Rubrics » Bridging News
The Greed Economy: Analysing the Nigerian Situation through the Lens of Exploitation
No. 50, Nov.-Dec. 2024 Nigeria has faced significant economic challenges in recent years, from rising inflation and currency devaluation to political instability and widening income inequality. Many analysts have pointed to a deeper problem underpinning these crises—a “Greed Economy.” This concept describes an economy where the pursuit of personal profit trumps long-term societal welfare, and where market actors manipulate systems to gain disproportionately, exacerbating inequality and economic instability. Nigeria’s current fiscal, monetary, and market dynamics all seem to reflect elements of this Greed Economy, creating an environment where exploitation flourishes.To understand how the Greed Economy plays out in Nigeria, it’s essential to analyse examples backed by data that show how exploitation, corruption, and opportunistic behaviours have impacted the economy. The following sections illustrate key areas where data trends support the narrative of a Greed Economy in Nigeria. More
Democratic Defiance or Defiance of Democracy? Elections in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
No. 50, Nov.-Dec. 2024 While Christmas is universally viewed as a time of holiday cheer and merriment in all countries that celebrate it, it also represents a time for solemn contemplation for Romania. It was on Christmas Day in 1989 that dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed following the conclusion of a bloody revolution to overthrow the communist regime. They were also the last people to receive the death penalty at the end of a now controversial trial before it was abolished. Their deaths thus marked the end of the communist era, an end that ushered in a long transition towards the democracy that the Romanian populace had long since yearned for, and for the past three and a half decades, Romania’s geopolitical direction has been decidedly Euro-Atlantic, cemented by its accession to the EU and NATO.Nearly thirty-five years later, the results of Romania’s first round of presidential elections took the entire media by storm, shocking candidates, social scientists and voters alike. Călin Georgescu, an independent candidate with a strong anti-EU, anti-NATO and pro-Russia rhetoric, a candidate whom most of the media and political parties largely ignored, with very limited public appearances and whom pollsters expected to be voted by less than 10% of the estimated turnout, managed to win the first round of the elections, garnering nearly 23% of votes, upsetting all pre-election predictions and calculations. Georgescu isn’t altogether unknown to the general public, having been nominated by the nationalistic Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) as their proposition for prime-minister in 2021 before the faction broke off with him due to his statements defending far-right figures from Romania’s past. He is no stranger to politics either, having worked within Romania’s Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Environment and has served for a while as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for human rights and hazardous waste. However, during the current campaign he kept a low profile, slipping under the radar as the spotlight focused on the most popular candidates. More
REER – Romania in a Decent European Position
No. 50, Nov.-Dec. 2024 Romania occupies a depreciating but relatively decent position in the regional context in terms of the Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER), an indicator that summarizes the evolution of the exchange rate and consumer prices in relation to the main actors in international trade. The indicator is critical for the chronic and growing trade deficit, reaching at over 18 billion euros in the first 7 months of this year. More
Timothy Dexter: A Mind Filled with Gaps
No. 50, Nov.-Dec. 2024 America was going through a tough period during the 1700s. The constant fight against British oppression led to the Revolutionary War, which ended on the 4th of July in 1776, after many casualties on both sides. The economy was devastated and many Americans were left in great poverty due to these events. However, one young man from Massachusetts would find himself constantly “failing upwards” into a life of luxury, against all odds. More
Habemus POTUS!
