A new report by the IMF says that there is growing concern that low levels of infrastructure investment are hindering economic growth. “In many emerging market economies, infrastructure bottlenecks are not just a medium-term worry but have been flagged as…
Scotland’s No vote is neither good nor bad for value-creation
Scotland’s decision to reject independence could leave the country in the worst of all possible worlds in terms of developing policies to promote value creation in an economy where services are dominant. The consensus among conventional economists was that independence…
Cities are growing and price has little to do with it
Everyone knows that London is an expensive place to live, but how big’s the cost difference with other parts of the UK? The price of a London home is at least $600 a square foot. A house less than three miles…
Scottish independence and the state in the age of intangibles
Value-creation in services is exclusively the product of constructive interaction at the level of the individual. This fact is testing business corporations and states in different ways. For businesses creating intangibles, the challenge is delegating responsibility for interaction with customers…
Value creation versus price in university education
The cost of a university education in the US and the UK has risen sharply in the past four decades despite the rise of costless ways of sharing information on the internet. Why is this happening? Defenders of the status…
GDP is more than imperfect; it’s wrong for economies where services dominate
An article by David Pilling in last weekend’s FT Magazine reported on expert views that gross domestic product (GDP), the most popular way of measuring output, was misleading. “GDP is a made-up entity,” Pilling quoted economist Diane Coyle as saying.…