What's new in economic research

Below a selection of a couple of interesting articles from the most recent vox.eu column:

Martin Ravaillon cautions about the overuse of various rankings and indexes.

Olivier Blanchard, Chief Economist of the IMF, talks about the need to rebalance the global economy. He argues that "the [global economic] recovery which is neither strong, nor balanced, and runs the risk of not being sustained"

Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari analyze the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone and the response of the national authorities, EU institutions, and IMF (full paper here). They find Greece’s debt burden to be unsustainable, with or without the support package, with which I strongly agree: bankruptcy of Greece is inevitable, although you will never hear the "b" word. Instead, Greece will restructure its debt through what will be called "An Enhanced Market Friendly Debt Swap" or something similar.

Finally, Francesco Giavazzi and Luigi Spaventa argue that the EC's new proposals for strengthening fiscal discipline are "empty and useless".