The following preface and introduction are taken from a report, The Norwegian Oil Experience: A toolbox for managing resources?, which is being published in English here for the first time.
Translator’s Preface
The discovery of oil and gas, like other mineral resources, is often a curse rather than a blessing. For many societies around the world it [...]

Last week’s podcast from Doug Henwood’s Behind the News (embedded below) is definitely worth listening to. The entire show is dedicated to a discussion of the financial crisis with the political economists Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch who are the co-authors of a new book In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial [...]

The Left has often been accused of not understanding economics properly. So it’s been no small pleasure over the last year to see the guardians of neo-liberal orthodoxy thrashing around helplessly in a bid to explain the financial meltdown, while radical critics like David Harvey and Robert Brenner have provided by far the best guide [...]

Warning! If you are lucky enough to be invited on to a national radio programme - for example, the Pat Kenny show - to discuss the economic crisis, whatever you say don’t suggest that those on higher incomes with substantial wealth should pay a little bit more tax. If you do, you will be attacked, [...]

Can you feel it?  Brian has dinner with Sean and Co.  Was one of the Anglo-Irish 10 there breaking bread with the Taoiseach-elect?  And Senator Dan Boyle signals a wobble on the part of the junior coalition partner.  Low-paid civil servants are demonstrating; as are the Guards; Dublin Bus is facing into an all-out strike.  The National [...]

The newspaper articles read like war reports - from the economic front-line on which we are all trapped The new CSO figures on unemployment confirm this. Already, leading economists are suggesting the jobless rate could exceed 12 percent by year’s end, making projections made only last week already out of date.
It’s depressing enough [...]

A system in crisis
There were two remarkable things about the Lisbon Treaty referendum that have been almost completely ignored by the men and women whose job it is to chew over Irish politics on a daily basis. First of all, the result showed that Irish citizens have no confidence in the people they vote for. [...]

Did anyone catch it?  Stephen Collins did but he didn’t give us the maths.  When Minister Lenihan introduced the Finance Bill he made a small amendment in the new income levy, imposing an extra one percent on incomes above €250,000.  In doing so he put forward two statistics:  first, that this would net the state coffers €60 [...]