Category: Uncategorized

As reported by Eurointelligence,  a new publication collects the views of 31 contributors that advocate the entry of the UK to the euro area. (This initiative was convened by Peter Sutherland.)  An executive summary of “10 years of the Euro – New perspectives for Britain” can be download here. The full report is available here.

Property Week have just released a new report on price movements over the second half of 2008: considerable valuation losses are evident.  This website gives a summary and the full report is here.

The idea that wage cuts would be deflationary and employment-reducing is being used in some quarters to argue against public sector wage reductions.  Herbert Grubel has a relevant short paper on the use of the Marxist “under consumptionist” argument to obtain wage increases in the US during the Great Depression.

See:

http://www.sfu.ca/~grubel/marx_,_unions_and_current_crisis.htm

The Swedish fiscal consolidation in the early 1990s is fascinating – published by Bruegel, an interesting analysis is provided by Jens Henriksson who was a participant in the process. You can download it here.

(upgraded from the comments) Ronan Lyons says:  Following on from this, two reviews of the Irish property market out this morning (14th Jan), with similar conclusions for 2008 (-15%) and prognoses for 2009 (-10%):
http://www.daft.ie/report/Daft-House-Price-Report-Q4-2008.pdf
and
http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0114/iavi.pdf

For the daft.ie figures, the calculations underlying the percentage of total stock for sale by county are available here:
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/irelands-property-overhang