Airbnb, the American short-letting online agency, is under siege as many cities in the US and Europe impose restrictions on short-term/ holiday lettings. Today Daft.ie reports that over half of all available rental properties in Dublin are being listed as short-term tourist lets.

Kuala Lumpur: In Southeast Asia, a region with a history of authoritarian rule, it required a seismic shift to topple Malaysia’s ruling Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition that had been in government continuously since independence from Britain in 1957. As in Ireland, the British parliamentary tradition has had an impact and the Malaysian army has never been directly involved in politics compared with the coup d'état record of the Thai military. The defeated governing coalition could not thwart the wave of support for the multi-racial opposition alliance.

MELAKA, MALAYSIA: The Age of European Colonisation began in 1488 and eventually it had a major impact on the common diet of all Europeans, but at a huge human cost for people elsewhere.  After the collapse of colonialism, the industrialised Western diet together with its processed foods and chronic diseases spread across the world in recent decades through what has been called coca-colonisation.

Italy is in crisis again, following an election that gave populist parties of the right and left about half the votes cast while the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) plunged to 19% of the vote. However, after two decades of near-stagnation, average incomes in 2016 were higher than Ireland's as reflected in Eurostat data on consumption of public and private goods/ services, adjusted for price differences and the OECD's latest data on net adjusted disposable income.  

The US economy has reverted to the economic and political structure of a developing nation according to a book by Peter Temin, emeritus professor of economics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), published in 2017. Temin who turned 80 in December, has used a 1950s era economic model developed by W. Arthur Lewis (1915-1991), the West Indian economist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1979. Lewis proposed a dual economy in developing countries, with one part containing upwardly-mobile, skilled workers and the other part inhabited by subsistence workers.

President Trump says Republican Party tax cuts will prompt US companies to bring home the trillions of profits they have kept overseas and the multinationals will invest the money in American jobs and plants. It's a fantasy as most of the so-called foreign cash is already in the United States.

European Union finance ministers are set to approve a blacklist of non-EU tax havens on Tuesday, officially termed "non-cooperative tax jurisdictions" but it will exclude 3 of its member countries including Ireland who is among the top 5 global rich countries that in effect sustain the smaller tax havens. It will also exclude Luxembourg, and Malta where a journalist who investigated international tax fraud, was murdered last October.  

The coverage by The Irish Times newspaper of economic issues has been poor in recent years while many Opinion Page pieces generate few online comments from subscribers or social media shares.

A week after the Paradise Papers were published following a leak from Appleby, a Bermuda law firm and facilitator of corporate avoidance, Pascal Donohoe, Irish finance minister, will lobby Republicans in the US Congress, to scale back or eliminate an excise tax proposal in their tax cut and reform bill, which is designed to reduce profiting-shifting by giant multinational firms.

Prof Séamus Grimes of NUI Galway is one of the leading Irish academic experts on China's economy and he has focused his recent research on the evolution of the indigenous high tech sectors in both Ireland and in what is again the world's biggest economy (adjusted for price differences using what are called Purchasing Power Standards), since it lost its place to Great Britain in 1820. Last week at the university, Prof Grimes made a presentation on China's massive 'One Belt, One Road'/ Silk Road intercontinental project, that was first announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013.

Norway is the world's No. 2 fisheries product exporter after China and other European world champions are Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark. While Ireland's fish exports have increased in recent times, in 2016 Norway's were 18 times our value.

On Monday Lawrence Summers, Harvard economist, former Treasury secretary and director of the National Economic Council in the first term of President Obama, in effect called President Trump's top 3 economic advisers lying fraudsters in his monthly column in The Washington Post and The Financial Times. He said their tax-cutting proposal was "a melange of ideas put forth without precision or arithmetic" and it was easy to demonstrate that the claims, including the assertion that domestic investment will be spurred by corporate tax cuts, were "some combination of ignorant, disingenuous and dishonest."  Meanwhile, William Lazonick, professor of economics, University of Massachusetts Lowell, has published a paper on the disconnect between the real American economy and what he calls "the legalized looting of the US business corporation."

