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At dinner yesterday Niall Ferguson made the argument that China (or the East) were perhaps no longer looking to how Western countries had built their social institutions and formed their empires, and were instead now doing their own thing as the Western approach was shown to be flawed

“Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the structural adjustments of the global economy…”The decisions on the four modernisations taken at the Third Plenum represented a radical change in Chinese domesticdevelopment strategy.

Political meritocracy is the idea that a political system is designed with the aim of selecting political leaders with above average ability to make morally informed political judgments. That is, political meritocracy has two key components: (1) the political leaders have above average ability and virtue and (2) the selection mechanism is designed to choose such leaders.

At the heart of economics is a theory of action. It reflects views about how human beings make economic decisions and leads to an analysis of aggregate consequences.

A core puzzle in Önancial economics is the inability of standard risk-premium models to account for excess returns in currency and other asset markets.

Neoclassical economics has abolished the role of psychology in decision making by assuming that all individuals are rational optimizers with rational expectations about future events.

The global financial crisis led to the rediscovery of ‘fundamental uncertainty’. Incorporating uncertainty into the analysis of financial markets alters our understanding of how these markets operate and expose the two-faced role of law in finance.

There is much anecdotal evidence in the popular media, backed up by survey research, that participants in currency markets pay close attention to fundamental economic variables in forming their forecasts of future exchange rates.