Philippe Legrain

Guardian, 30 March 2010. A hike in national insurance is not only unfair, it will damage future growth by discouraging many from working harder

China’s biggest private car maker, Geely, is not only taking Sweden’s Volvo off Ford’s hands. It is also buying Manganese Bronze, the company that makes London’s famous black cabs. Bad news? Hardly. With Geely’s help, Manganese Bronze is more likely to crack the huge Chinese market, now the world’s biggest.

Student in Quebec removed from French lessons for wearing burqa. How will not speaking French help her fit in better?

Hat tip: The Straight Choice

Consider these three facts. Britain is struggling to recover from a crisis caused in large part by a huge property bubble. Unemployment is painfully high and people are feeling the pinch. The government has a huge gap in its finances that cannot be filled by public-spending cuts alone. What would you raise taxes on? Astonishingly, [...]

Oliver Kamm at The Times, a man I respect a lot, argues in his blog that banks are not a “vested interest”. But unless I have misunderstood him, I think he is being too charitable to the banks. He argues that “the banks are not some unaccountable lobby seeking to superimpose itself on the public interest: they [...]

Money quote: To this day it is hard to find fault with the conceptual framework of our [financial risk management] models as far as they go. Of course not.

on the benefits of immigration: All these kids are American high school students. They were the majority of the 40 finalists in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, which, through a national contest, identifies and honors the top math and science high school students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems. The awards [...]

The financial crisis brought the world to the brink of economic breakdown. But now bankers’ bonuses are back, house prices are rising again and politicians promise recovery – all this while unemployment remains high, debts mount, frictions with China grow and the planet overheats.
Is this really sustainable – or do we need to change course?

Private consumption is 7% up on pre-crisis levels in the 10 largest Asian economies (excluding stagnant Japan) http://bit.ly/9hxgPW

Guardian, 9 March 2010. Running Britain in an age of austerity will be a thankless task – Labour might be better off without this poisoned chalice

Amid all the euro-phobes' schadenfreude about the euro-zone's travails, it is remarkable that the pound is plunging – not just against the US dollar, but also against the much-maligned euro.  If markets get panicky about the UK government's deficits, we may regret our not-so-splendid isolation from the euro-zone. 

New research by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Xavier Sala‐i‐Martin, Columbia University and NBER finds that The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala‐i‐Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970‐2006. We show [...]