With the area opening to greater human activity, the Polar region has once again caught the eye of policy makers (the region was once the site of heightened Cold War activity), who are looking increasingly northward.Will the Arctic be the site of conflict or cooperation?
ATHENS | By Kostas Karkagiannis at Macropolis | In June 2012, at the height of the debt crisis in the eurozone, its leaders decided to create a banking union. Their aim was, as the conclusions of that summit stated, to: “break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns.” In this case, the sovereigns were members of the single currency whose economies were suffering.
BEIJING|Lan Fang and Li Yan at Caixin| Massive population remains China’s basic national condition, but structural problems of the population are daily becoming increasingly important factors affecting the development of the economy and society. The party just eased the one-child policy, but scholars and members of the public say progress should have been made years ago.
MADRID| By The corner team via Presseurop|In a time when Europe is trying to reinforce its identity it is very difficult to understand that the European Comission has decided to end its financial support to such an intelligent project as Presseurop, the first Pan-european multilingual news and debate site. Its closing down on Friday marks the end of a journalistic experiment with civic dimension, says the European press.
BEIJING | By Yang Kaisheng via Caixin | When it comes to banking in China, private investors have long been owners of financial institutions, so understanding what exactly changes will be key to the new policy’s success.
Macropolis | The European Banking Authority (EBA) disclosed on December 16 the results of a transparency exercise covering 64 European banks from 21 countries. The aim of the exercise was to share updated information based on first half 2013 data about banks’ operations according to uniform benchmarks.
MADRID | By Alex García.
The Internet plays a dramatic role in the development of China’s consumption. Encouraging information products could become a new engine of growth. But the success of such an ambitious 2.0 plan will depend on the new reforms announced by mid-November at the Communist Party Central Committee plenum.
SAO PAOLO | By Benjamin Cole at Marcus Nunes’ Historinhas | Slated to be No. 2 at the Fed is Stanley Fischer, who espouses adjustable inflation-targeting more than the locally preferred shooting for steady increases in nominal GDP (Market Monetarism), who knows?—it may amount to the same thing in practice.
PARIS | By Jérôme Hourdeaux at Mediapart via Presseurop | Despite being strong advocates of competition, European institutions are bound to the US software giant through murky contracts. Any transition to “open source” software, which in theory they encourage, would be too complicated and too expensive, they claim. Excerpts.