After ignoring Warsaw during his first term, David Cameron rushed to Poland immediately after his re-election in May, hoping to get the country on board his renegotiation package.
Jean Tirole won last year’s Nobel prize for economics for his work on a new type of market – and one that has grown with the meteoric rise of the internet. So-called two-sided markets arise when a company brings together suppliers and consumers. Google is a classic example: it provides browsers with web pages, and makes cash from advertisers who are drawn to the billions of eyeballs that look at its site every day. Tirole showed that, in two-sided markets, prices are usually skewed, with one side paying.
Tuesday’s agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme is a momentous achievement, but only if it can be enforced and verified. Following the diplomatic deal in Vienna, Western governments should engage with Tehran, but also help to contain Iran’s growing influence in the region.
In his famous Bloomberg speech of January 2013, offering British voters a referendum on EU membership, David Cameron promised to strengthen the role of national parliaments in the EU. But are British parliamentarians up to the task? The Commons’ limited interest in European business suggest not.
The new bailout deal signals Greece's capitulation to its creditors, something which has important ramifications for the bailout's success. Even if the deal makes it through the Greek parliament in the coming weeks, the programme's economic incoherence will make it fall apart.
Germany's strategy was clear: impose harsh conditions on any government that seeks to change the austere rules of the game, knowing that electorates in Greece and elsewhere are terrified of the leap into the unknown that would be exit from the euro.
