Category: Uncategorized

Many observers believe that global imbalances have a lot to do with the economic crisis the world has been experiencing. The non-academics among you may have come across the argument on David McWilliams’ recent TV show, for example. So, the fact that these imbalances have been shrinking rapidly over the past year ought to be good news.

Richard Baldwin and Daria Taglioni have a very nice piece pointing out that these declining imbalances can be mechanically explained by the global trade collapse, and are likely to reemerge as world trade recovers. They also do an excellent job of surveying the reasons why trade fell so rapidly during 2008-9.

This is a link to a nice conference on the Australian economy which colleagues at the Melbourne Institute ran a week or two ago.   Some good presentations (audio links also available).   Education session is good – I thought Andrew Leigh gave a great presentation which hits a lot of issues and views that I would share (raise quality and quantity).  Ditto innovation.   Some of the political speeches are as you would find them anywhere although I thought the Education Minister gave a smart and focused look at what their priorities are in this domain.

The papers by Van Ours and Gregory repeat a point made often here on labour market response – Van Ours nails this as get active in labour market and keep folks at work, nothing is irreversible, this is a crisis response and not a ‘steady state’ labour market strategy so don’t compare to the literature on Active Labour Market Policies which, he agrees, are pessimistic and carry sizable deadweight.

The answer is “very”, here.