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Presents information about the history of paper money, in light of the introduction of euro notes and coins on January 1, 2002. Prediction that the release of the money will cause problems such as long lines, confusion, exploitation of consumers, and forgery; Ways the European Central Bank will protect against forgery; Idea that forgery is become easier through technology.

Discusses the paper and pulp industry in Europe as of September 2001. Reasons for skepticism about investing in the paper and pulp business; Impact of new production methods on the business; Concentration of the industry through mergers such as Stora Enso and UPM-Kymmene; Details of UPM-Kymmene's Tervasaari mill at Valkeakoski near Helsinki, Finland.

At a summit that was starting just as The Economist went to press in June 2004, heads of government of the 25 European Union (EU) countries were planning, after much haggling, to agree upon a new constitution for their Union. When EU leaders deadlocked in December 2003, Elmar Brok, a German who was a leading member of the convention, said that, if the constitution was not agreed on, Europe could slip back into the inter-state rivalries that led to the first world war. A failure to agree will not take Europe back to war, even if it could lead to a split within the EU. Nor would success necessarily mean the emergence of a new superpower called Europe. Point to any apparently significant aspect of the constitution--the Charter of Fundamental Rights or the creation of a European foreign minister--and somebody from Britain's Foreign Office will be at hand to explain that it is not as significant as it sounds. All the main achievements in European integration, from the single market to the abolition of frontier controls to the creation of a single currency, started life as words in a European treaty. Yet, for all that, there is considerable potential for the real world and the constitution to collide. Even if voters do not trash the putative constitution, European leaders might do it for them, by ignoring treaty commitments that prove too politically onerous.

THE British tend to be uncomfortable about the idea of the state keeping tabs on them. Compulsory identity cards, in use during two world wars, were quickly abandoned in peacetime. Seven years ago, a Conservative home secretary, Michael Howard, was forced into a humiliating retreat after failing to convince colleagues that the time and the technology were ripe for another attempt. Given this history, it is hardly surprising that the current home secretary, David Blunkett, is approaching the issue cautiously. The home secretary is now pressing the case for a universal ID card, using the 80m passports and driving licences now in circulation as the basis for a national register. Illegal immigration is one reason why Mr Blunkett is so keen on the idea. Support for ID cards was part of the deal Mr Blunkett did recently with the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, to close the Sangatte refugee camp, because the French believe that their absence encourages immigrants. Blunkett's other main claim for a national ID card is that it would help tackle identity fraud.

The article reports on rise in inflation in Europe. It mentions that paper by Veronica Guerrieri of the University of Chicago and colleagues argues that monetary policy should tolerate somewhat higher inflation if doing so allows workers to find a new job during periods of economic change. It also mentions that inflation gets baked into economies when workers and firms come to believe that prices will keep rising.

The article offers a look at European banking integration. The European Union began as a dream to dissuade European countries from ever again contemplating war against each other. The vision has always been to create a single economic area with common standards and without barriers. Before the euro, banks easily handled 15 different west European currencies and interest rates, and made good money out of trading cash, securities and derivatives for customers and for their own book. The euro was expected to allow easy comparison of prices across all the countries that used it, and stimulate convergence. This has certainly worked for a range of items, but comparing banking services from country to country is difficult. A paper by the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, which is partly funded by the European Commission, reinforces the impression that European financial regulation is chaotic.

The article details financial-services regulations proposed by the European Union. Charlie McCreevy, the former Irish finance minister and now the EU's internal-market commissioner, is regarded as both a sensible champion of capitalism and a bureaucrat who has slowed the march towards a single market. McCreevy is likely to be on display in a new financial-services plan for the next five years, due to be laid out by the European Commission on December 5th in the "White Paper". Hitherto, the commission has focused on harmonising wholesale financial services, such as inter-bank payment systems, and on areas in which benefits could be won fairly quickly, such as government-bond and equity markets. To rectify this, the new plan pays more attention to retail financial services. For instance, the commission wants to make it easier for people to open and close bank accounts across borders, and to transfer money between accounts in different countries without hitting big obstacles or incurring high fees. The White Paper also calls for plans to harmonise asset management, credit intermediaries and banking supervision.

