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Five “Good” Reasons to Hate Economics
We live in a world where hating something is trendy. Some hate Hawaiian Pizza, some others hate the rich, some hate immigrants, some people hate rap music, etc. Some people hate economics. What is economics about? I would refer to it as a social science that studies the economy from a well-defined perspective – that resources are scarce, that choices must be made in using them, that most of the time people use some thinking in making these choices, and that the market mechanism helps carry out this resource allocation. Thus, economics is first and foremost about the functioning of the market economy, and about the role of prices in allocating resources. If one wants to get an idea on what economists do study, he/she might look to the table of contents top-5 journals of the field, including the American Economic Review and Econometrica; the collection of Schools Brief in the Economist is also representative of the “hot topics” in today economics. One might be surprised by the methodological homogeneity of the field. Econ-haters will probably disagree with my definition, since when you really hate something, you sometimes end up by denying its existence. I agree, this can raise some logical problem (should I hate something that does not exist?), yet hate is about emotions, not about logical thinking. More
Deciphering Timelessness through Ephemeral Numbers
I first made the acquaintance of Professor Cezar Mereuță in the most natural way a young novice economist can meet a master of the profession: as a name on a textbook. In the Professor’s case, his exposure to “the market for ideas” has always been deliberately bimodal: both in the realm of academia and in economic mass-media. I, too, have chosen to heed this tenet of dualism, for although scientific truth is sublime, its social value is only apparent once it is communicated: the “economy” of (the economic) science is inevitably a “mixed” one, its nature being both “public” (in the sense of its popularisation, not politicisation) and “private” (in the sense of being responsible for the appropriateness of one’s terminology and the adequacy of one’s methodology). Among economists, discussions can veer into opaqueness, yet it is clear that disseminating the fruits of economic research via mass-media has always been a goal of Professor Mereuță, for the sake of civility and the civil population at large. I worked alongside him for roughly twelve years, first as a reader, then as editor, foreword author and, lastly, co-author. More
IP, Fire, and Other Dangerous Things
Why is there more money being invested in the development of (video) games than in research of new drugs and medicine? Well, the claim underlying the question may be overblown. But there is evidence for the gaming industry being larger than the movie or sports entertainment sectors.[1] There is also evidence suggesting a surge of innovation in gaming and a simultaneous decline of innovation in the pharma sector.[2] This begs the question: What does all this have to do with intellectual property or IP? More
Romania’s Loss of Competitiveness Compared to Hungary and Poland
Romania has improved its competitiveness compared to the Czech Republic and Bulgaria at the regional level in recent years but lost ground compared to Croatia, Poland and Hungary, according to data released by Eurostat. With an index calculated at 96.77 (2010 = 100), we were slightly better than our neighbor from the South of the Danube (97.32), with the note that a lower value shows an improvement in competitiveness. More
The Advantages of an Adequate Minimum Wage
We find today, in the specialty literature, analyses and studies that focus on the quality of life, and these frame the concept of wellbeing as concerning the individual and referring to a state. In these works, the semantic features of the concept of wellbeing are formulated as follows: wellbeing refers to the person (the individual) – it considers the individual himself, not a certain social-historical individual; wellbeing refers to a state (static profile) – it is a “photograph” of the components of a state vector considered appropriate, representative, relevant and practicable for researching such a concept; wellbeing refers to a moment – the establishment of empirical values of the state vector that refers to the individual, at a certain moment. This is observed, from a theoretical and philosophical point of view, both at the level of the individual, as individual wellbeing with a strong idiosyncratic accent, and at the level of society as social welfare with an objective character. The concept of wellbeing remains in our attention also in this period when we attach great importance to individual safety issues, and I am referring here to health issues. More
Seven Things the Suez Canal Incident Taught Us about Globalization
The recently resolved Suez Canal incident was the second high profile crisis in global logistics since the beginning of the pandemic. It underscored the significant vulnerabilities of an interdependent world in which supply and production chains are distributed over vast distances and are reliant on the near perfect and constant functioning of a complex transport apparatus through vulnerable bottlenecks. The Suez incident was caused by a super large container transport vessel becoming lodged in a sandbar and blocking the Suez Canal itself in one of its narrowest points. Until traffic could be restored, hundreds of ships were stationed outside the canal, waiting for their opportunity to cross, while racking up billions of dollars in global economic losses and contractual fines. More than 10% of global container shipping passes through the Suez Canal, which links the important Southeast Asian and East Asian producers to markets in Western Europe. It is also an important highway for energy transport, though land routes have been coming online to diversify these flows. The crisis came at a moment when the Egyptian Government is busy upgrading the Suez Canal, to enable it to accommodate 50% more traffic than it did in 2014. The growth in the intensity of the use of the Suez has several consequences – more traffic tolls for Egypt, greater importance for Egyptian ports and their attendant production and storage capabilities, greater geopolitical importance for the Suez Canal, which was the site of an attempted takeover by British and French forces within living memory. More