No. 50, Nov.-Dec. 2024 After a decisive showdown that defied our expectations regarding the use of legal battles and allegations of fraud, Donald Trump emerged victorious in the US presidential race, becoming the second President of the United States (POTUS) to take a break between terms. The outcome was an anti-climax, as the vote went the way many polls and betting markets had predicted, with Trump winning by a clear popular and electoral college majority that could not easily be challenged. The financial disparities between the two candidates in favour of the Democrats could not compensate for Trump’s ability to communicate freely and charismatically with the crowd, and the Democrats failed to fully utilize the new campaign weapon, the political podcast, which surpasses traditional media in terms of audience. I don’t know if we can hope that this experience will make the Democratic Party rethink its flirtation with identitarian and economic extremism, or the way it let party cabals play games in removing Biden (who would have been a better presidential candidate) and selecting Harris, but Donald Trump managed to win record support from minorities and improve his score in absolutely all American counties. Kamala Harris has not managed to surpass Biden’s performance anywhere. But what will happen from 2025 on the external front? Will we witness a new Pax Americana or will the pessimism of the elites in the Euro-American mainstream come true? More
Liber Amicorum in Praise of Amfiteatru Economic
No. 50, Nov.-Dec. 2024 I shared the following thoughts before and they have already been printed in the pages of the book that tells the story of the most appreciated Romanian magazine of economic science. I also recommend the other testimonies collected between the covers of the volume edited by Professors Vasile Dinu and Laurențiu Tăchiciu, Amfiteatru Economic și dimensiunea colectivă a prieteniei intelectuale [Economic Amphitheater and the collective dimension of intellectual friendship]. Because, yes, beyond any metric, writing-for-communication endures only when it becomes writing-for-communion. More
Event-debate “European Citizens’ Agora – The European Union Enlargement Process, a Catalyst for Progress”
No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 The EUROPE DIRECT Bucharest Centre, hosted by the European Institute of Romania, in partnership with the Faculty of International Business and Economics, the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, organized on Thursday, October 24, 2024, the event-debate entitled “European Citizens’ Agora – The European Union enlargement process, a catalyst for progress”. More
The Draghi Report: Whatever It Takes to Increase European Competitiveness
No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 It is often said that by declaring that he would do “whatever it takes”, the then President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, saved the Eurozone from the financial and sovereign debt crisis of 2012. His solutions for reviving the growth of the Union’s competitiveness European (EU) are presented in a much larger document (400 pages), published last week, but the general principle is the same: “whatever it takes” must be done. This organization needs, he claims, a “new industrial strategy” to stimulate economic growth, which involves additional investments of 800 billion euros annually. The amount represents 4.7% of GDP, more than double the American aid received by European economies through the Marshall Plan. But it is an “existential challenge”. More
The Missed Colossus
No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 The $20 decillion ($20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!) fine imposed by Russia on Google (The Washington Post, 2024) is largely symbolic but reveals the arbitrary and absurd despotism into which the Russian Federation has gradually transformed—a stark contrast to the 1990s, when Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin appeared to foster a spirit of friendship, and discussions of Moscow joining NATO were not (yet) laughed out of the room. More
Behind the Reaction and Counter-Reaction in the Middle East
No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 The US announcement of an imminent Iranian attack on Israel has sparked fears of a long-awaited escalation to open warfare in the Middle East. However, that attack was similar in size and intensity to the one in April 2024, came at a time of day when casualties were minimized, and was calibrated not to pose very great challenges to Israel’s layered missile defense system, assisted by American and, it seems, British forces. More
The Visible Hand: The Case for Government Enterprises in Ensuring Fair Competition and Market Stability
No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 The phrase “invisible hand”, famously coined by economist Adam Smith, refers to the self-regulated nature of a free market. The notion suggests that individual pursuits of self-interest, when left unchecked, will guide the market toward efficiency and the collective good. However, history and modern economics have demonstrated that this “invisible hand” is not always adequate in fostering fair competition or preventing market abuses. When monopolies form, price fixing occurs, or firms seek only to exploit arbitrage opportunities, the market can fail to protect consumer rights, ensure price stability, or promote overall economic growth. This is where the “visible hand” of government enterprise and intervention becomes crucial. More
The Industrial Revolutions of Art
No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 The bonds between cultural studies and economic science – timeless, as they endure “materially” married, yet peripheral, as they seem “spiritually” divorced – need to be revisited and reviewed with the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0). It is in the midst of the debates on the future of “humanity” (understood as species and spirit) – given the new technologies that affect and alter micro-/meso-/macro-/mondo- business organizations, production processes, consumption habits – that this research endeavour unfolds. Both cultural facts and economic tools are subject to an intricate intellectual “stress test”, therefore scrutinizing the “4.0” cultural concepts/definitions and attitudes/behaviours, observable in markets’ as well as in policies’ deliverables will help us to fairly (fore)see what we might risk losing or stand to win, culturally, as communities, nations, human kind.Industrial Revolutions (IR) remain at the crossroads of several binomials: intellectual design and spontaneous emergence, institutions and technology, necessity and fortuity, and so forth. The shifts from mechanised production (IR 1.0) to mass production (IR 2.0) then to automated production (IR 3.0) and to the ascending scale/scope of digital transformation (IR 4.0) – with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as flagship technology – triggered mode(l)s of development, devised profound societal upheavals and fuelled worries about freedom and fairness. Culture(s) too host(s) such civilizational twists and turns – as spots of reflection on social disruptions, as sites of refuge from own uprooting, as spaces of sharable hidden energies – and IR 4.0 excites and upsets them via novel ideological biases, vanguard niche markets, public versus private spaces trade-offs, or geo-cultural/-political/-economic resets. More