The article looks at the size of newspapers in Europe in relation to newspaper circulation. Tabloid newspapers in many countries are full of topless women, celebrity gossip and xenophobia. But they also boast another attraction: women and younger people find their smaller pages easier to manage, especially on public transport. Broadsheets that usually look down on tabloids are now rushing to downsize. Broadsheets are mostly seeing their circulation slowly dwindle as older readers die and young people choose other sources for news and entertainment. They are also facing tough new competition from free commuter tabloids. Spain has no broadsheets left at all, and in Italy Monrif Group switched its three leading papers, in Milan, Florence and Bologna, to tabloid format in 2001. At Britain's Independent, total circulation has risen by about 15 percent from 2003 thanks to its small edition. Though many readers prefer it, the tabloid format brings its own problems, one of which is that advertisers refuse to pay as much for the same fraction of space. Tabloid proprietors are less than thrilled about quality papers aping their size. Richard Desmond, owner of Britain's Express Newspapers, argues that there is value for readers in keeping a clear distinction between the two.

he September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on America, and repeated warnings that the next targets could be Germany, England, France, or Italy show how vulnerable Europe is to new threats, from instability in regions far away, from failed or failing states and from the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In the past, many Europeans have seen such problems as America's to deal with, or no one's. At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Prague, the Czech Republic, on November 21st-22nd, 2002, and in the European Union's subsequent deliberations about the best use of its own embryonic rapid-reaction force, European leaders will commit themselves, at least on paper, to take on farther-flung responsibilities. After half a century of being wrapped up chiefly in their own affairs, Europe must think urgently about how best to defend themselves and their interests anywhere in the world. Although Europe has prided itself on their civilizing "soft power", most European governments recognize that more hard power, military capability, in short, is required. The go-anywhere NATO that is to be proclaimed at the summit will in any case face the old NATO's problems: too few fleet-footed capabilities, with smart weapons and secure communications, of the sort that America displayed in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and which are needed to win wars. The Iraq debate at the United Nations has been an all-too-familiar case-study in how Europeans get themselves at cross-purposes, with an activist Britain, a cautious France and an ohne mich Germany all pulling in different directions. America easily leads the world in almost every dimension of power. But Europe, with its bigger population and not much smaller gross domestic product, reckoned to be larger, in fact, until America's faster growth and the depreciating euro reversed the honors, has considerable heft, and that weight will grow as the EU takes in more members.

Discusses foreign relations between Great Britain and Germany in light of the June 1999 publication of a joint Anglo-German paper called `Europe, the third way, die neue Mitte,' emphasizing New Labour positions on Anglo-Saxon economics. Political, economic and institutional differences between Britain and Germany; Identification of the group that prepared the paper; Possible gains for British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The article looks at the Swiss newspaper, the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" (NZZ). Barring a daring switch from its typeface in 1946, the NZZ has changed little since the 1930s, when it was banned in Germany for suggesting that Hermann Göring was responsible for the Reichstag fire. The emphasis is on international news, business, finance and high culture. A Zurich banker who is one of the paper's 1,500 shareholders claims it is second only to the "New York Times." Falling sales (the paper sells just under 160,000 copies, of which 4,000 are in Germany) and fewer advertisements have led to a 65% drop in the NZZ's share price. A recent decision to break up long stories with sub-headings was taken only after years of debate in the NZZ boardroom, says Thomas Maissen, a professor at Heidelberg and author of one of two new books on the paper's history.

According to a paper published in Science on January 9th, levels of organochlorines in farmed salmon are so high in Scottish output that people should eat less than half a portion of salmon a month. Organochlorines are unpleasant chemicals such as dioxins and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) produced by industry that hang around in the environment. They accumulate in animals, concentrating in the fatty parts. The authors of the Science paper looked at 700 salmon from around the world. Europe's salmon came off worst overall; among European salmon, Scottish fish did particularly badly. Yet America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Britain's Food Standards Agency (FSA) think there is nothing to worry about, so long as people eat the amounts they recommend. Contaminant levels reported in the study are easily within guidelines set by the FDA, the World Health Organisation and the European Commission. So why did the authors of the Science paper come to such a different conclusion? Because they based their findings on the method of assessing toxicological risk used by a different regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), to advise sport fishermen how much of the fish they catch they can eat.

This article reports on how changing ocean currents could impact temperatures in north-west Europe. Ocean currents are the primary way that heat is redistributed from the tropics to the polar regions. A paper published in "Nature," by Harry Bryden and his colleagues at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, Britain, suggest that the North Atlantic currents which keep the region warmer than its latitude suggests it should have weakened significantly.

