This is the last business day of 2006, so it calls for some refelections.

Professionally it was a good year for me. Two papers I coauthored were published/accepted in foreign refereed journals (in Economic Systems and in European Journal of Political Economy), two papers were published in Polish refereed journals (topics related to global imbalances), I also finished a book (in Polish) which is reviewed at present for the publication.

I learnt new things in 2006. I am now sure that web 2.0 and social networking will become a mainstream in 2007, and that it will rapidly accelerate the process of knowledge creation and distribution. My blog hopefully contributes to this knowledge-networking, I am also investigating the possibilities to create a world Polish knowledge diaspora using this social networking model. Consequently recently my private research interests moved from economics/monetary policy into intellectual capital/knowledge management. I am now moving rapidly up the learning curve.

Few months ago I stopped watching TV altogether, I also rarely read Polish press, as most of the time you can read about one politician accusing another politician about something which is totally irrelevant to the average citizen. Instead I now read my own electronic newspaper, which is built by aggregating RSS feeds from several world leading newspapers and magazines. I also use blog-search tool to read interesting articles. This change of habits allowed to increase my productivity as a knowledge worker n-fold, with n>2.

2007 will bring new challenges, distance will become shorter and time will pass quicker. Companies that will fail to innovate and develop knowledge assets will face increasing pain, the same will apply with short dealy to entire countries. Public sector institutions have to wake up to this reality and change the way they have been functioning for the past decades. They have to become transformation-agents, helping the private sector to prosper in the global economy. This calls for new structural reforms: advancing e-economy development, participate in global distribution networks, tap the knowledge potential outside the country and outside the company by buiding knowledge networks, build strong links between researchers and business to accelerate innovation-creation processes. I call these XXI century structural reforms, which are becoming more important than structural reforms of the XX century, sometimes called Washington consensus reforms.

I read a lot about Asia. Countries like China, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia are rapidly developing knowledge-based economy, which together with favourable demographics will shift the economic weight from Europe/US to Asia. You will see further dramatic progress on this front in 2007, just keep watching China diplomacy efforts, especially in Africa.

What are my plans for 2007? There is a lot of administrative work at the central bank. But I do hope to have some time left to launch several research projects in the knowledge-management field, focusing on the role of public institutions. I am planning to develop further my blog. Hopefully by the end of January 2007 I will make my knowledge resources publicly available, with proper tagging to help nagivating through thousands of papers. Next I will add wiki functionality, that will enable to run projects in wiki (open source) formula. It would be nice if more economicts/scientists follow my footsteps. This way we could create a global scientific social network, truly open, communicating and associating with each other via tags similarities.

I wish you and your internet avatars a prosperous New Year 2007.