There is a chastening appendix in Michael Porter's 1990 book The Competitive Advantage of Nations, in which he offers tabulated examples of how nations come to specialise in certain areas of...

It's bad out there. But can even the collapse in global markets justify the increasingly frenetic coverage of financial markets? Things have got so gloomy that, this morning, the Guardian has...

As credit crunches ever harder on the global economy, Jonathan Ford explains in our lead opinion this month why the Wall Street crash of 1929 is a less significant analogy to the situation today than...

The publication of Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's "libertarian paternalism" manifesto, has made real waves on this side of the Atlantic, with the Tories in particular seizing upon the...

For years we have been told that a billion or so people in the world have to live on "less than a dollar a day." That originally meant that poverty was defined as a money income of $1.08 a day in...

John Gieve’s participation in our financial roundtable turned out to be virtually his last hurrah as deputy governor of the Bank of England in charge of financial stability. A couple of days after...

There’s no end in sight, it seems, to the financial crisis that started last summer. But how bad is it and what can we do to prevent another one? Prospect assembled a panel of top financial...

If in doubt, the Old Left would nationalise or regulate. If in doubt the New Right would privatise or deregulate. And if in doubt, the soupy left-right blend that now unites us has its own default...

Soaring food prices have been hitting the headlines. Wheat recently reached new records, but in real terms (after adjusting for general inflation) it has only recently recovered to the levels it...

A couple of news stories today help illustrate some of the more unexpected consequences of the vast price rises some commodities have experienced over the past few years—caused largely by...