Academics from Cambridge Judge Business School have raised doubts about whether the size and speed of George Osborne's cuts will dampen the country's economic recovery and whether volunteers under the banner of working in a "Big Society" can really take on jobs previously performed by public sector workers. Boni Sones OBE reports.

Ken Warwick believes the prospects are good as long as we rebalance the economy.

It's a case of not "if" but "when". Crises and cycles, says Professor Lord Desai, are recurring events, every solution inevitably creates its own problems.

Author, economist and political analyst Loretta Napoleoni has been tracing the intertwined roots of the world's monetary systems and the business of terrorism

As 2008, a year that shook the world and began the restructuring of the global economies, draws to a close, we take a look at the year ahead. Which economies are likely to find it easiest to ride out the current recession and what management tools and skills should opinion formers and business leaders draw on to ensure they provide the right climate for firms to do well? Strangely, not all the news is bad news, as we have been finding out in the Window on the World series of interviews with academics and associates from Judge Business School.

As 2008, a year that shook the world and began the restructuring of the global economies, draws to a close, we take a look at the year ahead. Which economies are likely to find it easiest to ride out the current recession and what management tools and skills should opinion formers and business leaders draw on to ensure they provide the right climate for firms to do well? Strangely, not all the news is bad news, as we have been finding out in the Window on the World series of interviews with academics and associates from Judge Business School.

Nick Butler, Chairman of the Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies, is formally launching The Keynes Society this Spring, a concept inspired by the urgent need for some new economic thinking at this critical time. It will involve a non partisan group of people from around the world who are interested in economics and in policy. The aim would be to open up discussion rather than to replace one orthodoxy with another and given Keynes' breadth of interests there is no reason to set boundaries on what it will cover - the economics of science, climate change, higher education and the arts could all do with some radical thinking. Nick Butler explains the lessons Keynesian economics has for us today.

The International Labour Organisation has forecast a rise in unemployment by 20 million world-wide, by the end of 2009. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has forecast a loss of up to 10 million jobs within the OECD group of countries, and up to 25 million jobs world-wide between 2008 and 2010. However, would a strategy of cutting wages as opposed to cutting jobs in the face of this recession create the conditions for economic recovery? Dr Paul Kattuman believes it would.

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences: the maxim of the 'self fulfilling prophecy'. Forecasts that are sufficiently believed, cause people to act in ways that make the prediction come true. Forecasts about the economy can have this self-fulfilling character. Prognostications of popular media commentators on the economy form a large part of the basis of everyone's beliefs about future economic circumstances; if 2009 turns out to be a dreadful year for the economy, to a large extent it will be because people believe it will be. Dr Paul Kattuman explains the phenomenon of the way media forms beliefs and the role it is playing in driving economic behaviour.

Dr Noreena Hertz, Associate Director of CIBAM, on why in an interconnected world an open source form of capitalism is what is required for longer term viability.