'Industrialized Nations Are Facing CO2 Insolvency'

In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the German government's climate protection adviser, argues that drastic measures must be taken in order to prevent a catastrophe. He is proposing the creation of a CO2 budget for every person on the planet, regardless whether they live in Berlin or Beijing.

Read the full article here.

Verhofstadt's Left-Wing Coup

Read Derk-Jan Eppink's column in the WSJ here.

R &D investments in Europe

Read the complete Eurostat newsrelease here.

Increase in real pay plummets in all but four EU Member States in 2008

The average real wage increase for European workers fell from 3.6% in 2007 to 1.3% in 2008, according to new data published by Eurofound’s European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO). The annual update on pay developments in Europe 2008 recorded sizeable differences between EU Member States, with the rate of real increase falling sharply, and the nominal rate dropping only slightly. Wide differences emerge, however, between the various groups of countries within the EU, in terms of the level of real wage increases, with a broad east-west split.

Read the full press release and find the related report here.

Doing Business - Belgium ranks 22nd in 2010

Read the World Bank's overview here.

Saving the Capitalists from Capitalism

Read this article on Greg Mankiw's blog here.

Happiness as a tool for valuing public goods

If governments supply public goods that market forces will not, they ought to assign monetary values to those goods so that they can prioritise projects. This column discusses the difficulties of estimating those values using happiness surveys. Using a new method, it estimates that people value a one-standard-deviation improvement in air quality at $40.

Read the full article here.

Economische vooruitzichten België vierde kwartaal 2009

Klik op de tabel of lees de volledige nota hier.

Gouvernement d'entreprise : l'erreur américaine

Lisez cet article dans les Echos ici.

Charge!

Carmakers are shifting towards electric vehicles. Policymakers must do their part, too. GREENS may not like it, but once people have enough to eat and somewhere tolerable to live, their thoughts turn to buying a car. The number of cars in the rich world will grow only slowly in the years ahead, but car ownership elsewhere is about to go into overdrive. Over the next 40 years the global fleet of passenger cars is expected to quadruple to nearly 3 billion. China, which will soon overtake America as the world’s biggest car market, could have as many cars on its roads in 2050 as are on the planet today; India’s fleet may have multiplied 50-fold. Forecasts of this kind led Carlos Ghosn, boss of the Renault-Nissan alliance, to declare 18 months ago that if the industry did not get on with producing cars with very low or zero emissions, the world would “explode”. Read the complete article in The Economist here.

Pension Funds in Asia Passed Europe's in '08

Europe's biggest pension funds weathered the financial crisis better than their North American counterparts last year, according to new research. But Asia's pensions savings actually grew during 2008 and total funds under management by Asian-Pacific pension funds surpassed Europe's for the first time. Read the complete article in the WSJ here.

Behavioral Theory

Can Mayor Bloomberg pay poor people to do the "right" thing? Read the article in The American Prospect about the progress of New York City’s ambitious anti-poverty initiative here.