Contrary to what is promoted by the EU’s central bankers, higher taxes tend to coincide with lower deficits and low debt.

Eurozone central bankers have advocated cutting taxes as part of deficit reduction, placing the burden entirely on public spending cuts, while politicians across the eurozone have tended to prefer spending cuts over tax increases in implementing austerity. But are lower taxes the key to deficit reduction? Craig J. Willy looks at evidence from across the OECD and finds that higher taxes tend to be correlated with lower levels of public debt, and greater fiscal sustainability. In addition, greater levels of income equality in countries are also correlated with fiscal sustainability

In order to avoid a demographic “death trap” Western Europe must implement new and fair policies for both present and future generations.

The principle of ‘intergenerational justice’ implies that young people should be treated fairly in comparison with older citizens. As Craig J. Willy notes, however, large debt burdens, unsustainable economic practices, and the electoral effects of ageing populations present a challenge in ensuring fairness for young Europeans. He argues that while some policies, such as compulsory voting, or providing ‘extra’ votes to parents (Demeny voting), might improve the representation of young people, policy experimentation across Europe is likely to be the key in avoiding a demographic ‘death trap’

Diverging trends in 2004 accession states show how fragile Central-Eastern European attachment to western political models really is

It is now over a decade since the 2004 enlargement which brought eight states in Central and Eastern Europe into the EU, alongside Cyprus and Malta. Craig Willy writes that while most of these states greeted EU accession enthusiastically, political trends have been diverse in the decade since. While some countries, such as Poland, have embraced a largely ‘Western’ political model, other states such as Hungary have started to move in the opposite direction. He argues that these developments illustrate how fragile the attachment to the EU and Western institutions really is in Central-Eastern European states

Belgium must do more to prevent its citizens from joining Islamic State

Among European countries, Belgian citizens account for one of the largest per capita shares of foreign Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq. Craig J. Willy writes on Belgian immigration and labour market policies in light of the threat posed by terrorism. He argues that Belgium could be doing substantially more to promote equal opportunities in employment and education, which would help improve the integration of migrants into Belgian society

Europe must adapt to the reality that we are living in a world increasingly dominated by Asia

Economic development in China and other Asian countries has an impact on the role of European states in global affairs. Craig J. Willy argues that with the rise of Asian economies, the world is increasingly moving away from the model of free trade championed by Europe and other states in the West. Unless Europe becomes a more cohesive actor which is capable of convincing other nations to respect Western legal and commercial principles, it will find itself forced to adapt to the East Asian development model

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe