GLOBAL DOWNTURN?
 Oisin
 Okay my first flagging of stuff.
Firstly we are hearing a lot of talk about a global downturn. How true is this? Is there really a global downturn happening? The answer simply is yes but it is not affecting all regions of the world equally.
The IMF in its 2008 World Economic Outlook published last in April presents us with the following information on world growth rates:
Immediately we can see that there has indeed been a secular decline in the world growth rate. There is a decrease in projected 2009 world growth rate of 24% relative to the 2006 rate. However the decrease in the projected 2009 rate relative to the 2006 rate in advanced economies is 57% while in emerging and developing economies it is only 15%. The only area where there is no projected decrease is in the Middle East which where the projected growth rate for 2009 is 105% of the 2006 rate.
Anyway the point of this is simply to show that the global downturn is hitting advanced economies much harder than the rest of the world.
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Written by Oisín GilmoreOn July 9, 2008
HELLO. MY NAME IS OISÃN. I AM A TOKEN.
Okay well… Hello. I have no connection with NUI-M and am not a sociologist. So I really am a token on this blog. Aileen persuaded me to join her, I mean this blog by telling me that I could just use it to flag stuff that I thought was interesting. She said it’s somewhere I could put up notes on stuff I’m reading and want to read and somewhere I could put up half thought out criticisms of stuff I’m reading etc.
So that’s the plan.
I suppose I should also say some stuff about what I’m interested in. Basically my interests in economics are in economic history, monetary and financial economics, labour economics, institutional economics, growth theory and the history of economic thought. I’m also interested in trying to make sense of what is happening to the world economy. On a somewhat different level I’m interest in industrial organisation and feminist economics. Outside of economics qua economics I’m interested to varying degrees in pretty much all of the humanities to varying degrees. I’m particularly interested in the various forms of communist theory: Marxist and anarchist. I’m also interested in social movement: how they develop and how they bring about change. (I do have other interested non academic interests but probably won’t post much about them on here.)
Err so that’s my first post. Other’s will be better.