Links. Land, Estonia, Economic myopia, Putin’s popularity, British teachers, Clean technology

1) In the Financial Times Robin Hardin has a good article about the land tax. He suggests (based upon micro-economic work of Morris Davis, Rutger Stephen Oliner and Edward Pinto which I did not read) that a ‘land underlying houses’ value index might be a good indicator of housing bubbles. Macro data show this, too. The ‘Piketty style’ national accounts balance sheet data contain information on the value of land underlying houses. For the Netherlands I’ve extrapolated these data (roughly: market value of houses minus building costs of houses) backwards to 1965 and they clearly show the two post WW II Dutch housing  bubbles. Technical detail: due to the introduction of new national accounts concepts there is a break in the series between 2008 and 2009; the data on NIP are consistent with the old concepts, not with the new concepts). See Jesse Frederik (in Dutch) on the first bubble.

2) Unemployment in Estonia keeps getting down – but employment is not getting up. The working age population is shrinking.

3) Robin Fransman on myopia at the ECB

4) Another country with a (for a time: rapidly) shrinking population: Russia. I’m  not a Putin fan (understatement). But Russians have reasons to be satisfied with his reign: after 2005 mortality went down quite a bit and deaths due to suicide, homicide and ‘accidental poisoning by alcohol’ plummeted since 2005. At least according to the data of the official statistical institute.

5) The post 2008 statistics keep surprising. Productivity in the UK shows a historically unprecedented decline – but productivity in British public sector teaching went up with 16% in the last 4 years – while teaching is normally notoriously resistant to productivity increases. There are some measurement snags – but 16% is a lot!

6) Manufacturing uses ever cleaner technologies