In Globalization (Greenwood Press, $44), Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, intends to help us understand worldwide free trade. The author begins by documenting the many benefits of globalization. Chief of these, he writes, is that people who live in more open economies have higher standards of living than people who live in less open economies...

French President  Nicolas Sarkozy has a plan: Let’s have the governments of the world increase their regulation of the banking sector, and let’s have those same governments renationalize many of their counties industries, and then let’s call it “capitalism.”  This is the message that Sarkozy conveyed at a recent meeting with President George W. Bush at Camp David, and in a speech he de...

When the World Bank surveyed the regulations governing businesses in 181 economies around the world, it detailed many reductions in regulation worldwide, particularly in many developing countries. But it also uncovered the how much many governments continue to make it difficult and costly to do business. Regulations that make it difficult or impossible to register a business, or to have land tit...

The World Bank report, Doing Business, 2009, examines government regulation of business in 181 countries. While the study emphasizes recent improvements that free business from stranglehold of government regulation, it also highlights the extent to which political authorities around the globe continue to make business difficult and costly. In earlier webposts, we saw that the Western developed n...

An open and competitive business environment is the basis for innovation, job creation, and rising standards of living. Unfortunately, the heavy hand of government regulation often hinders private enterprise and the competitive process. As we saw in an earlier webpost, a recent report from the World Bank found that the Western developed nations are far from being models of free-market economies....

Much recent economic news is focused on the current financial crisis. But beneath the investment portfolios that have caused so much concern is the real economy, where actual goods and services are produced, marketed, and sold.  Crucial to market stability and growth is the ease or difficulty these businesses experience to open, run, and even close down.  This, in turn, is dependent on th...

Last week fund manager Jim Rogers had harsh words for the federal government’s takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  He called it "socialism for the rich" and added, "it’s just bailing out financial institutions." The result, in his view: "America is more communist than China is right now." (The September 10 interview can be viewed at www.cnbc.com.)  The rhetoric may see...

The recent U.S. government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was greatly influenced by concerns expressed by foreign governments and central banks that have heavily invested in American capital markets. The continuing instability in the mortgage industry led many to fear that there might be a major selloff by foreign investors that could threaten a dramatic fall in the value of the dollar. A...

The rapid growth in government owned and managed Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF) over the last several years has raised a variety of questions about their potential political and economic impact on recipient nations.  Many of these concerns have been overdrawn, others represent reasonable fears.  With investable funds now estimated to be close to $4 trillion, SWFs are a significant factor in globa...

Accounting, as students are often told, is the language of business. Until recently, however, every country had its own dialect. Now Christopher Cox, the outgoing head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has proposed that the U.S. give up its traditional rules and move to a common international standard. The benefits of such a move, Cox argues, are that companies operating acr...

The era of high commodity prices and large balance of trade surpluses in developing economies such as China and India is changing the global financial landscape. One new and significant feature on this world scene is Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs). These are huge investment funds owned and managed by governments that are buying into or buying up assets in countries around the world, including th...

Russia’s ability to reclaim its great power status on the international stage is dependent upon the strength of its economy, and not merely its military ability to defeat the Republic of Georgia, a small neighbor along its southern borders. The Russia of today is vastly different from the Soviet Russia of the 20th century. It is true that the Russian government under then President and now Pr...

The recent conflict in the Republic of Georgia has once again refocused American and international attention on Russia’s place in the global community. It is now almost 17 years since the Soviet hammer and sickle flag was lowered from the walls of the Kremlin in December 1991.  Earlier, in August 1991, a clique of Soviet hardliners tried to prevent the demise of the communist regime. I was in ...

In an interview on Paris television at the end of June, French president Nicolas Sarkozy attacked the European Central Bank for raising interest rates and restraining monetary growth to rein in price inflation. The inflation currently plaguing the world, Sarkozy said, was due to an explosion in global commodity prices.  The French president’s words have a familiar ring. In the 1950s and 1960s...

In a campaign year in which the case for raising or lowering taxes no doubt will be an important issue, it is worth looking at the record about the relationship between the level of taxes on the one hand and the size and functions of government on the other. In a recent report entitled, Big, Not Better? prepared for the London-based Centre for Policy Studies, economist Keith Marsden has looked ...

The recent and continuing surge in gasoline prices has raised concerns and fears about the future of oil-based energy in the coming years. Are we reaching the end of global petroleum supplies in the face of increasing demand that supply seems unable to keep up with? In fact, oil reserves around the world are plentiful, and can keep growing consumption and industrial uses humming for many decades t...

At a time when the dramatic rise in global food prices has created a deep concern about the standards of living of the poorest around the world, a recent study on the traffic in wildlife products points out the crucial role it plays sustaining the livelihood of tens of millions among those poor. The report also emphasizes the importance of recognized and enforced property rights to create the inc...

The issue of climate change and religion is suddenly getting more attention. In the June 12 issue of the New York Review of Books, physicist Freeman Dyson reviews a couple of new books, including economist William Nordhaus’s A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies. Dyson writes, All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming,...

Around the world political corruption is considered one of the most serious problems in society. In its most recent report on global bribery, the Berlin-based organization, Transparency International, found that the demand for bribes by government officials occurs everywhere, but the highest rates of bribery are in Africa, the Newly Independent States (Russia, Ukraine, Moldova) Asia-Pacific, and ...

Millions of people around the world gather every May 1st to celebrate the social and economic achievements of the labor movement. Sadly, those societies that were organized in the name of workers and the equality of all individuals were forced to create a new class of individuals responsible for enforcing equality. This new class not only made themselves "more equal" than the workers they were su...