Articles

Lawrence Summers, the Harvard University professor and former Obama administration economic adviser, hasn’t been shy of late urging the Federal Reserve to refrain from raising short-term interest rates at its policy meeting this week. In a series of opinion columns and blog posts, Mr. Summers has argued that the time isn’t ripe for a move and that markets aren’t prepared.

In his February 24, 2014  remarks to the National Association of Business Economics, Summers said, “I want to take up these issues -secular stagnation, the idea that the economy re-equilibrates; hysteresis, the shadow cast forward on economic activity by adverse cyclical developments; and the significance of the zero lower bound for the relative efficacy of monetary and fiscal policies.”

Pierpaolo Barbieri, Ernest May Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, says that "big, international banks like Santander and BVA are well diversified. Of the others, quite a few need capital — but how much? That's the unknown and Bankia has undermined faith in financial reporting."

Successful environmental management is partly contingent on the effective recognition and communication of environmental health risks to the public. Yet risk perceptions are known to differ between experts and laypeople; laypeople often exhibit higher perceptions of risk in comparison to experts, particularly when these risks are associated with radiation, nuclear power, or nuclear waste. This paper consequently explores stakeholder risk perceptions associated with a mercury-contaminated chloralkali production facility in Kazakhstan.

Cell phone use has grown faster in Africa than in any other region of the world since 2003....Of course, South Africa—the most developed nation—still has the highest penetration, but across Africa, countries have leapfrogged technology, bringing innovation and connectivity even to remote parts of the continent, opening up mobile banking and changing the way business is done.

"...Asia has its own internal balance of powers, and in that context, many states continue to welcome an American presence in the region. Chinese leaders have to contend with the reactions of other countries, as well as the constraints created by their own objectives of economic growth and the need for external markets and resources. Too aggressive a Chinese military posture could produce a countervailing coalition among its neighbors that would weaken both its hard and soft power. A poll of 16 countries around the world found a positive attitude toward China’s economic rise, but not its military rise."

"For a time, [Chimerica] was a symbiotic relationship that seemed like a marriage made in heaven. Put simply, one half did the saving, the other half the spending. Comparing net national savings as a proportion of Gross National Income, American savings declined from above 5 percent in the mid 1990s to virtually zero by 2005, while Chinese savings surged from below 30 percent to nearly 45 percent. This divergence in saving patterns allowed a tremendous explosion of debt in the United States, for one effect of the Asian "savings glut" was to make it much cheaper for households to borrow money than would otherwise have been the case."

The Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902–23 illustrates the importance of economic side payments as a method for forming and maintaining alliances. It also shows, however, the influence of domestic factors on constraining these types of payments. Security concerns often lead a nation to offer side payments to a potential ally, but domestic political constraints, partisanship, and changing strategic needs account for the variation in the economic-security linkage.

Lawrence Summers describes the importance of strong economic policies around budgeting the $700 billion bailout of the finance sector. He comments that "a time when confidence is lagging in the household, financial and business sectors is not a time for government to step back." He emphasises the positive impact of "well-designed policies," which, he says, "are essential to support the economy" in the financial future of the U.S.