George Osborne, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, walks away from No. 11 Downing Street on Wednesday, before delivering his budget to the House of Commons.STEFAN WERMUTH
A roundup of the best economic posts on the Web
Austerity Britain: Lesson for the U.S.?
In the New Yorker, John Cassidy warns the U.S. to keep an eye on the toll that the government's austerity movement is taking on Britain's economy:
"It is a simple matter of arithmetic that when one source of demand in the economy -- in this case, the government -- cuts back its spending sharply, G.D.P. will fall unless another sector steps up its level of spending. But with Britain suffering from rising fuel prices and a housing bust, there was never much prospect of debt-laden consumers filling the stores or business embarking on an investment binge."
The austerity delusion
And, in The New York Times, Paul Krugman sees the U.S. moving towards austerity and warns of its potential for disaster:
"Austerity advocates predicted that spending cuts would bring quick dividends in the form of rising confidence, and that there would be few, if any, adverse effects on growth and jobs; but they were wrong. It's too bad, then, that these days you're not considered serious in Washington unless you profess allegiance to the same doctrine that's failing so dismally in Europe."
GDP & population shares, natural resources & prosperity: A national comparison
At Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Livio Di Matteo examines the shift in the distribution of GDP to resource-intensive areas of the country:
"...[I] looks like the resource boom in energy prices has certainly been a key factor in the recent shifting distribution of GDP across the Canadian federation particularly as can be seen in the recent shift towards Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland & Labrador. ... Of course, we then come down to the ultimate question. Despite all the talk about the shift to a knowledge economy, is Canada fundamentally still dependent mainly on natural resources for its long-term prosperity and if so does that really matter as long as we can be prosperous?"
Japan, at a halt
The Economist, with some sobering reports on the state of Japan's economy, as it struggles to recover from the earthquake and tsunami of two weeks ago:
"The tragedy is that there are any number of efficient retail businesses in Japan desperate to get their shops back open -- if nothing else, so that they can sell to the disaster victims. If Japan's establishment were not so bunker-headed and convinced that it knows all the answers, it would have created a war room, brought in experts from the real world, and declared a state of emergency to get the fuel up north."
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