The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was a comprehensive effort by Mao Zedong to regulate how people think and behave. Citizens were forced to read the “Red Bible” and honor the Communist Party with quasi-religious rituals. Mutual supervision was encouraged throughout all of society. People were told that the way of thinking and behavior advocated by Mao Zedong was the only correct one.

Once again, the 2021 National People’s Congress, held from March 5-11, followed a strict choreography. The political leadership entered the Great Hall of the People to the sound of a military band and led by state and party leader, President Xi Jinping.

Malta is a compact archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea, 80 km from Sicily, 333 km from Libya and 284 km from Tunisia. It had a long list of rulers, including the Phoenicians, the Byzantines, the Arabs and later the French under Napoleon and finally the British. The island gained independence in 1964, and in 2004 it joined the European Union.

Monday, April 26, marked World IP Day. In cooperation with the Property Rights Alliance (PRA), the Austrian Economics Center celebrated it by signing its annual coalition letter, addressed to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Director-General Daren Tang. Property rights benefit businesses, both big and small, start-ups or companies with a long tradition. This, in turn, enriches society as a whole.
The COVID-19 pandemic has cost us too much. As a response to the pandemic, several countries are lobbying at the WTO for abandonment of international IP protection (the TRIPS agreement). The day TRIPS is abandoned, the PRA alliance argues, many others would abandon even the minimum of IP protection there has been.
The Executive Director of the Property Rights Alliance Lorenzo

10th International Conference “The Austrian School of Economics in the 21st Century” will be held in Vienna (Austria) on November 4 and 5, 2021, organized by the Austrian Economics Center and Fundación Internacional Bases.

As Covid-19 continues to rage throughout Europe, China and Russia seem to be giving the European Union lessons in soft power on its home ground. EU members and countries nearby are turning to Beijing and Moscow for additional supplies of Covid-19 vaccines, faced with rising discontent at the slow rollout of the EU’s own vaccination strategy, supply shortages, delivery bottlenecks, poor communication and concerns about vaccine safety.

Among the many problems originated by the Covid 19 pandemic, one of the most important is the resurgence of the anti-vaccine movement. Conspiracy theories, ridiculous arguments and unfounded accusations have given renewed fuel to one of the most anti-scientific and destructive trends we have ever seen.

The business of fighting Covid-19 is now estimated at around $150 billion. As of March 2021, 354 million vaccine doses have been delivered – 90 percent of them to countries that are home to only 10 percent of the world’s population. If 65 to 85 percent of people have to be vaccinated to reach global immunity, then it is unlikely to happen this year.

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted transportation worldwide, sending shockwaves across supply chains, lowering demand and reducing revenue. Shipping and aviation especially experienced a steep financial decline. Companies have had to operate at limited capacity and growth prospects have dropped sharply. 

While I freely self-identify as a libertarian, I don’t think of myself as a philosophical ideologue. Instead, I’m someone who likes digging into data to determine the impact of government policy. And because I’ve repeatedly noticed that more government almost always leads to worse outcomes, I’ve become a practical ideologue.

This GIS 2021 Outlook series focuses on the opportunities that stem from the upheaval of the past year. Coronavirus vaccine distribution has begun, most probably marking the beginning of the end of the global health crisis. A receding pandemic will leave behind intertwined economic and fiscal challenges for countries around the world.

Deflation is the most feared economic phenomenon of our time. The reason behind this a priori irrational fear (why should we be afraid of prices going down?) is the Great Depression.