A blog on the political, economic and social causes and implications of the crisis in the Southern periphery of the Eurozone.

I'm a political scientist working on political parties and elections, social and economic policy and political corruption, with a particular focus on Italy and Spain. For more details on my work, see CV here, and LSE homepage here. For media or consultancy enquiries, please email J.R.Hopkin@lse.ac.uk.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Economists at work

Research by Mark Hallerberg and my LSE colleague Joachim Wehner finds that Economically-troubled countries are more likely to be led by those with economics training.

Although my colleagues suggest the causal chain runs the other way, it doesn't look good for Papademos and Monti... More seriously, placing faith in technocrats might make more sense if they hadn't been such enthusiastic promoters of the particular model of monetary union that has created this mess.