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Comment on Professor Maria Joao Rodrigues’ paper on “Mapping Future Scenarios for the Eurozone” In the early days of November 2012 the Greek Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras, announced that the approval of a new austerity package by the Parliament, essential for receiving a disbursement from the “troika”, was a condition for remaining in the euro. [...]
Few studies have offered a regional breakdown of the impacts of the crisis of unemployment in Italy. We know that the recession’s effects were not spread evenly but which areas were affected most? Perhaps most importantly, did the crisis increase or reduce the structural and deep gap between Mezzogiorno and the rest of Italy? In [...]
The international financial crisis had disastrous consequences for Portugal in terms of economic growth, public debt and unemployment. Yet, the impact of the European sovereign debt crisis was more dramatic: a mounting budget deficit and recession led to rapid growth of sovereign debt. Shut out of bond markets, Portugal followed Greece and Ireland in seeking emergency [...]
1. The following short comment is not intended to discuss the sequence of events as imagined in the four Rodrigues Scenarios or to evaluate their respective probability. It only proposes to use the cognitive instrument of comparative analysis to juxtapose the past experience of some existing federal states and the future of the European Monetary Union [...]
It seems as if the crisis in the Euro area has at least taken a break. Since the ECB has announced to buy public bonds at an unlimited extent, markets have calmed down markedly and risk spreads for countries in crisis have been reduced. This shows that the signal the ECB has given was exactly [...]
Young people have always been considered a group at the margins of the Bulgarian labour market. Even during 11 consecutive years (1998-2008) of economic growth they failed to shed this unenviable position, mainly due to structural constraints such as insufficient levels of qualification, skills, experience, social capital, etc. So, somehow predictably, youths have suffered a [...]
“Mapping Future Scenarios for the Euro-zone” is a valuable contribution to the debate among European policy makers, opinion formers and decision takers about the profound challenges facing the future of the Euro – and by extension – the European Union itself. It should also prove helpful to those in the media and in European civil [...]
Following the financial crisis of 2007, Eurozone countries have been separated into two large blocks dependent on their capacity to honor their domestic public finance constraints. The predominant view, and that of the EU institutions, is built upon a questionable causation, national fragility and profligacy. Hence, reestablishing credibility and the survival of the common currency [...]
Watch a conference organised by the Poland Office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and local partner institutions discussing the Eurozone crisis in the global context. The two main speakers were Marek Belka (President of the Polish National Bank) and Maria Joao Rodrigues (Economics Professor and Policy Advisor). This video is part of the Eurozone Scenarios Project of [...]
The Great Recession, so to use the expression that the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has proposed, has, on the one hand, exacerbated the old weaknesses of the country’ school-to-work transition system and, on the other hand, added new reasons of concern. In fact, it has dramatically further increased both the absolute and the relative disadvantage [...]
Even though the Nordic countries show marked similarities in terms of socioeconomic and social conditions, there is much that separates them. Welfare policy ambitions may be similar, but when we examine the conditions for youths to establish themselves in the labour market and earn a living, we find significant variations. Youths face considerably less favourable [...]
Until recently, youth unemployment had received relatively little attention in Poland’s policy-making circles. However, since 2008 the youth employment situation has deteriorated considerably, even though Poland’s general economic indicators stood out positively in the EU. And when one factors in that around one million youths migrated abroad, the situation is even worse. The Polish case [...]
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