Read all posts from ‘Austerity: Less is More?’

“Joder, que nosotros nos hemos venío porque allá no hay trabajo…” (F*** man, we came here because there are no jobs there…) answered the Spanish couple to my inquiries about their origin and their visit to the beautiful Mexican beaches of Los Cabos, Baja California Sur. I had finally met […]

Even in previous decades during years of high growth, Slovakia still ran up big deficits. To enter the euro area a country has to meet a reasonable set of criteria known as the Maastricht criteria. This means that a country which gives up its local currency must keep its deficit […]

Abstract: It is hard to tell if government spending cuts and austerity measures are good or bad to deal with deficits and financial crisis. In Colombia, the tendency to reduce public spending has affected sensitive sectors like education and health. This is far from being unnoticed, there have been lots […]

What can the experiences of people and communities tell us about the value of austerity measures? Have austerity policies exacerbated inequality in our societies, or rendered us all more equal? How do people in different countries view austerity policies?

Nigeria has come a long way from 1974 when General Gowon said that the problem was not money itself but rather how to spend it. Sadly, the way since then has been been all downhill. Back then we spent more on capital projects and infrastructure than on recurrent spending. These […]