The Netherlands with a population of 17m is Europe's top agri-food exporter while agri-food trade from the European Union (EU-28) to the rest of the world has been ahead of the United States in recent years. Ireland had a 10th ranking in the agri-food export league in the EU in 2016 and the United Kingdom was in 7th place, boosted by the whisky sector.

Robots and other technological advances such as artificial intelligence (AI), and driverless vehicles, will enable countries in Europe with declining populations to sustain economic growth. Migrants may as well, but those populations do also age while large-scale migrations can result in political and social discord.

A hectare (ha) of agricultural land in 2016 cost an average of €24,000 in Ireland and €6,000 in France ─ in Germany in 2015 the average cost was over €19,000 and almost €19,000 in the UK last year.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a leader of the far left who made common cause with the Communists in this year's French presidential election, was the wealthiest candidate of the leading candidates while Emmanuel Macron with a new political party defied conventional wisdom and became the youngest leader of France since the 30-year old Napoléon Bonaparte seized power in a coup d'état in 1799.

When Ireland was partitioned in 1921, Northern Ireland had about two-thirds of industrial output on the island. Today NI has employment in manufacturing that is a third of the Republic's.

In 2016 European Union economic growth exceeded that of the United States and this year the recovery continues while UK and US growth remain weak. In a dramatic signal of rising public confidence , a majority of Europeans say they are optimistic about the future of the EU and more than two-thirds identify themselves as EU citizens, according to a Eurobarometer survey of more than 33,000 people across the union and in candidate countries.

In 1992 'Industrial Training in Ireland,' an official report authored by Dr Frank Roche and the late Paul Tansey, concluded that Ireland was a poor trainer — both the State and the business sectors — and there was an urgent need to radically upgrade the skill base of the workforce. In the quarter century since then not much has changed and a July 2017 paper from the Department of Public Expenditure (PER) shows that the cost of public outlays on training and further education was €1.7bn in 2016.

Exchange rate changes have put the cost of living in Dublin at the same level as London's while data last month from Eurostat show Irish prices for a broad cross-section of consumer goods and services were the second highest in the European Union (EU), coming in at 125% of the average of the 28 member countries in 2016. With the exception of consumer electronics, Ireland was above the EU average for all the price categories surveyed.

The Eurozone is the top market for Irish-based exporters but the presence of Irish-owned firms in the 18-country single market ex-Ireland, is low at a time when Brexit is a threat to exports to the UK.

Brexit: The UK is the most globalized big economy in the world and despite the disastrous general election results for the Conservative Party, it's unlikely that exit negotiations with the European Union will result in unimpeded access to the world's biggest trading market — John Redwood, a Eurosceptic Tory MP, said last Friday that both Labour and the Conservatives had ruled out staying in the single market. "We were honest with the British people and there is no option to stay in the single market without accepting all of the European laws, the superiority of the European Court of Justice, the freedom of movement and the budget contributions," he said.

The Financial Times on Monday published an interview with Trump's trade council chief who criticised Germany for using a "grossly undervalued" euro to "exploit" the US and its EU partners — while this echoes the US president's knee-jerk protectionist position, the US policy makers are likely to ignore the right lessons from Germany's manufacturing success.

Ireland is in the 19th rank for disposable income and 22% below the OECD average in one measure of individual standard of living — the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development comprises 25 of the world's rich countries and 10 emerging economies.

Venture capital investments in Europe fell sharply in the third quarter of this year and this week the Financial Times reported on a speech in London which put Europe's tech woes in stark terms. However, while policy makers should give attention to innovation in economies, just focussing on the tech/ digital sector is a road to economic and political failure.

Despite the presence of significant units of some of the world's most innovative companies in Ireland, "Patenting in particular is noticeably low compared to the innovation leaders, and more recently compared to Singapore, which has now overtaken Ireland in filing volume," according to an international report.

Dublin is the 14th most expensive of 20 global cities to live and work, according to the latest Live/Work Index, which measures the combined cost of residential and office rental per person per year.