In the past few months the “bikes subject” has become a more mundane one, specifically because of the new bike-sharing companies that arrived in the city earlier this year. OBike, Flickbike and Donkey Republic are a few of the companies conducting the station-less bike sharing train wagon and the road hasn’t been that easy so
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The circular economy explained
While ordering a fresh orange juice for lunch or flushing toilet paper through the loo, most of us do not really think of the destination of the waste we are creating by doing so. The same holds for more bulky products, such as electronic devices and plastics. What happens to these orange peels, fibres, batteries,
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How far should we go so as to protect consumers?
It’s hard not to see the wall of cigarettes at the service counters in supermarkets in the Netherlands. When I first came to Amsterdam, I was pretty surprised at the ‘Duty Free’-styled labelling on the cigarettes: Plain black text on a white box. I hadn’t paid so much attention to these labels in the past,
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I would like to start this series of columns with a brutal display of intellectual honesty: despite my PhD in Economics, I do not understand many fundamental features of the economy and the way economic science tends to handle it. First up: I do not understand how economics gets away with ignoring marketing and advertising.
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The term fintech, shorthand for financial technology, is a dynamic description difficult to definitively pin down. It is perhaps best understood as encompassing technologies that ‘disrupt’ existing financial products and services or parts of the financial services sector. Here, the oft-used term disruption refers to innovations which provide new or more efficient services and products
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How a journey to West-Papua changed my view on development economics
The world is a tumultuous place, and currently in a distressing state. 22,000 children die every day of poverty. 805 million people go hungry every day. Climate change causes rising sea levels, droughts, biodiversity loss, and overall damage to the ecosystem. However, there is a growing community of organisations, institutions, scientists, politicians and entrepreneurs that
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