Economics

Please see below selected Europe-related change from 2015 and earlier, For change from 2016 onwards, please see What's Changing? - Economics.

December 2015

• Finland's government is drawing up plans to give every one of its citizens a basic income of 800 euros a month and scrap benefits altogether. A poll commissioned by the agency planning the proposal, the Finnish Social Insurance Institute, showed 69% supported the basic income plan.

Please see below selected India-related change from 2015 and earlier, For change from 2016 onwards, please see What's Changing? - Economics and What's Changing? - Emerging Markets.

December 2015

• Buoyed by rising manufacturing output, India’s economy grew by 7.4% in the third quarter compared with the same three months last year. Buffered by financial gales two years ago, India is now the best performer among the BRICS economies, outpacing China’s growth rate of 6.9% in the third quarter. Inflationary pressures have receded, but reforms intended to streamline taxes, such as introducing a national sales tax, have stalled in parliament.

November 2015

10 years on from chastening and often stunning images of the impact that global recession is having - right now. The Great Depression Revisited? The clothes and the cars and the laptops suggest "not yet", but over the coming months, who knows?

Still, the blooming sunflower in the last shot is a touching piece of photojournalism, suggesting that hope springs eternal or, as Roy Harper put it, "through all destruction flies new dawn".

Please see below an evolving set of forecasts for 2019. This is work in progress, due for completion before the end of January 2019. 

Introduction

Dollar Street is a powerful and fascinating site, showing how people really live around the world. Dollar Street is a project from Gapminder, the foundation set up by the late, great Hans Rosling, who died a year ago from pancreatic cancer, aged only 68. He is missed.

A.S. Byatt tells us that "for the Victorians, everything was part of one thing - science, religion, philosophy, economics, politics, women, poetry. They didn't compartmentalise - they thought big." - quote in New Statesman, 27/04/09

This is the Halcyon philosophy too, as much of what's most interesting and important in life appears to come from the interconnectedness of ideas, from the alchemy of putting together - in the words of Theodore Zeldin - two ideas that have never met.

Of Mice and Men - redux?  Chastening and often stunning images of the impact that global recession can have in our day and age might suggest so, yet the blooming sunflower might suggest too that hope springs eternal or, as Roy Harper puts it so lyrically, "through all destruction flies new dawn".

Man such sunflowers constantly emerge, displaying a wide variety of proposed "antidotes to the pessimism of the post-crisis world". If you'd like to hear constructive suggestions for our way ahead economically, you could also listen to the following podcasts: