Most will be aware of recent large demonstrations in Chile in favour of greater equality. These often comprised around a million people – a remarkable turnout in a country with a total population of about 19 million. Demonstrators were met with violent military intervention and curfews. The state of emergency has now been rescinded and… Read more
Category:
Inequality
Understanding monetary ‘plumbing’ and where it gets us
There is an interesting podcast from the American site Macro’n Cheese with the Scottish Professor Mark Blyth, who, though he long ago emigrated and has become Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University in the US, he has certainly managed to hang to most of his Dundonian dialect! I have to say I usually… Read more
Westminster: Most Similar Country Ireland? – A new EU Regional Productivity Analysis
Introduction An interesting paper “The big European sort? The diverging fortunes of Europe’s regions” has been published by the Centre for European Reform (CER). Such papers are of great interest at PP. The paper analyses regional productivity. As a single metric productivity is one of the best, but as Charles Adams says, in order to… Read more
Regional inequality: the utility of many metrics
To measure – political success or anything else – we need to choose the right metrics. It is widely recognised that GDP per capita or average income is not necessarily that useful. A point that must be repeated over and over is that when in comes to wealth and income, it is not the crude average… Read more