Economics Roundtable

The standard economic model usually starts with something like this: “We consider an infinite horizon economy, with a continuum of individuals of measure 1, etc.” These individuals have no sex, because economists, in their quest for simplification, assume that men and women make choices in the same way. ...

The standard economic model usually starts with something like this: “We consider an infinite horizon economy, with a continuum of individuals of measure 1, etc.” These individuals have no sex, because economists, in their quest for simplification, assume that the men and women make choices in the same ...

In a previous post on the booming stock market in Mauritius, I brushed aside the possibility of a bubble, despite a 130% rise over the past 2 years. There has indeed been some inevitable corrections as the financial crisis took a global dimension, with stocks of financial ...

There is a considerable debate about whether the Eurozone has broadened and deepened enough to have become less dependent on the US economy (the ‘decoupling’ hypothesis). The recent decline in stock prices in major European economies (with, in places, greater losses than in the United States, where the ...

After years of stagnation and war, some Portuguese-speaking nations are among the fastest growing economies in the world today. Angola grew by 23% in 2007 and is projected to grow by a staggering 27% this year (which at this rate implies a doubling of GDP every 3 years!). ...

Will poor countries ever catch up with rich countries? Some have. But will the rest do? In a 2000 paper entitled “Some Macroeconomics for the 21st Century,” Bob Lucas suggests that, yes, by 2150, all countries will be rich. The reason: the recipes for growth are known ...

In the last decade, the list of countries where taxes are ‘flat’ (a tax system which taxes all incomes and profits, beyond a certain level, at the same rate) has been growing. Flat taxes, it is argued, do two things: they reduce tax evasion and they ...

Mauritius has relatively low levels of absolute and relative poverty: less than 1% of the population lives with less than $2 a day and around 8% of the population earns below half of median-income (compared to 17% in the United States). Several explanations: (1) the ‘rising tide ...