A basic tenet of economics is that people always behave selfishly, or as the 18th century philosopher economist David Hume put it, "every man ought to be supposed to be a knave."

Off to buy a new handbag and fabulous red shoes, or how about overalls and a riding lawnmower? Before going, a mood check for signs of despair and gloom might be in order because how a person feels can impact routine economic transactions, whether he or she is aware of it or not.

A study published by Wiley-Blackwell in the Pacific Economic Review predicts that China will win at least 14% more medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics – in comparison to the 144 medals won in 2004 – and narrow its medal-tally gap with the USA significantly.

For years residents of Cape Cod and the Islands have been promised that the Cape Wind project, a 25 square mile (the size of Manhattan Island) array of 130 440' tall wind turbines, would lower their electricity rates. Remember: “The Wind is Free?”

Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. today announced that they have formed two new publishing partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region. The world’s largest society publisher will publish Basic & Applied Pathology and Pacific Focus from 2008.

The significance of rugby and the All Blacks, runs deeper in New Zealand than just being a national pastime.

New figures show the U.S. economy grew at a fairly brisk pace during the third quarter of 2007. VOA White House Correspondent Paula Wolfson reports Bush administration officials give much of the credit to rising American exports.

Sino-US trade relations are increasingly troubled by America’s concerns over China’s trade practices that result in the mounting imbalance in bilateral trade and US suffering huge trade deficits.

US trio Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson have won the 2007 Nobel Economics Prize for their pioneering work on how to design solutions for complex economic and social tasks.

Standard economics assumes that people base their decisions on real value only and take changes in price tags properly into account. For example, a rational consumer is assumed to base his shopping decisions on “real” prices (e.g., how many hours do I have to work for a loaf of bread?) and would not change his consumption patterns if all “nominal” prices were to move in proportion (e.g. are inflated by the same factor).

This week marks the launch of the eighth year of the Interest Rate Challenge, a competition designed to give 16 to 18-year old students across the UK the opportunity to take on the role of the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) and set the official interest rate for the UK to meet the inflation target of 2.0%.

In a lecture in London to the Society of Business Economists to mark the tenth anniversary of the Monetary Policy Committee, Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, examines the improvement in the UK's economic performance over the past 10 years and the role played in that by the MPC.