A long season of high-stakes elections in Georgia, Ukraine, and now the United States is finally over. Once the last campaign posters are taken down, we may as well start asking: now what?

The literature, typically using panel data covering many countries, shows that higher government turnover rates reduce growth significantly in both economic and statistical terms, even for established democracies.

The term “economics imperialism” has been coined in recent decades to describe a tendency of economists to meddle with such seemingly non-economic aspects of life as crime, the family, irrational behavior, politics, culture, religion, and war. Mine is an attempt to invade the world of music.

Few elections in recent years were watched as carefully around the world as the Georgian parliamentary elections. And few political and economic observers shunned the opportunity to interpret its stunning outcome.

The question of the title seems to be a rhetorical one. With the 2008 global financial crisis fresh in our minds, the logic of the vicious cycle between the economic slowdown, troubles in the banking sector, credit crunch, and the subsequent industrial decline reinforcing the credit conundrums seems quite apparent.