International Economics: IB Economics

This could go in a variety of places but I've put it here because it shows the direction of travel as regards international trade. However, there are a variety of trade-offs here: efficiency versus equity, energy security versus environmental protection and so on.

There's also a lovely illustration of the power of incentives: why else would the head of an energy giant be promoting fossil fuels? 

Gordon Brown again writes about the inequality in the distribution of coronavirus vaccines, arguing that such is the level of production, and also the level of waste in the developed world, that the global rollout of vaccines in the developing world is grossly unfair. 

And the accompanying illustration is very clever too.

Excellent insight into tax avoidance, using President Trump as an example. It makes a clear distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion, and highlights some of the numerous ways that the super-rich are able to avoid paying tax.

I've a simple view of this - if you are wealthy enough to be able to afford the lawyers and accountants that enable you to do this, you are doing something unethical. Indeed, a simple solution to lots of this would be to enact a law saying that people who use such people to reduce their tax burden should be paying the state as much in tax as they pay to the 'wealth defense industry".

Two of the biggest contemporary names in development - the Director-General of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and the PM of Barbados, Mia Mottley, have contributed a piece to the Guardian that promotes greater equity in development, arguing that the living standards of the world's poorest have been compromised by the twin threats of climate change and the current higher levels of global inflation. 

They argue that it is the role of international organisations and the way they regulate global trade to ensure that any reimagining of globalisation is fairer.  

And the flip side of that coin? Swiss bank UBS reports that contrary to the view that "We're All in This Together", the world's wealthiest individuals have seen their fortunes rise by 27% over the period of the crisis with tech bosses earning most. 

And from a UK perspective, it also seems that our billionaires are the least philanthropic too. 

The OECD have looked at social mobility in their latest research and discovered that, since the 1990s, social mobility has stalled. As a result, people born into poor families have less chance of earning national average incomes than previous generations and this might reduce productivity and, at worst, exacerbate the poverty trap.