“An insider of the European Commission since the late 1980s, Marco Buti is a unique guide through the two crises of the 21st century.” - Giuliano Amato, former Prime Minister of Italy “Marco Buti and I have not always agreed on issues of economic policy. But I cannot think of somebody more qualified to tell us about the travails of Europe since the Great Financial Crisis. He was there all along.” - Olivier Blanchard, Senior Fellow at Peterson Institute for International Economics “This collection of VoXEU contributions shows how history is made. Marco Buti, a man inside the vortex of ...

Disruption, from Latin (dis- ‘apart’ + rumpere ‘to break’), means tearing something into pieces, destroying it completely. In the chaotic, uncertain, fast-paced contemporary world, journalism must embrace change and adapt. Based on this assumption, the author covers her experience towards the centenary media business with a fresh and entrepreneurial approach, the same approach she adopts in her everyday life as a young manager at the Financial Times. Framing her analysis with the Chaos and Network theories, she brings the reader into a journey through the future of journalism, which now ...

Industrial production has always been a propulsion element in any economy, be it from a perspective of value-creation, employment potential, or its impact on sustainability and technological innovation; the ability to manage operations and supply chain is therefore a key skill for a company’s competitiveness.If this has always been true, today as never before, in a world hit hard by a medical emergency first, and then by economic and social ones, the reflection on the most appropriate management practices in manufacturing has become a central element for individual companies, entire sectors ...

Critical Thinking is a discipline that provides the means to distinguish good from bad arguments. In doing so, it draws on the contributions of other disciplines such as logic, psychology, argumentation, and probability theory. By exploiting and developing our ability to reason, it makes us understand why certain reasoning patterns are correct and others are not.The book is an introduction to Critical Thinking, to the role that reasoning plays in concrete contexts and to the forms it assumes in different fields. The first part of the book explains what an argument is and what types of argument ...

The book deals with the interplay between two strategies promoted by China in the 21st century to increase its integration into the world economy: Belt and Road Initiative-BRI and the internationalisation of the renminbi. They came about at different times and with complementary aims, with a great synergy between them. On the one hand, greater international circulation of the renminbi is indispensable for the completion and smooth functioning of the BRI: the vast financial resources needed to implement BRI projects around the world cannot be denominated in renminbi (which has no real official ...

A new book on the relationship between banks and corporates is a challenge that must be accepted: we need to revert the narrative on banks and provide a proper perspective on what they can do for the economy overall.Corporate and Investment Banking is in fact the banking activity that most affects the growth of companies and their ability to be more robust and competitive. In the financial world, the key variable for development is technology, enabling the use of information to the benefit of customers. For the corporate market, the tailor-made design of products involves a more complex choice, ...

The book analyzes the different phases that have characterized the evolution of the pol-icy framework and the economic governance of the European Union and the Euro Area since the end of the global financial crisis (2007-2009). This analysis, which is found-ed on a careful reconstruction of those "right" or "wrong" economic ideas that have "ruled" the European world until the pandemic shock (to paraphrase the final remarks of Keynes' General Theory), is crucial to appreciate the importance of the ground-break-ing initiatives undertaken by the European policy makers and institutions in 2020: the ...

By addressing the financial markets from a new perspective, this book sets out to take the reader on a journey, explaining the role of financial markets as places where exchanges take place to meet the needs of people, businesses and institutions. The volume is structured in four parts. The first part introduces the functions, structure, and components of the financial system. In the second part, the authors describe the functioning of the markets in terms of risk and return, providing a more in-depth description of the role of intermediaries. In the third part, capital markets are illustrated ...

In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the singer and songwriter Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." This suggests how important pop music is in the contemporary society, and highlights how blurred are traditional boundaries across all forms of art. Pop music is strictly connected to mass media, mass culture, the youth universe, and its languages. Pop/rock music is the bearer of new trends, while getting influenced by social and cultural events. Rock reflects the world of youth, its rituals and legends, and it represents ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated our fragility as a species. Humanity was attacked by a previously unknown virus that spread very rapidly, thanks to a speed of population mobility never before seen in human history. It succeeded in creating the complete upset of the global socio-economic system. Such an event gives us an important stimulus to re-evaluate health in the context of a circular system that encompasses humans and the environment in which we live. The key challenge we face is the discovery of novel paths to crisis resolution. Can we abandon the often cherished, but now rather obsolete, ...