The article focuses on the Treasury-bond market. Ten-year Treasury yields touched 4.4%, on October 3rd, their highest in almost two months. Yields ended October 5th at 4.34%. What really drives yields? Fed-watching matters a lot at the shorter end of the spectrum. And concern about inflation is arguably the main determinant of long-bond yields. But the appetite of foreigners and especially foreign central banks has played a big role. Foreign banks have been buying more of other things, mainly higher-yielding bonds issued by government-backed agencies such as Fannie Mae, the mortgage giant. Some are choosing to buy in the secondary market abroad, which shows up in private rather than official flows. This may be especially true of many OPEC countries, including those with national wealth-management funds. On October 5th it emerged that Venezuela, perhaps for political reasons, had apparently transferred as much as $20 billion--most of its reserves--out of Treasuries and out of America. Indirectly, central banks' diversification out of dollars may also be boosting private-sector demand for dollar assets. Moving more into euros, they are helping to push down yields in Europe. Brad Setser and Nouriel Roubini, of Roubini Global Economics, a consultancy, reckon that central-bank buying at its peak could have dampened Treasury yields by up to two percentage points. And a new paper by Francis Warnock and Veronica Cacdac Warnock, of the University of Virginia, finds that if foreign central banks had bought no Treasuries over the past year, ten-year yields would be 60 basis points higher. A curious new trend in the eurodollar-futures market, however, hints that interest-rate hikes may end sooner than most assume.

This article focuses on relations between Russia and the European Union. Now that the German Question has been solved, the Russian Question beckons. Can Russia, after centuries of autocracy and imperialism, be turned into the sort of nice democratic country that gets along easily with its European neighbours? The answer seems to be: not for a while yet, to judge from a policy paper released last week by the European Commission, the European Union's executive body, which suggests that relations between the Union and Russia are close to a post-Soviet low. Some of these arguments go back years. But they are getting more heated with the approach of the EU's eastward enlargement in May. The EU will embrace ten countries in all, seven of which were subjects or satellites of the Soviet Union. The Commission's latest analysis of Russia marks a sharp change from its starry-eyed optimism of a year ago, when it published a document called "Wider Europe" saying that Russia, and other countries of eastern Europe and the southern Mediterranean, could be turned into a "ring of friends" around the enlarged Union, absorbing the Union's political and economic values and being rewarded with aid and improved market access.

A change in international rules on bank capital looks inevitable. Most banks, at least in Europe, seem resigned to this, even though for some it will mean big increases in capital requirements. Admittedly change will not come until January 2007, when the new rules known as Basel 2 are scheduled to take effect. A recent consultation paper from the Basel committee on banking supervision is meant to be almost the last word. The average impact seems acceptable: a decrease in charges for many classes of credit risk, offset by a totally new charge for operational risk--the risk of all manner of mishaps and foul-ups, from a lost document to a bomb blast. But the devil is in the detail. Hardly any bank represents the average. On the other hand, banks that focus on retail and small-business lending have reason to celebrate. Does Basel 2 align capital charges and the risks in the financial system more accurately than the present regime, Basel 1, which has been in force since 1988? Almost everyone agrees that Basel 2 is taking banks' regulatory capital closer to "economic capital", the theoretically ideal cushion against unexpected losses. But opinion is divided over whether this is a good thing.

Discusses how archaeologists are changing their interpretations of the ancient stoneworks of Europe and the understanding of astronomy that they represent. Details of Gerald Hawkins' 1963 paper, "Stonehenge decoded;" Importance of midsummer and midwinter; Boyne valley in Ireland and Maes Howe tomb in Orkneys; Comparisons with civilizations of Central America, particularly the Mayans.

The article discusses relations between the U.S. and Europe. In the author's view the U.S. gives too much attention to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and not enough to the European Union (EU). A paper produced by the combined efforts of several think tanks in the U.S. and Europe says the US needs to develop strategic relations with the EU.

The article presents information on a debate over the impact of socialized medicine on pharmaceutical research and discovery. A study by researcher Donald Light, published in the journal "Health Affairs," found European drug firms to be more innovative than American ones, in spite of European price controls. These results contradict a paper published in the same journal in 2006, which found the U.S. to be the source of more innovation, due to its lack of price controls.

This article reports on the findings of nine papers that came from research of Venus by the European Space Agency's space vehicle named the Venus Express. Venus has been thought of as Earth's twin and scientists believe it once had water and life and that is being confirmed by the reports. Venus lost its life sustaining properties due to its proximity to the sun. On the dark side of the planet, the Venus Express found oxygen and other gas ions and remnants of early oceans.

