Rubrics » Bridging News
The COVID State
In 1976, an ABC movie entitled “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” recounted the tragic story of a child suffering from severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). Although the child died when he was twelve, doctors have since found a cure for this disease. Consequently, while SCID still occurs, the fear engendered by this condition has been alleviated. More
Sustainable Development – Excerpts from a New Lodestar in the Field
Sustainable development has been making the rounds since 1987 as a buzzword to be employed in the rarefied heights of policy discourse on economics, industrialization and much more. Unlike other fashionable concepts, it at least aspires to validity by positing as its main goal the minimization of the cost to the future incurred by advancement in the present. This has many applications, some not utterable anymore in polite society. They include finance, economics, environmentalism (local and global), resource use and many more. The classic example is a society in the present borrowing for wasteful consumption or malinvestment and transferring the burden of its current policies to future generations of taxpayers, including those yet unborn, thereby constraining their own ability to save money and to borrow for projects or for crisis periods. Another example is the exhaustion of common resources under the “tragedy of the commons”, where everybody is incentivized to abuse an asset held in common as gains are privatized, while losses are socialized, leading to an unsustainable pattern and ending in pollution, resource exhaustion and even extinction. The ethics of this can much debated, but the implications are there for all to see. More
The Keys to the American Economy Are Changing Hands
A change in leadership is imminent for one of the most important institutions for the American economy. Janet Yellen, the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve, will step down at the end of her four-year tenure at the helm of the establishment, after becoming the first chair in recent years not to be nominated for a second term. More
China’s Approaches to Central Asia States
The article deals with China's interests in Central Asia states. It is said that Central Asia has traditionally (since the early 1990s) been interested in Beijing in terms of economic development and security of the neighboring Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Also, China is interested in Central Asia as an additional source for the import of energy resources. For China, Central Asia has an important geopolitical significance as a transit route between mainland China, Europe and the Persian Gulf countries, an alternative to sea routes. More
The 16th European Resource Bank Meeting
In 2019 we will celebrate the 16th European Resource Bank Meeting. Join the Austrian Economics Center and The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom for a weekend full of discussions, networking, exchange of expertise and experience, the Dragons’ Den Competition, and a tangible history lesson. More
Pandemic: How to Avoid What Is Worse
In addition to major health issues, COVID-19 creates major economic problems. The risk of a deep global recession is very high. It is a shock that reduces supply, especially through the shock on the labour force, through illness or social distancing, resulting in the closure of many activities in different industries. Some activities were closed by private decisions, others were closed as a result of social distancing measures imposed by the authorities. Regardless of their source, these decisions triggered a supply-side shock, which translates into a shock on the demand side. The two shocks may be self-reinforcing and can lead to disaster. More
2020 Gaudeamus Book Fair, Featuring the Bucharest University of Economic Studies
The 27th edition of the Gaudeamus Radio Romania Book Fair took place between November 16-22, 2020. The fair was held exclusively online this year, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The most popular book fair, staged by the most-listened-to radio station in Romania has thus been held continuously for more than a quarter of a century. With this occasion, the Faculty of International Business and Economics, within the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, released the treatise entitled International Economic Relations. Theories, Strategies, Policies, Tools and Case Studies [Gheorghe Hurduzeu and Luminița Nicolescu (editors), ASE Publishing House, 2019]. More
Recent Developments in the Economic Governance of the European Union
The existence of Economic and Monetary Union creates a rather eccentric approach of the monetary and fiscal policy. While the European Central Bank’s monetary policy targets price stability union-wide, the fiscal policies have a national character and may have pro-cyclical effects. The large imbalance between the monetary and fiscal policies is a source of vulnerability towards achieving the European Union’s objectives. More
Smaranda Brăescu: The Girl with Her Head in the Clouds
In the early 1900s, modern aviation was still in its infancy. It was an era when iconic inventions and discoveries in terms of flying machines were only starting to see the light of day. The first pilot licence obtained in Romania was issued in 1911, after the first Romanian aviation school was opened in the spring of the same year. Against this backdrop, a career in aviation was, in the 1900s, an uncharted road, especially in the case of women, for whom, at that time, it was globally uncommon to vote or to have a job… any type of job. Just to remind you that the first European country to introduce women’s suffrage has done so in 1907, while Romania gave women the right to vote only in 1938. Also in Romania, married women were allowed to manage their own income only starting 1926. More
Corona-blues: A Brief Reflection on the Challenges of Managing the Coronavirus Pandemic
That the new coronavirus has taken the world by storm is no longer a surprise, causing significant casualties worldwide as well as civil unrest and disrupting economies, with ever grimmer prognoses. Much has been said about both the humanitarian impact as well the myriad effects it had on the political, social and economic levels. From a healthcare perspective, one might expect the world’s most developed economies to fare far better than their developing counterparts. Yet a quick look at the numbers reveals a rather intriguing picture: out of the world’s over 13.5 million confirmed cases of contamination, over 4 million come from some of the world’s most developed economies, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Sweden. These same countries account for more than half of the deaths caused by the virus. Of course, these are absolute numbers that we are talking about, but even if we switch to looking at relative measures, such as the number of deaths or infections per 1 million people, developed countries still rank at the top. More
Foot(Glo)ballisation by World Cup
If people were to tell their story to the inhabitants of other worlds in this universe, it would suffice to produce a chronicle of earthly discussions containing the keyword or hashtag #WorldCup. I believe we can safely leave out “football” from this label – the elliptical expression “World Cup” instantly directs our thoughts to the sport that will have grown into a religion defined by the “new testament” of Diego Maradona (1986) and his “second coming” in the form of Lionel Messi (2022). The secular religion of football is economic as well as political in nature; in other words, it is an instance of “scientifically” exploited “culture”. The Qatar edition is one of the clearest examples thus far of how the downright scientific marketing of a symbolic good (i.e., football) can contribute either insidiously or ostentatiously to the planetary management of cultural values (a potpourri of frigid conservatism and frivolous progressivism): a campaign worth some $300 billion meant to wash the image of some and the brains of others on the shores and hydrocarbon reserves of the Gulf. More
Photon(e)s 1.0
A portrait of Romina, done in a much too warm day, somewhere in Athens, along with a palm tree leaf. It’s a compositional experiment of shadow and colour and an attempt at capturing a bit of the atmosphere of the place we were living back then. More
