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Welcome to Nada Es Gratis, our new Consortium partner

The Spanish-language site “Nada Es Gratis” (“There’s No Free Lunch”) joins the Vox Consortium today. The site has been up and running since June 2009 and has already established a broad and active community of readers and contributors.

Vox welcomes the newest member of the Consortium – the Spanish-language site Nada Es Gratis.

Nada Es Gratis (“Nothing Is Free” – the Spanish interpretation of “There’s No Free Lunch”) is edited by Antonio Cabrales (Universidad Carlos III), Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (University of Pennsylvania), Luis Garicano (London School of Economics) and Juan Rubio-Ramirez (Duke University). In addition, a large group of Spanish-speaking economists collaborate with it on a regular basis, including Javier Andres, Samuel Bentolila, Michele Boldrin, Marco Celentani, Juan Carlos Conesa, Javier Díaz-Giménez, Juan José Dolado, David López-Salido, José Victor Ríos-Rull, Tano Santos, and Pablo Vázquez.

Launched in June 2009, the site has quickly become a thriving hub of economic debate in Spain with over 100,000 visits and frequent citations in the mass media. It is hosted by FEDEA (Fundación de Estudios de Economía Aplicada), a private research centre created in 1985 that aims at producing applied economic analysis of the highest quality from an independent and non-partisan position to address contemporary issues in Spanish society.

Its goal is to promote analysis and commentary by distinguished economic researchers on the key problems facing modern society, with a special focus on Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, but without forgetting that Spain is a small open economy linked with an integrated world.

Examples of topics recently addressed include:

  • The financial situation of savings and loans institutions,
  • The need for fiscal consolidation,
  • Monetary policy of the FED and the ECB,
  • Labour reform,
  • Reform of the educational system in Spain,
  • Health economics and many others.

Nada Es Gratis welcomes all opinions based on objective facts and sound economic reasoning. Readers are free to comment on all posts, with the only limitations being those imposed by the rules of civil discourse.

Nada Es Gratis aims at narrowing the gap between economic researchers and the general public – a gap that unfortunately has traditionally been large in Spain because economists have participated very little in public debate on economic policy.

Vox’s expanding consortium

Having recently expanded the consortium to include the German-language site Ökonomenstimme, we are thrilled that Spanish is rejoining the language club (the previous Spanish language site became inactive).

Enlargement of the Consortium will assure that the best contributions are translated into an expanding array of languages thus reaching further into the policymaking world. Despite English’s ascendancy on the web, only a narrow slice of professional economists are completely at ease with English. More analysis will be read and understood if it is presented in a wide range of languages. In this way, good research-based policy commentary and analysis should reach deeper into the global policy-making machinery than, for example, a Financial Times Personal View. Moreover, unlike many opinion-pieces in the print media, columns posted on the Consortium are freely downloadable (no subscription is required).

http://www.fedeablogs.net/economia/

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