Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist of the IMF, told the annual meeting of the American Economic Association that there were many reasons to doubt the supposed costs of public debt. Since then Jason Furman and Larry Summers of Harvard University, both of whom advised Barack Obama on economics, have written in Foreign Affairs, a journal, that it is time to kill off the “debt obsession”. The Economist
It’s an incredible video. It was created at the end of July 2017, three months before Austria’s general election that October. The video shows Strache, leader of the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), and fellow party member Johann Gudenus, deputy mayor of Vienna at the time, meeting with a woman in a luxurious holiday villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Süddeutsche Zeitung
A secretly filmed video that led Heinz-Christian Strache, Austria’s far-right vice chancellor, to step down on Saturday is filled with eyebrow-raising moments, according to excerpts published by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. New York Times
Austria’s chancellor called on Saturday for snap elections after the country’s far-right vice chancellor resigned over a secretly filmed video from 2017 that renewed questions about whether Russia had a direct line into a government at the heart of Europe. New York Times
More than 370 million people will be eligible to vote in the European elections. But as they enter the polling booth they will have very different issues on their mind, as this survey of the six biggest countries conducted by the Europa group of newspapers reveals. The Guardian
The carbon pricing initiatives have been classified in ETSs and carbon taxes according to how they operate technically. ETS does not only refer to cap-and-trade systems, but also baseline-and-credit systems such as in British Columbia and baseline-and-offset systems such as in Australia. Carbon pricing has evolved over the years and initiatives do not necessarily follow the two categories in a strict sense. The World Bank
More than 40 governments worldwide have now adopted some sort of price on carbon, either through direct taxes on fossil fuels or through cap-and-trade programs. New York Times
To what degree will climate change sway the way Australians vote? The answer could provide important lessons for other democracies in the age of climate change. New York Times
Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded. New York Times
A leaked “non-paper” by the eight countries calls on the European Union to step up the fight against climate change and sign up to a European Commission plan to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions “by 2050 at the latest” .Germany, Italy and Poland were notably absent from the list of signatories of the leaked document, obtained by EURACTIV, echoing divisions at a recent EU summit. EurActiv
© Stefan P. Schleicher 2019