Professor Cezar Mereuță’s Paretian Odyssey Continues
A paradox confirmed by statistical data: the nodal analysis, used in economics to show that the strongest 10% of the players in a market generate 80% of the total sales in that market, also applies in the field of... the pandemic. This is revealed by an analysis made by Prof. Dr. Cezar Mereuță, who, for a year, monitored the parallels between the economic power of countries and the number of infections with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The result shows that the two indicators are mirror-like: 9.35% of the countries of the world generated 80% of the world GDP in 2019; and 9.91% of the countries of the world accounted for 80% of all the contagions in 2020. Based on the results of the research, Prof. Dr. Cezar Mereuță provided a set of explanations and recommendations. More
A Few Considerations about the Gender Gap in the COVID-19 Impact on the Labour Market
March marks one year since Romania entered a state of emergency and remained on alert due to the pandemic. The Romanian state, like all of the states of Europe and the world, is still looking for solutions to limit its spread. The priority in the concerns of all governments remains health, but we cannot ignore the economic and social effects of the health crisis, and knowing that crises are seldom gender neutral when it comes to economic effects, this moment seems opportune for an analysis of the relationship between the health crisis and gender equality and its long-term consequences. More
Public Schools, a Rival for Racism and Xenophobia
Some believe that we live in a world that is advanced and effortlessly evolving in so many different ways, yet it is also stuck and old-fashioned in other ways. Paradoxically, the modern world that we live in is still exposed to racial conflicts. Combining different cultures, nationalities or ethnicities still brings anger and discomfort to numberless people. In this sense, I like to believe that such mentalities and lifestyles can be easily changed or adjusted during childhood, including through education and exposure to multicultural activities. Furthermore, I believe children should be constantly facing diversity from a young age. More
The 2020 GDP of Romania
The National Institute of Statistics confirmed the signal result of the economic growth for 2020 at the level of -3.9%, in the first preliminary version made public. The nominal value resulting from the overall calculation for the last year was RON 1,053,881.4 million, above the recent forecast and almost identical to that of 2019 (RON 1,053,884.8 million). However, it was lower in euro by about 4.22 billion, due to the increase in the average annual exchange rate (from 4.7452 RON/euro to 4.8371 RON/euro). The result – redistributed between quarters. Beware of base effect! More
The Long-Lasting Effects of Colonial Policies
Whenever we talk about Canada, New Zealand, Libya or Indonesia, we need to bring up the colonial empires which dominated much of the modern world up until the beginning of the Cold War. The periods under colonial rule differ, with the “scramble for Africa” taking place in the latter half of the 19th century, while American colonization began in the late 15th century, but the great European empires eventually had most of the world, at one time or another, under colonial rule. All those four countries share a similar past which involved being ruled by Europeans with varying degrees of autonomy, exploitation or even representation in democratic processes. However, the similarities stop there. Canada and New Zealand are both considered developed countries which hold economic and commercial power while Libya can barely be seen as a functioning state due to its internal unrest. Indonesia is somewhat in the middle, having an emerging economy status while controlling a loosely connected archipelago dominated by ethnic and religious heterogeneity. How did these countries turned up so different from one another despite their shared status as colonial subjects? More
A Reactionary Response to a Likewise Football
Context: TheChampions League (CL) is the greatest inter-club football competition in Europe and the entire world. Organised every year, it includes the best 32 European football club teams: 26 qualified in advance, while six of them have to go through a preliminary round, three qualifying rounds and a play-off round, all played over two legs (except in this “pandemic” year when only the play-off round was played over two legs). Eight groups are formed; each team plays every other team in its group twice (once home and once away). At the end, the first two teams of each group with the highest number of points progress to the knock-out stage, therefore 16 teams. The teams which finish 3rd in their CL groups relegate to the second-tier competition, the Europa League (EL), which works basically in the same way as the CL, except that the team that finishes third in its EL group goes nowhere (at least so far). Then, a draw takes place in Geneva. A kick-out style tournament commences, with double-legged matches until the last act of the competition is reached – the big final. More
