Philippe Legrain

Now, the United States tried a fiscal stimulus in early 2008; both the Bush administration and congressional Democrats touted it as a plan to "jump-start" the economy. The actual results were, however, disappointing, for two reasons. First, the stimulus was too small, accounting for only about 1 percent of GDP. The next one should be [...]

The Chancellor told the Observer that: You’d be very foolish indeed to say, "Well, that’s the job done". You know this is something that needs constant attention. We’ve got the Budget next year, we’ve got the pre-Budget report in 12 months’ time, the Budget after that. I put more money into the reserve on Monday [...]

Progress, November 2008. The banking crisis requires government action but not a return to 1970s state control

A German doctor whose family was twice denied permanent residency in Australia because of his son’s Down syndrome has been allowed to stay after the immigration minister intervened on his behalf. Dr. Bernhard Moeller moved to Australia with his wife and three children nearly three years ago when he was hired to work as a [...]

Damian Green and I don’t see eye to eye on immigration, but I find his arrest, questioning and the search of his home and office by counter-terrorism police outrageous. According to the BBC, police suspect the Conservative immigration spokesman of “conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office” and “aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring [...]

(A) All domestic non-financial enterprises that currently have access to bank financing and whose loans, overdraft facilities, credit lines or whatever other financial arrangements expire during the coming year, have the right to an automatic one-year extension of the expiring arrangements on the same financial and non-financial terms as the expiring arrangements. This mandatory ‘creditor [...]

The reason why the government had to rescue Britain’s banks is not that their shareholders and executives deserve special favours, but because businesses and jobs depend on the availability of credit. There is no public interest in propping up banks that won’t lend. For sure, banks should not be lending with reckless abandon as they [...]

Willem Buiter sums it up perfectly: The private financial sector has to deleverage massively, but would (with credit markets and wholesale financial markets closed for business) do so in an unnecessarily destructive way if left to its own devices. The household sectors in the US, the UK and a number of other European countries have [...]

The Guardian, 25 November 2008. Darling’s prescription was a sticking plaster on an economy that demands Obama-style shock therapy.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Alasdair Darling’s statement was a pre-budget report only in name; in reality, it was an emergency budget crafted by Gordon Brown. It was big and bold, but it should have been bigger and bolder. Worse, the main plank of the government’s plan to support the economy – a cut [...]

at the Royal Geographical Society with Khalid Koser and Andrew Green, chaired by Jonty Bloom. Watch it here

Immigration to Britain from eastern Europe continues to fall. In the third quarter of 2007, 59,000 people from the A8 countries registered to work in Britain; in the same period this year, only 38,000 did. The decline was mostly due to fewer Poles applying to work: their numbers almost halved from 41,000 to 23,000. We [...]

The latest Transatlantic Trends survey of attitudes towards immigration in America and Europe finds that 47% of Europeans and 50% of Americans think immigration is more of a problem than an opportunity. But young Europeans (aged 18-34) are much more positive about immigration than older ones. In both the US and Europe, the better educated [...]

I’m delighted to say that the Italian edition of Immigrants is out in January 2009. The book is published by Baldini Castoldi Dalai editore and is available for pre-order from shop.it

Photo by Sergio Betancort © Prisacom S.A. From El Pais.com They came from North Africa and reached Europe: the Canary Island of Lanzarote, Spain

Net immigration to the EU – immigrants less emigrants – was 1.9 million in 2007, according to Eurostat. Since the EU population is just shy of 500 million, the immigration rate was 0.38%. Spain had the highest level of net immigration: 702,000; Italy was second, with 494,000; Britain third, with 175,000. The Netherlands experienced net [...]

In a bid to reverse the brain drain out of Europe and attract talented foreigners to come work here, the EU is proposing to introduce a Blue Card visa, in a deliberate echo of the US’s much-coveted Green Card. The Green Card grants the holder the permanent right to live and work in America. The [...]

From the country that elected a former Nazi as president comes another outrage: In an extraordinary on-air outburst, Klaus Emmerich, the veteran Austrian television pundit, declared: “I would not want the western world to be directed by a black man.” When invited to retract, Mr Emmerich stood by what he had said, adding that “blacks [...]

Spain’s Socialist government is planning to tighten the country’s immigration laws. It wants to limit the right of immigrants who are not yet permanent residents to bring their parents to live in Spain and to extend the length of time illegal immigrants are detained from 40 days to 60. The right-wing opposition, the Partido Popular, [...]

The upside: Many Republican anti-immigration extremists will no longer be members of the incoming House of Representatives. Nine or 10 have lost their seats; their leader, Tom Tancredo, is retiring, as is Duncan Hunter. The downside: Leading reform advocate Ted Kennedy is fighting cancer, and John McCain watered down his reform commitment during his election [...]