Blockchain technology has the potential to be a catalyst for change to incumbent financial sector firms. In this Vox Talk, Tim Phillips talks to Simon Johnson, one of the authors of the latest Geneva Report on the World Economy which looks at the technology and its possible applications.
Vox Talks
- 188859 reads
- Printer-friendly version
Vox Talks
Central banks are concerned about the impact of cryptocurrencies. In this Vox Talk, Tim Phillips talks to Beatrice Weder di Mauro about the sources of this concern, and whether the disappearance of cash and a desire to escape the zero lower bound will lead to central banks issuing their own digital currencies.
2 years on from the UK’s referendum vote to leave the EU, substantial questions about the path to Brexit remain. In this special edition of Vox Talks, Tim Phillips talks to Swati Dhingra, Karl Whelan, and Luc Frieden about how the process of Brexit negotiation is itself impacting UK households already, from food price inflation to bilateral trade relations across Europe. The data suggests these effects are not transitory, but will persist beyond the current climate of policy uncertainty.
The issue of how to reform the EU is well discussed in research and policy. But through which institutions and in which order these reforms should take place is less well debated. Nauro Campos discusses the role of Europe’s institutions in its successes and failures. Based on the findings of the recent CEPR eBook, “Bretton Woods, Brussels, and Beyond: Redesigning the Institutions of Europe”, he suggests that the risks of not reforming these institutions are at least another recession across Europe, but also threats to the European project itself.
The presence of a local criminal organisation can be linked to slower economic and social growth, and this holds true of the Sicilian Mafia. Giuseppe De Feo discusses his recent research on how the Mafia came to be, and its impact on Sicilian growth since its inception. The threat of Peasant Fasci organisations in the 1890s led landholders and politicians to turn to the Mafia to combat pressure from the peasant class. Since then, the Mafia's existence seems to have reduced literacy and health outcomes, and limited the provision of a variety of local public goods.