The World’s Top Economists – who are they, what can they do for your country?

The OECD Forum is an amazing event taking in place in Paris on 2^nd and 3^rd of June, it “brings together all sectors of society to share policies and ideas around 45 sessions and will enrich the Ministerial Meeting, where government leaders and ministers will discuss similar issues.” We hope to see you there, if you would like arrange a meeting, please contact us.

Will the Greek crisis be the elephant in the living room at the upcoming OECD Forum 2015?

The OECD Forum has no dedicated session about the Greek Crisis, nor any speaker representing Greece. Has the world given up on Greece? If that is so, we’d like to bring in fresh ideas.

When countries are in economic trouble or have the ambition to succeed even better, Diasporas can help. Not just with the usual mean of transferring money to family and friends (remittances) but also: with foreign direct investments, expertise and thought leadership… The Diaspora is a huge pool of talents. We’ve had the opportunity to say so during the World Lithuanian Economic Forum [view PDF].

Greek economists in Diaspora have the cultural bond to genuinely care about the country and they can ‘think outside the box’ to examine the situation more objectively. Plus, they have a network abroad: they can convince fellow economists that their action plan will work and restore foreign investor confidence.

We’ve looked at RePEc, a reference database in economic research. ‘RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 84 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences. The heart of the project is a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components, all maintained by volunteers. The collected data is then used in various services that serve the collected metadata to users or enhance it. So far, over 1,750 archives from 84 countries have contributed about 1.7 million research pieces from 2,100 journals and 4,000 working paper series.’

We’ve found that of 45k RePEc authors, about a thousand of the world’s top economists have Greek names, which could indicate that they are Greek, or have Greek heritage or some connection with Greece.

You can find the list of top economists in our open data catalogue of useful dataset for Investment Promotion. You’ll find many of them following @FDIMagnet on twitter.

What about European integration in business?

Using our unique sociolinguistics technology, we’ve analyzed the gender and diversity of origin of over .5 million company directors of the largest companies in Europe.

What can we conclude from this colorful ‘mille-feuille’? Although Europe is integrated in the sense that every major European company operates in every other European country, European businesses often are still nationalistic. That may explain some of the European tension over the Greek Crisis. Companies in Greece have Greek company directors; companies in Germany have German company directors etc. with the exception of a few European countries, more open to attracting talents from all over Europe (Great-Britain…) If nothing changes, Greece’s management talents will keep flowing to those countries – and that’s not helping restore the Greek economy.

About FDIMagnet,

FDIMagnet is NamSor™ offering for Investment Promotion. We use our unique data mining software to offer differentiated Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) services:

–   Diaspora Direct Investments (DDI)

–   Smart Investors Targeting & CRM

–   FDI Targeted Communication

Follow @FDIMagnet, join the LinkedIn group or email us at contact@fdimagnet.com

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