterial infrastructure such as human capital and social cohesion. To paraphrase the singer Jovanotti, “when a definition captures them, the world is ready for a new generation.” If capturing the attention of investors is just as important, why limit ourselves to looking at satellites in the ...
The Infrastructure of the Future? Car Parking for Sustainable Mobility
Italy sees sustainability and infrastructure as the key to revive the process of economic growth, that has disappeared over the past twenty years. There are many important areas of infrastructure, from traditional areas such as roads and railways, to new material infrastructure such as satellites, to immaterial infrastructure such as human capital and social cohesion. To paraphrase the singer Jovanotti, “when a definition captures them, the world is ready for a new generation.” If capturing the attention of investors is just as important, why limit ourselves to looking at satellites in the ...
Finance and Social Media: A Dangerous Combination
Financial crises and the scandals associated with them recur over the years, and it’s no different now. After the great crisis of 2007-2008, they actually seemed destined to disappear, but the reality is that they are as relevant as ever, even though they haven’t reached the level of intensity of those years. With respect to the past, their quality has changed, as demonstrated by some very recent events which can provide us with interesting information. I will cite four of them, three that are very similar, and one that is different due to some “new” aspects. On the one hand, I refer to ...
Sovreignism and Currency: Istanbul Today, Byzantium Yesterday
If a country goes through three central bank governors in two years, as happened in Turkey, it means that its monetary policy is not credible. So it's no wonder that the Turkish lira is suffering and inflation is galloping. At the end of March, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fired the central bank governor Naci Ağbal, who had been appointed in November 2019, to take the place of Murat Uysal. In turn, Uysal had been appointed in July 2019 to replace Murat Çetinkaya. How can we explain this waltz at the central bank? Let's start from the beginning. The decree that removed Çetinkaya did ...
Rural China and the Return to Youth
When Xi Jinping officially declared the defeat of poverty last February, the officials assigned to the project were transferred to “rural revitalization,” with the task of dealing with even more complex problems such as depopulation, the ageing of the population, and the chronic lack of work in the internal areas. “China is still the largest developing country in the world,” the deputy propaganda minister Xu Lin stated at the time. And he added: “To face inequality, the inadequate development of the internal areas of the country, and to reduce the imbalance between urban and rural territories, ...
Brexit, Northern Ireland, and the Risks for Trade between the United Kingdom and the EU
What is the price of Brexit, and what has the United Kingdom gained from it? The violence seen in Northern Ireland starting last Good Friday is there to remind us that calculating the costs and benefits of a decision made on the tenuous boundary that separates economics and politics is not only premature, but also very complicated. The reason is that the context is unsettled, and while we begin to take stock of the first months since Brexit, unexpected clouds are forming on the horizon. We will start with what has happened so far to trade between the United Kingdom and the European Union. In January ...
2021: An Artificial Intelligence Odyssey
When we reflect on artificial intelligence – as we are doing in the Dossier of this issue – it is useful to recall one of the most famous figures in the history of film: HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece and cult film. More than an odyssey in space, though, the film tells of a voyage in time – from primitive man to the man of the future – in which intelligence is the true protagonist, and in which HAL (an abbreviation whose letters precede the well-known brand IBM) is more than a computer in a traditional sense, but is the subject that actually controls the spaceship, ...
The China of the Future
All spiffed up and vaccinated for the most important political event of the year. At the beginning of March, in Beijing, in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, approximately three thousand members of the National People's Congress met, the closest thing China has to our parliament. For one week each year, delegates from every part of the country meet in the capital for discussion and closed-door votes, or better, considering the current political system, to learn about and ratify the national legislative measures. This year they had to approve the 14th Five-Year Plan, the direction ...
Seeking Well-being by Measuring Sustainability
Microeconomy teaches us that the theoretical foundations of national accounting, i.e. the known relationship between supply and demand at the aggregate level, are linked to choices made by society aimed at the best management of capital stock and the maximization of long-term well-being. In a functioning economy the use of each resource must be balanced and aimed at the creation of prosperity. Thus, the relevant capital stock must include everything that is useful and necessary for social well-being, meaning human, physical, social, and environmental capital. Without a specific method of measurement, ...