Andy Wightman has picked up this and reports it on his blog. The European Court of Auditors has just published a damning report on the Single Payment Scheme which was introduced as part of the 2003 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (ECA Press Release here & BBC report here.). It is my view that this kind of thing comes about as much through ignorance of the laws of economics as from corruption....

A row has erupted over a report that attempted to put a value on the natural environment. The counter-argument is that the natural environment is priceless and that it is somehow sacrilegious to put a price on it. There is an important sense in which this is true, but in our present state of society, surely it is better to put a value on nature than to assume, as at present, that it is worthless?

Intolerable choices for the Eurozone, an article in the FT by Martin Wolfe, who concludes that the Eurozone has failed and that no-one knows where to go from here. The surprise is that anyone in a position of authority ever thought that the project was viable in the long term. Surely this alone must now cast doubt on the entire body of economic theory that governments and those who advise them are...

This is an oft-heard complaint at the moment but what does it mean? What exactly has moved offshore? Truckloads of their money, in bundles of £50 notes? Containers filled with furniture? Houses, dismantled and put onto low-loaders? None of the above of course. And that is the trouble with economics as presently discussed and commented on. It does not look at actual physical objects and the real...

Growing numbers of high street retailers are at loggerheads with the landlords of their shops, threatening to abandon hundreds of stores when leases end in the coming years unless hefty rental discounts are granted. Mothercare has announced closure of 110 stores, music retailer HMV announced in January it would cut 60 stores from its UK network, while electrical retailers Comet and Dixons have also...

We are told that the banks (in Ireland and elsewhere) lent money to speculators to enable them to buy land at inflated prices. When prices dipped, the speculators went bust, the banks had to be helped by the taxpayer, and took on board the remaining assets of the speculators. However, what was not much reported was the enormous sums of money received by the sellers of land in the boom that preceded...