World economy

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European efforts in innovation still lagging behind US, Japan

The EU is not closing the persistent gap with global innovation leaders US, Japan and South Korea. The European Commission on Tuesday published the results of its Innovation Union Scoreboard, which includes innovation indicators and trend analyses for the EU 27 Member States, as well as for Croatia, Iceland, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey, and also compares a more reduced set of indicators between the…


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$25 billion US mortgage settlement: not quite there yet

NEW YORK | It would be great news for hundreds of thousands of people: billions of dollars (an estimated $25 billion) in aid to homeowners who have lost their homes to foreclosure or who are still at risk. The money would come from big mortgage banks: Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial. Why on earth would those banks be willing to pay that amount? They…


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Mind the gap, it’s about cooperation

By Julia Pastor, in Madrid | In a context of crisis that is becoming worse and worse, and with the arrival of the new government lead by Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s cooperation challenges need to be revised. The unavoidable decrease in resources must be faced by an improved, more finely tuned project selection and the need for greater transparency must be satisfied by including the goals that each project intends to attain,…


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The red envelope

The happiness of Beijing residents is in recession for the fourth consecutive year. The reasons behind such state of mind are not exclusive of the Chinese capital and they represent the challenges the Communist Party will have to face during the year that has just begun in China. In Europe, the year 2012 exudes pessimism. Conversely, according to Chinese astrology, the symbolism attached to this mythological animal will bring  power…


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US banks join foreign governments against Volcker rule

NEW YORK | It has been one of the main topics at Davos, according to The New York Times: A number of foreign officials complaining to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner about the Volcker rule. It hasn’t come from the usual suspects, American banks, but from other governments. European, Japanese and Canadian officials have objected to one aspect of this already polemic new regulation: the fact that it restricts US banks…


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Danger: Depression

By Luis Garicano, in London | NADA ES GRATIS  (fedeablogs.net). A very brief and worrying observation that the media does not seem to have noticed: the IMF forecast of which the press this week has been constantly talking about and that predicts a decrease in the Spanish GDP of 1.7% does not include an additional fiscal adjustment due to the deviation of the 2011 deficit. That is to say, if the deficit…


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Are US non-profits doing the work that European governments do?

NEW YORK | It’s a catastrophe, experts say: about 1.2 million US students drop out every year and this imposes a huge cost on the whole economy. “Many of these schools [with high dropout rates] are in the inner-city and are made up of blacks and Latino students who are not graduating at great rates. This increases the level of poverty, it increases crime, it increases the incarceration rate. 80…


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Loosing hope in China as motto

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks 2012 Report highlights dystopia as one of the major three risk cases. The concept is used to describe a scenario where literally “life is full of hardship and devoid of hope.” This is an ideal far away from the motto behind the Chinese Dream so insistently emphasised by the state’s propagandistic apparatus: prosperity will be achieved thanks to a society that works in unison…