The article discusses booms and busts in housing markets, comparing American and European prices. Research by David Miles and Vladimir Pillonca of Morgan Stanley concludes that there are likelier candidates than America for a housing bust. In a paper assessing conditions in 13 European countries and America, they argue that there is a bigger housing bubble in countries such as Britain, Sweden and Belgium that there is in the United States.

The article reports on a number news stories that occurred in February 2007. Among a number of news items is the report that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its paper on global warming, that the European Commission imposed fuel efficiency standards on European automakers and that there was an outbreak of the H5N1 avian influenza in Great Britain, leading to the slaughter of 160,000 turkeys.

This article reports on the second Jobs Strategy paper published in 2006 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The statement outlines the ways in which countries, particularly European ones, can reduce high and persistent unemployment rates. The 2006 report was many times longer than the first one because there is greater analysis of strategies that have a concrete impact on unemployment.

The article speculates on whether Americans would like to work as little as Europeans. Josef Stalin, who rationalised the Soviet calendar in 1929, gave workers every fifth day off, but their shifts were staggered, so that factories could run without interruption. The staggered week appealed rather less to the people who worked it, however. A recent paper by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, both of Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, of Dartmouth College.begin from the premise that Stalin unwittingly proved: people complement each other at work, and perhaps at play too. Couples want to go on holiday together; parents want time off when schools are out. As a result, the economists say, people do not make solipsistic decisions about how much labour to offer in the marketplace. Their choice depends on everyone else's. Glaeser and Sacerdote think this principle might help to explain why Europeans work so much less than Americans.

The article discusses a paper drawn up by a team led by Wim Kok, a former Dutch prime minister. Kok's brief was to produce a progress report on the so-called Lisbon agenda: the ambition to turn the European Union (EU) into "the world's most competitive, knowledge-based economy by 2010", set at an EU summit in Lisbon in 2000. Kok's view of how things are going at the halfway stage is not encouraging. Unemployment remains high, growth is slow, researchers are moving to America, manufacturers to China. There is also the uncertain outlook for Europe's growing number of pensioners. The structural reforms that are seen as crucial to the revitalisation of the European economy are, above all, the responsibility of national governments. Besides the technical complexity of harmonising social-security reforms across the European continent, experience suggests that the EU is ill-suited to imposing reforms. If real reform is to happen in Europe, it will be hard necessity and the power of example that create the pressure for change. Fortunately, both are being provided by the ten countries that joined the EU in May, particularly the eight from central Europe.

The article discusses the bridge-construction industry in Europe and the role of the European Union. Europe has recently been building spectacular bridges as eagerly as America once did: Britain's second Severn bridge was completed in 1996; Portugal's second Tagus one in 1998; Denmark's island-hopping Storebaelt East bridge in 1998, with a 1.6km main span, at the time the longest ever; the Oresund bridge joining Denmark and Sweden in 2000. More are to come: recently aired, a new down-river Thames crossing; and, on paper since 2002, the mother of all bridges, a 3.3km suspension bridge which, from 2011--supposedly--will join Sicily to the Italian mainland. All this bridge-building is good news for the contractors. France has two of Europe's big four construction firms: Vinci, lead partner in the new Greek bridge (as earlier in the Tagus one), and Bouygues. With Skanska, leader of the Oresund consortium, and Germany's Hochtief, these are a formidable quartet. By turnover, reckons International Construction magazine, Vinci and Skanska lead the world, and all four are in the top eight, with three firms from Japan (ever addicted to costly public works) and, perhaps surprisingly, only Bechtel from America. European Union finance is one reason for this unlikely European leadership. EU funds go into many construction projects in poorer regions, even in rich countries. Under EU rules, all public-works contracts must be open to all EU firms equally. Yet visible prestige symbols such as giant bridges usually go to local firms or locally led consortia. That was true of the two French projects cited above. It will probably be true of the bridge to Sicily. Outside contractors can and do compete in EU countries. Bechtel is involved both in the Channel link and in London's Underground. Spending a fortune on such giant projects may be great for the construction industry. Whether it is a good use of taxpayers' money is less clear.

