Think-Tanks'Press

The solution to stagflation was to switch from demand management to supply-side policies. The logic was powerful: The only way to achieve lower prices and higher output was to make economies more productive. This prescription would still be effective if today’s problems were those of the 1970s. But they are the reverse: Demand is depressed. To exit stag-deflation requires a break with current economic orthodoxy.

There is no shortage of examples of such breaks: Roosevelt’s New Deal; the creation of the Bretton Woods system; the break from Bretton Woods; Russia’s post-Soviet privatization and marketization; and China’s opening-up policy.

The trade-off between accessing European markets and managing EU immigration lies at the heart of the current Brexit policy debate. Various voices from both sides of the negotiating table have set out their red lines. But we have heard relatively few constructive proposals for a deal that might square this circle and work both in the UK and in the capitals of Europe.

The report details a new, three-tier immigration system which offers preferential access to EU workers, with free movement maintained for workers that pass a skills or salary threshold; but brings unskilled immigration under UK control, through annually set quotas. Importantly, the first opportunity to fill those low-skilled migrant quotas would go to Britain’s preferential trade partners, such as the EU.

Many think immigration presents an impossible conundrum for the Brexit negotiations.  A new, preferential system, we argue, could rebuild trust on immigration in Britain while offering UK negotiators a positive offer to make as it seeks a strong trade deal with the EU.

There can be no security in contemporary Europe without the creation of a new ‘iron triangle’ – the US, NATO and the EU. Right now, ‘reality’ looks more like a meringue triangle – the appearance of a hard crust on the outside, very soft in the middle. Until the hybrid threat is seen as the strategic threat it is NATO and the EU will continue to act like two wary bull elephants dancing around each other on the head of a shrinking pin. Real progress will only be seen when effective and real strategy is crafted and the agility and adaptability central to the conduct of effective hybrid warfare is realised.

What should the select committee do? The answer to this is easy. It should do what the Minister should have done when his officials served up the Bill: send it back.
Instead of prescriptive regulations for a bygone era, the new economy needs a regulatory model that is flexible, efficient, and outcomes based. Legislation that incentivises innovation, rather than stifles it.
There is an opportunity here for New Zealand’s regulatory regime to embrace the digital economy and set the standard internationally with a permissive accreditation and licensing regime.

The pilot project symbolises a new institutional working method whereby the European Defence Agency manages defence research programmes on behalf of the European Commission. After delegating the pilot project to the Agency in November 2015, this will be a test case not only for the EU’s ability to finance vital defence research but to also prove to the member states that the EU can add value to national efforts on defence research.

Any future European Defence Research Programme may even eventually alter the way the EU develops defence capabilities. This is crucially important given the SDIP’s emphasis on having ‘the right capabilities, tools and structures to deliver more security for its citizens’.

Ordinary people can neither cross into Russia with contraband nor transfer large amounts of money abroad without legal grounds to do so; only those who are part of the system can. And who is more a part of the system than top law enforcement officials?

In the Zakharchenko case, it seems as though the FSB, which has been trying to gain control over smuggling and capital exports, found out about the timing of a large transfer and attacked while the “caravan was in transit.”