By CaixaBank analysts | The reduction in doubtful loans, easier financial conditions and creation of households will continue to support the recovery in housing. But persistently low participation in employment is a source of risk for 2013.
MADRID | Europe is unable to deliver growth on its own. By sticking to fiscal virtue, no matter the price as Ms Merkel has recently voiced, it lacks enough stamina to get out of the current recession.
In his annual State of the Union speech, US President endorsed long awaited EU-US free trade talks that could spur growth and create new jobs.
MADRID | Dennis Lockhart, president of the Atlanta Federal Reserve: “Why couldn’t we grow by a higher rate? Because people still are in the middle of a deleveraging process, which makes it near impossible that consumption takes off again.”
China’s economic miracle was possible thanks to three decades of cheap manufacturing and exports. Thousands of workers left their villages to become the cheap labour force of China’s southern cities. Now this is a thing of the past.
Evgeniya Khilji | Tensions between “Russians” and “others” can be observed more closely in Putin’s Russia’s large cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the concentration of legal and illegal immigrants is high. Ethnic Russians feel threatened by the large numbers of incoming ‘visitors’.
Presseurop.eu | By Annelien De Greef | For a long time, prawns were all that Greenland was famous for. However, the melting ice caps mean that natural resources are there for the taking. This development is both a curse and a blessing and one that puts the Danes in a difficult situation.
Our welfare depends on finding more affordable production systems, too, because it frees capital and human workforce that can be used in other fields. This is how an economy improves.
BARCELONA | By CaixaBank Research | Brazil’s GDP grows by a disappointing 1% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2012. Inflation fails to moderate and remains at 5.5%, above the central bank’s target.
By Eberhard Rhein | When introducing new energy systems, policy makers should pay more attention to a balanced development between production and consumption.