Archive
In China It’s Full (Demographic) Winter
China has aged before becoming wealthy. A lengthy reportage by the Financial Times from Rudong, the county with the highest percentage of elderly people,[1] describes well the demographic nightmare that the People's Republic is facing. In the late 1960s, it was so populous that it was chosen as a pilot area for the one-child policy; today, sixty years later, nearly 40% of its inhabitants are over sixty years old. As a result, schools are closing, existing factories struggle to find workers, and the majority of the population lives on rather meager pensions. In Rudong, the percentage of elderly ...
The War of Talents and the Challenge of Skilled Immigration in Europe
Despite not capturing media attention, the increasingly urgent need for skilled immigration in Italy and Europe has been the focus of numerous analyses carried out over the years by both national and international institutions. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been particularly active on this front, publishing several reports as part of the series entitled “Recruiting immigrant workers.” The OECD is an international organization for economic studies consisting of member countries (including Italy) that share the common characteristics of being developed ...
Built-to-Rent as a Solution for the Next (Re)Generation
Built-to-Rent. The analysis of the reference context, the new demands of the market in terms of flexibility arising from the labor market, the need to make housing accessible, and the necessary respect for parameters of well-being to be guaranteed for end users, outline the emerging need for a rental housing offer, supported by services for persons and places, capable of creating economic, social, and environmental value, including positive externalities for local communities. The domestic market is characterized by: a) Urban planning/construction regulations; b) Legislation concerning rental ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...