More bad news for Europe's troubled economies

THE new year was a bad time for a public figure to die. Kiro Gligorov, the first president of independent Macedonia, was rather ignored when he died on January 1st: the foreigners who might normally be interested in such an event were occupied trying to work out whether nuclear war was imminent on the Korean peninsula. Macedonia may remember Mr Gligorov fondly, but the country is in a mess. It comes top of our misery index, which combines two powerful indicators of economic gloom—unemployment and inflation. Out-of-control price rises are mainly a problem in oil-rich countries with loopy economic management such as Venezuela and Iran (and, to a lesser degree, Russia). One striking feature of the updated index, however, is that high unemployment now places a number of rich European countries right up there with the most miserable countries in the world—or at least in the 92 for which we have good data.