debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
Following the interesting results of our SEJ “Most influential left-of-centre European Thinker” vote we thought it was time such a vote was also held for “Most Influential left-of-centre European Blogs”. Again, we think such a poll has never been conducted. Even though there has been a bit of coverage of the still very small European [...]
A major new target in the “Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development” that China just unveiled is to boost the growth rate for household (disposable) income so that it equals the growth rate of the country’s GDP. The reason is simple: over the past 10 years or so, China’s household income grew more slowly [...]
It is all too easy when in the midst of a major financial and economic crisis, as Europe is now, to look inwards, to turn one’s back to the rest of the world, to argue that we will return to these wider responsibilities once we have put our own house in order. Easy, but, I [...]
In his article The Good Society versus the Big Society Henning Meyer addresses how the right in Britain have occupied the political terrain of society and its relationships that once belonged to social democracy. He rightly identifies that the crucial issue is an attempt by the right to reconfigure the relationship between the state, the [...]
Watch Ville Kopra, economist at the SAK in Finland, discuss current political economy issues and how the Finnish model is coming under pressure. [vsw id="YjPc02wZQO0" source="youtube" width="425" height="344" autoplay="no"]
At the end of 2008, as the financial crisis hit with full force, the countries of the world divided into two groups: those whose leaders decided to muddle through, and China. Only the Chinese took seriously Milton Friedman’s and John Maynard Keynes’s argument that, when faced with the possibility of a depression, the first thing [...]
The Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party is certainly not among the best-known institutions in the west, but it gained a lot of attention recently when China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, became its vice chairman (a position also once held by Hu Jintao before he became President in 2002). After Xi outranked his rivals [...]
Although the global economic crisis was triggered by the foregoing financial crisis, the more deeply rooted cause appears to have been the global imbalances, created by uneven developments in qualitative, knowledge-based competitiveness and the weakening thereof (primarily due to the marketifying of education in some developed countries). And, secondly, by the uneven development of cost [...]
Our partners from the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung have produced a special issue of their journal “Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft” which brings together (all articles in English) some very good contributions on the current status and future of European social democracy. Contributors are Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Ehard Eppler, Gero Maass, Patrick Diamond, Rene Cuperus and Matt Browne [...]
In Brendan Barber’s words, Britain has been experiencing a ‘phoney war’—living in anticipation of what the cuts might mean, without experiencing their reality.[1] Although high-profile academic economists, from Robert Skidelsky to Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, have warned about the consequences of Osborne’s reckless gamble, it is only now that the results of the spending [...]
Previous posts have criticised economic governance reforms in the EU for, among other things, paying too little attention to the problem of tax competition within the EU and the leakage of tax revenue to non-EU states. Clear evidence of the validity of this concern comes today with reports that both the UK and Germany are [...]
Watch Professor John Weeks discuss the key problems of the EU’s political economy with Social Europe Journal. [vsw id="FgLAGsqyKcw" source="youtube" width="425" height="344" autoplay="no"]
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