In the past year the United States has run up a current-account deficit of more than $500 billion. Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve argues that the pool of savings on offer in today's global capital markets is deeper and more liquid than ever as a result of the spread of globalization. The markets continue to furnish America with the money it needs without demanding higher yields in return. In a recent paper, Michael Dooley, of the University of California at Santa Cruz, and David Folkerts-Landau and Peter Garber, of Deutsche Bank, come to the same sanguine conclusion from opposite premises: the deficit is manageable not because today's world is unique but because it replicates the post-war Bretton Woods era. Under Bretton Woods, the Europeans, as they regained their exporting strength, amassed ever greater dollar claims on America. Similarly, under today's "revived" Bretton Woods system, the East Asians hoard their export earnings in low-yielding dollar assets, such as Treasury bills. The inflow of Asian capital keeps American interest rates low and demand high. Most of the discomfort caused by America's deficit will be felt neither in Asia nor in America but in Europe. European investors may be growing less willing to underwrite American borrowing for miserable returns.

This article examines the link between economics and religion. If you want to avoid an argument over religion at your next dinner party, you might suppose it safe to invite an economist or two. They, of all people, could be expected to stick to Mammon. Or maybe not, if a new paper by Robert Barro, one of America's best-known economists, and Rachel McCleary, a colleague at Harvard University, is any guide. Recently, Niall Ferguson, a British historian at New York University, argued that today's economic stagnation in Germany and other European countries owes much to the decline of religious belief and church attendance during the past four decades. More prosperous countries seem to have lower rates of church attendance, although America--the best instance of a country of competing sects rather than a state religion--is a conspicuous exception. If there is a link between religion and economic performance, then economists ought to have something to say about it.

Discusses the impact of camera-phones on the photography industry. Observation that sales of digital cameras will surpass the sale of film cameras in the U.S. in 2003; Idea that digital photography will hurt companies like Kodak and Fuji, which make film and paper, because people make fewer prints with digital cameras and instead share their photos over the Internet; Perception that camera-phones will outsell digital and film cameras by 2005; Way that camera-phones have been banned in some factories to prevent industrial espionage.

Valéry Giscard d' Estaing, chairman of the European Union's (EU) constitutional convention, has proved that even at the age of 77 he is a master politician. Using a mixture of regal hauteur, bullying, negotiation and selective listening, he now looks likely to force the disputatious rabble on the convention floor to agree to a single text for an EU constitution, which will be presented at a grand summit meeting in Greece on June 20th. However, the convention is a failure in one crucial respect: it has failed to achieve its objective of sparking a wide public debate and making the EU more comprehensible to the public. A Spanish opinion poll found that a good 90% of Spaniards were unaware of the convention's existence and only 1% knew its goal was to write a constitution for the EU--and by extension for Spaniards. In Germany, a founder member of the Union whose serious papers devote acres of space to EU affairs, another recent poll found that 31% of the public had never heard of the European Commission, the EU's most important institution.

Sometimes it can seem hopeless. How do you mould a single European people out of the lumpen masses scattered across the continent? European Union (EU) citizens are stubborn homebodies: only 1.6% of them live permanently in an EU country other than their own. They still insist on speaking different languages, they read different papers, worship at the shrines of different celebrities, chortle at different television programs. But there is one big exception. Every Tuesday and Wednesday, much of Europe's male population tunes in to watch the Champions League, the pan-European football championship embracing the best teams from all over Europe. Over the past decade European football teams have turned into a living, breathing embodiment of European integration. The cosmopolitan nature of the Champions League undoubtedly blurs the edges of both playing styles and fan loyalties across Europe .But the fact that teams are now so genuinely European does not seem to have disturbed the way the European press writes about them.

Looks at efforts to increase the number of small and medium-sized exporters in Europe. Difficulties involved; The European Commission's 1993 white paper on competitiveness; Suggestions including the creation of a stockmarket for these firms, by the French bourse.

The article presents information on the economic relations between Europe and Turkey. In its meandering way, the European Community has begun to accept that Turkey matters to Europe. It was suggested at a Euro-meeting several months ago that Britain; in its presidency of the Community in the second half of 1992, should write a paper about relations with Turkey. A later Euro-meeting gravely gave its consent. The collapse of communism has made it more important than ever that Turkey should succeed. After the cold war, mutual incomprehension between Islam and democracy is one of the world's likeliest causes of conflict.

This article discusses issues related to the European Community (EC). At June's Lisbon summit Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, will present a commission report on the implications of enlargement. It suggests that 20 European states are potential members. The ex-Soviet republics are not included on the excuse that Russia might be offended and that they have closer ties to Russia than to the EC. The commission's paper claims that a wider Community could work well only with new voting rules in the Council of Ministers.