INFatuated, INFuriated, INFlexible?

INFatuated, INFuriated, INFlexible? Reshuffling the nuclear world order

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

What the international press and analysts from every corner of the world have speculated on for more than a year has happened. The White House has announced that the US is withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The decision is congruent with the US President's foreign policy preferences, but it could generate significant consequences because it of the possibility of disrupting an extremely fragile international nuclear balance.  More

Future Tense in the Job Market

Future Tense in the Job Market And some featuring tensions

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

Lately, in the community of futurists and the subgroup of Economics scholars / freaks, a theory or, better yet, a slogan has emerged, in support of the idea of the acceleration of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0), based on automation, interconnections between machines and Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Internet of Things (IoT). According to this saying, expressed in a similar form by Martin Boehm in 2017, “4 of 5 jobs of the year 2025 have not yet been created”, which can be translated as 80% of the future (types of) jobs in the next 6 years do not exist today. Therefore, the statement is qualitative before being quantitative. This brief essay breaks this idea down to see if it holds water. We do contest neither the transformation of economy towards automated production, nor the growing impact of AI in present and future jobs. What is indeed put under scrutiny is the pace of adoption, on a large scale, of these technologies.  More

Some Thoughts on the Criteria of Nominal Economic Convergence in the EU

Some Thoughts on the Criteria of Nominal Economic Convergence in the EU Economy Near Us (XV)

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

In connection with the nominal economic convergence criteria, five comments can be made: a) on their completeness; b) on their representativeness; c) on their relevance (meaning); d) on their redundancy (non-synergy); e) on their effectiveness.  More

State Role vs. State Size

State Role vs. State Size Economy Near Us (XVI)

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

In modern society, the state remains the central element of political power and an essential factor in the sustainable development of a country. Together with its institutions, the state responds to emerging changes in society by multiplying its functions to ensure economic growth and to address a large part of the social needs it feels the need to manage. More

The Return of Microeconomics

The Return of Microeconomics The international edition of Professor Cezar Mereuta’s paramount work

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

The recent launch of the English version of the seminal study “Some Microeconomic Landmarks of the Transition Process in Romania” by Prof. Cezar Mereuță is an important step in the process of exposing the notable work of Romanian scholars to their peers abroad.The initial Romanian edition appeared in 2015 and crowned 17 years of research into the structure of 1,009 markets between 1995 and 2012. His work is not only a peerless assessment of the developmental history of the Romanian economy post-transition, but a valuable work of microeconomics in its own right. More

The Passions of France

The Passions of France And the fire of Notre-Dame

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

Monday, April 15th 2019, was the third day of the Holy Week for Catholic Christians, the week that commemorates the Passion of Jesus Christ preceding His crucifixion and resurrection. The day followed another weekend of protests in France, when 30,000 people demonstrated in several major French cities against President Emmanuel Macron. It is therefore a most unfortunate coincidence that, on that day, one of France’s most recognisable monuments, the 850-year old Cathedral of Notre-Dame, caught fire and was nearly destroyed before the fire was eventually put out some 15 hours later. The cathedral’s spire was completely wrecked by the flames, and the building suffered notable structural damage; some of the artefacts stored within it were touched by fire and smoke to varying degrees. The incident took France and the world at large by storm, drawing strong reactions from the general public as well as from celebrities and world leaders. It did not take long for some of France’s wealthiest personalities to pledge vast sums to the reconstruction of the cathedral, while president Macron promised to rebuild the cathedral within five years. More

Blood Is Thicker than Oil: The Throes of Venezuela’s Crisis

Blood Is Thicker than Oil: The Throes of Venezuela’s Crisis

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

As the smoking gun of Venezuela’s unrest clears away, onlookers wonder whether it is about to be holstered back or cocked for another shot. To most observers, the socio-political crisis in Venezuela came as a big surprise, as if out of nowhere. Owing perhaps to its remote geographic location and the prominence of more spectacular geopolitical events, it is easy to overlook the fact that we are not speaking about a recent outbreak. Instead, the current presidential scandal is but the very latest addition to a long-lasting crisis that began somewhere in 2010 due to economic shortages and worsened with the upheaval of the existing political equilibrium following the death of long-standing president, Hugo Chávez, in 2013. Venezuela has been a powder keg for nearly a decade, as the country’s unsustainable oil-reliant economy has shown its unfortunate limits, which were further compounded by the government’s ineffectual policies, strongly influenced by the anti-Western leanings common to both Chávez and current president Nicolás Maduro.  More

Mihail Manoilescu – Beyond Taboos and Clichés

Mihail Manoilescu – Beyond Taboos and Clichés Reassessing a legacy in economic theory and policy

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

Outside Brazil and Romania, Mihail Manoilescu is essentially a forgotten economist, and, even in the latter, when his name is mentioned he is generally taught as a trade or protectionist theorist, although he is a development, growth, trade and industrial planning theorist rolled into one. In the end, he was essentially an implicit macroeconomic theorist at a time when macroeconomics was just being established. What little was assimilated from him by post-war Anglo-Saxon economics happened indirectly and almost by chance, through out-of-the-Paul Samuelson-mainstream economists who – maybe because of his tainted ideological stands, or because of Romania’s fall into obscurity after the establishment of the communist regime – rarely mentioned his name, such as Paul Rosenstein-Rodan’s theory of development traps or Ráoul Prebisch’s theory of commodity dependency cycles, despite the fact that in the 1930s he commanded enormous intellectual and policy influence. Back then, he was as a sort of intellectual icon for the Geneva institutions’ group of less developed economies – the League of Nations’ nascent IMF/World Bank/WTO of the era – against the political economy orthodoxy of the day as well as a regular speaker at Davos-style conferences organised by the far right regimes of António de Oliveira Salazar, Benito Mussolini and also that of Adolf Hitler.  More

The Frontier of Science Is Expansive and Expensive

The Frontier of Science Is Expansive and Expensive The Higgs Boson and the humble revelation that in fundamental research the truth is priceless, yet so costly

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

The CERN physicists announced, around mid-March 2013, that the particle discovered a year before, which they had claimed to be the Higgs boson “with 99% certainty”, had gained another “1% of certainty”. That is it, the verdict is in! The particle which bestows mass on us, the source of our weight, has become a factual given. We have found the Creator among quanta, but we still need to search deeply into our souls to find Him, if we want the mystery of Creation to ever be completely revealed to us. The attempt to re-create the Creation remains a costly business.  More

An Analysis of Basel III: An Accord That Risks Becoming Obsolete Even Before Coming into Force?

An Analysis of Basel III: An Accord That Risks Becoming Obsolete Even Before Coming into Force?

No. 16, Mar.-Apr. 2019

The Basel III accord was eagerly anticipated and its adoption had a significant positive effect on the banking stocks in late 2017. Of course, there were other considerations behind the positive sentiment, such as the progress recorded by the Brexit talks between the European Union and Great Britain at that time. For analysts, however, the lion’s share of this positive outlook was attributed to the fact that, after almost two years of negotiations with behind-the-scene stratagems and a great deal of lobbying, the leaders of the biggest central banks had succeeded to reach a compromise regarding the new Basel III regulations, which would have an important impact on the activity of the commercial banks. According to the statements of certain officials, this framework was intended to be final. More

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