Education at a glance 2009

Find OECD indicators here.
Read the full OECD report here.

Household saving rate at 16.5% in the euro area and 14.4% in the EU 27

Read this Eurostat release here.

9 of 10 Europeans want urgent action on poverty

Read the Eurobarometer Survey on Poverty and Social Exclusion from the EC here.

Interview with Charles Krauthammer 'Obama Is Average'

In a SPIEGEL interview, Charles Krauthammer, the leading voice of America's conservative intellectuals, discusses Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the president's failures and the state of the United Nations and the international community. Read the complete interview in Der Spiegel International here.

The price of cleanliness

China is torn between getting greener and getting richer.

Read the complete article in The Economist here.

Financial crises are different! Refining the Reinhart-Rogoff estimates

Is the current turmoil unique? This column examines three decades of financial crises and says that it stands out. But the variation in past experiences suggests that the major economies may regain their pre-crisis levels of output by the second half of 2010.

Read this article from Cecchetti et al. on Vox.eu here.

Can renewable energy save the world?

Can renewable energy save the world from climate change, and do so at a reasonable cost? This column says we can replace some fossil fuel power with renewable power without a major cost increase, but we cannot hope to replace a major fraction of our fossil power with intermittent power sources such as wind and solar energy unless we can develop energy storage technologies.

Read the full article from G. Heal on Vox.eu here.

How to avoid a repeat of the Great Crash

The 80th anniversary of the Great Crash is upon us. This touches a nerve because we seemed to be looking into the same bottomless pit only a year ago. The chain of events, leading from a dramatic collapse in stock prices on Wall Street, beginning in late October 1929, to a Great Depression that engulfed the world economy for years, has suddenly leapt off the pages of the history books with an entirely fresh verisimilitude. Pessimists have asked, what is to stop it all happening again? Optimists have asked, what can we learn to stop it from doing so?

Read the full article in the FT here.

The Global Gender Gap Report 2009

Out of the 115 countries covered in the report since 2006, more than two-thirds have posted gains in overall index scores, indicating that the world in general has made progress towards equality between men and women, although there are countries that continue to lose ground.

Read this World Economic Forum report here.