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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. [...]
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 [...]
“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 Euro patient is in the intensive ward, but the doctors cannot agree on how to help. While Eurosceptics are already preparing the funeral, Europhiles keep praising the single currency in the hope of avoiding its premature death. Maria Joao Rodrigues has written an excellent overview of the Euro crisis showing how economists and political [...]
The Eurozone crisis is becoming ever more complex and cutting through the chase is becoming more and more difficult. My broad analysis of overlapping structural, political and democratic crises seems to hold up reasonably well but it is time to expand on these categories following a series of conversations I had with a variety of [...]
It is symptomatic of the Eurozone’s (EZ) crisis that most of Europe’s newspapers described the results of last week’s summit as a ‘Club-Med’ victory and a German defeat, as though Monti v Merkel were simply an extension of football’s Euro-2012. In reality, as Charles Wyplosz argues, nobody has truly won; the EZ has once again [...]
To keep the EMU functioning we do not need a fiscal union with budgetary and redistributive powers. What we need is common bank resolution mechanism including some form of shared responsibility to rule out the very possibility of European banking system collapse. The crisis has forced member states to agree on major changes amounting to [...]
In the middle of the euro area crisis two Nordic neighbours, Finland and Sweden, seem to offer an interesting case for a pairwise comparison and a “test laboratory”. The both countries joined the EU at the same time in 1995. While Finland was one of the first-wave EU countries to adopt the euro, Sweden has [...]
By almost any conceivable indicator, Spain is worse off than it was six months ago. Mariano Rajoy has lost control of events. He thought that simply by taking office, the crisis would resolve itself. Reality has quickly dismissed his messianic delusions, but Rajoy is left without a Plan B. His steep cuts have not even managed to rein in [...]
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