Submitted by Businomics Blog
Ben Pratt over at Market-Based Management Institute has a great post on his blog about selling chewing gum in Poland. Here’s an excerpt:

He said that several years ago the Polish division of Wrigley … had somewhere on the order of 70% market share of chewing gum sales in that country, almost none […]

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Submitted by Econbrowser
First, a look at what the blogosphere is thinking about recession.

Figure 1: Count of mentions of recession by weblogs with “a lot of authority”, accessed 25 October 2007.
This article from the Wall Street Journal, predicting the next recession, was quite striking:

 
Rule No. 1: Forecasters rarely call the turn in the economy accurately. Even […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
The answer is Yes, according to this economist at the Blue Matter blog, via Marginal Revolution.

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Submitted by EconWeekly

The Economist gets it wrong when claiming that “social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size.” (Social graph-iti, October 20th.) The British weekly says that the large scale of the networks makes it difficult to restrict one’s contacts to a select group.
But Facebook consists precisely of a web of […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
Dani Rodrick on why the best economics blogs might be on their way out.
Dani Rodrick the next day on why the econ-blogosphere is healthy and will keep on going.

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
Lo and behold, competition works — even in health care.
The Labor Department recently reported that the inflation rate for prescription drugs dropped to 1% over the past year. That’s a 30-year low, well below inflation, and a salve for consumers used to price increases.
It’s also no accident. Two big things changed […]

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Submitted by Econbrowser>
The answer is pretty simple, really– demand keeps going up but supply doesn’t.

World oil production in million barrels per day. Includes lease condensate, natural gas liquids, and refinery gain. Data plotted are annual averages for 1970-2006 from EIA Table t44 and average for first 7 months of 2007 from EIA Table t14.
The […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
Click here to see Internaional Herald Tribune’s list and slide show. There is only one city in the U.S., can you guess which one?

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

From columnist David Wessel’s column in yesterday’s WSJ: “Three-Ingredient Recipe for Recession”:
“When we look back next year at this time, it will be clear what caused the recession of 2007-08.
It was basically a triple whammy: Housing prices kept falling, oil prices kept rising and both lenders and borrowers grew more […]

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