On almost any night of the week, Churchill’s Restaurant is hopping. The 10-year-old hot spot in Rockville Centre, Long Island, is packed with locals drinking beer and eating burgers, with some customers spilling over onto the street. “We have lots of regulars—people who are recognized when they come in,” says co-owner Kevin Culhane. In fact, regulars make up more than 80 percent of the restaurant’s customers. “People feel comfortable and safe here,” Culhane says. “This is their place.”

Thriving neighborhood restaurants are one small data point in a larger trend I call the new localism. The basic premise: the longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with those places, and the greater their commitment to helping local businesses and institutions thrive, even in a downturn. Several factors are driving this process, including an aging population, suburbanization, the Internet, and an increased focus on family life. And even as the recession has begun to yield to recovery, our commitment to our local roots is only going to grow more profound. Evident before the recession, the new localism will shape how we live and work in the coming decades, and may even influence the course of our future politics.

Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that “spatial mobility” would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie. This vision of social disintegration was perhaps best epitomized in Vance Packard’s 1972 bestseller A Nation of Strangers, with its vision of America becoming “a society coming apart at the seams.” In 2000, Harvard’s Robert Putnam made a similar point, albeit less hyperbolically, in Bowling Alone, in which he wrote about the “civic malaise” he saw gripping the country. In Putnam’s view, society was being undermined, largely due to suburbanization and what he called “the growth of mobility.”

Yet in reality Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940. Since then tougher times have accelerated these trends, in large part because opportunities to sell houses and find new employment have dried up. In 2008, the total number of people changing residences was less than those who did so in 1962, when the country had 120 million fewer people. The stay-at-home trend appears particularly strong among aging boomers, who are largely eschewing Sunbelt retirement condos to stay tethered to their suburban homes—close to family, friends, clubs, churches, and familiar surroundings.

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After decades of frantic mobility and homogenization, we are seeing a return to placeness, along with more choices for individuals, families, and communities. For entrepreneurs like Kevin Culhane and his workers at Churchill’s, it’s a phenomenon that may also offer a lease on years of new profits. “We’re holding our own in these times because we appeal to the people around here,” Culhane says. And as places like Long Island become less bedroom community and more round-the-clock locale for work and play, he’s likely to have plenty of hungry customers.

Well worth a read and a closer reflection.

Besides Israel and Estonia, Slovenia is the next country to join the OECD. The macroeconomic outlook for Slovenia, unfortunately, remains sluggish. In Q2:2009, Slovenian economy contracted significantly. The output decreased by 9.3 percent. In Q1:2009, the economic activity decreased by 9.However, the data on GDP decline is too optimistic compared to the real sector. According to the latest availible data, the industrial production in April contracted by 28.26 percent, followed by double-digit consecutive declines each month. Investment, which in 2008 accounted for 28.9 percent of the GDP declined significantly. In Q1:09, the business investment contracted by 32.3 percent.

The pre-crisis boom in business investment was surged by quantitative easing and low interest rate which contributed to historic highs of credit stock. In addition to deteriorating macroeconomic outlook, the export of goods and services, which once used to be the core engine of Slovenia’s economic growth, contracted by 21.1 percent in the Q1:2009. Thus, during 2008, the economic activity experienced unusually high rates of economic growth spurred by investment, foreign demand and historically high consumption spending. Throughout 2008, the economy was starting to exhibit strong signals of overheating.

By the beginning of the crisis, the economic policy pursued a radical debt-driven infusions of liquidity in the banking and bailouts to the real sector. Consequently, the state of public finance changed dramatically. For decades, Slovenia maintained on of the lowest public debt/GDP ratios in Europe. As a fiscal measure, low public debt had been of the merits that enabled the fulfillment of convergence criteria before entering the EMU.

As a result of government intervention, debt guarantees and surging public spending, the public debt is likely to soar from 21.5 percent of the GDP in 2008 to 32.6 percent of the GDP in 2009. The public debt is expected to rise further. If the current trend continues, the public debt is estimated to soar up to 53.7 percent by 2013 (link).

The black line and the left axis on the graph show general government balance while the left axis and yellow bar show public debt. Both categories are expressed in percent of the GDP.

Public debt and general government balance as a percent of the GDP (2004-2013)

Source: Ministry of Finance (link)

As we can see, the primary budget deficit will move from -0.27 percent of the GDP in 2008 to 6.58 percent of the GDP in 2009. By 2013, the deficit is estimated to move to -7.4 percent of the GDP. Compared to small and open economies, Slovenia’s primary budget deficit is higher than in most small and open economies. It is, for instance, higher than in Denmark, Greece, Austria, Czech Republic, Finland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway. As far as I know, Norway is the only developed country without budget deficit in the near future (According to the OECD and Norges Bank, Norway will post 8.6 percent budget surplus in 2009, down from 18.8 percent in 2008. In 2010, the budget surplus will likely increased by 0.4 percentage point).

The government intervention in the real sector further regulated the labor market by introducing subsidies to employers to retain the employees and discourage layoffs to prevent the rise in unemployment. However, recent data suggested that public sector employment grew significantly while private sector employment declined respectively. In Q2:09, private sector employment decreased by 9.3 percent. Public sector employment, on the other hand, increased by 1.4 percent on the annual basis.

For at least two decades of transition, Slovenia’s gradualist economic policy favored rigid and inflexible labor market embodied in collective bargaining, high tax rates on labor supply and barriers to entry. The economic policymakers created discriminatory labor market structure which still discourages young graduates from entering the labor market after graduation. Consequently, unit labor costs are among the highest in the EU. Recently, The Economist snapped a nice chart, showing that tax burden on labor supply in Slovenia is the highest in the world (link). In combination with ageing population and of the youngest retirement generations in the world, the abovementioned labor market dualism further encouraged policymakers to raise health and social security contribution rates. It lead to one of the lowest growth rates of private sector employment in the EU. It further lead to the highest tax wedge in the EU and the unusually high growth of unit labor cost relative to productivity growth. In addition, strongly regulated labor market is the major cause of Slovenia’s low productivity convergence relative to the EU15. The majority of central European and Baltic countries have been lowering the productivity gap behind the Euroarea much faster than Slovenia.

In 2009, Slovenia reach 90 percent level of EU27’s GDP per capita. Compared to the Euroarea, Slovenia reached 83 percent level of the GDP per capita. Compared to EU15, which is a reasonable measure of comparison, Slovenia reached 81.7 percent level of GDP per capita. Compared to Switzerland, Slovenia sustains only 64 percent level of Swiss GDP per capita (link). Interestingly, if Slovenia were a part of the U.S, its GDP per capita would be at the 54 percent of the U.S level, even lower than in Mississippi and West Virginia – the least developed states in the U.S.

Although Slovenia is often cheered as being the “Switzerland of the East” and the most developed former communist country, its economy will likely resemble slow growth in Italy, Germany and France rather than dynamic growth in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and Switzerland. Current economic policies are the recipe for eurosclerosis, experienced by pre-Thatcher Britain. If such pattern of economic policy will continue, the Slovenian economy will, sooner or later, exhibit economic stagnation with low economic growth, onerous tax burden, high structural unemployment and rapidly ageing population.