Author: Damian Merciar

Damian Merciar is Managing Director of Merciar Business Consulting, http://www.merciar.com, a niche business economics consultancy founded in 1998. He has over twenty years experience in the areas of commercial Business Strategy. He is experienced in the transition environments of nationalized to private sector state utilities and the senior practice of commercial management, advisorial consultancy, and implementation. He has carried out policy advisory work for government ministries and been an adviser to institutional bodies proposing changes to government. He holds an MSc Economics from the University of Surrey’s leading Economics department and an MBA from the University of Kent. Also attending the leading University in the Middle East, studying International Relations and Language, for which he won a competitive international scholarship, and has a BA (Hons) in Economic History and Political Economy from the University of Portsmouth. He is currently based in London.

Economists Krugman and Stiglitz on Why Greeks Should Vote ‘No’ on the Referendum

Jo Weber's avatarJo Weber Economist & Social Media Expert

  An anti-austerity march in front of the Greek Parliament in Athens. (Ggia/ CC BY-SA 3.0)

Now that Greece has become the first advanced nation to fall into arrears with the International Monetary Fund, the nation has reached a crucial crossroads: Should it concede to the demands of the “troika” — the institutions representing creditor interests—or continue to reject austerity and prepare to ditch the euro?

Amid mass protests, tumbling markets and bank closures, Greece will hold a referendum Sunday to decide.

Recent opinion pieces by Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman maintain that Greece must keep going it alone and vote no.

Stiglitz writes in The Guardian “… the economics behind the programme that the ‘troika’ (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the…

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Does Digital Tech Lower Income & Reduce Jobs?

ddcolrs's avatarDelightful & Distinctive COLRS

Source: HBR, May 2015

 Brynjolfsson and McAfee explain that while digital technologies will help economies grow faster, not everyone will benefit equally—as the latest data already shows. Compared with the Industrial Revolution, digital technologies are more likely to create winner-take-all markets.

once you adjust for inflation, an American household at the 50th percentile of income distribution earns less today than it did in 1998, even after accounting for changes in household size.

… the Great Decoupling. The two halves of the cycle of prosperity are no longer married: Economic abundance, as exemplified by GDP and productivity, has remained on an upward trajectory, but the income and job prospects for typical workers have faltered.

Workers’ prospects are deteriorating in the developing world, too. A recent study by Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman found that labor’s share of GDP had declined in 42 out of 59 countries, including China, Mexico, and…

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