debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
There are five themes running through my remarks. First, deeply embedded trends demonstrate that, while the European Union is risky in the short term, it will be strong in the medium and long terms. The EU has a powerful logic and purpose in the twenty-first century. Second, in the debate about fiscal consolidation and structural [...]
The Monetary Union needs a ‘genuine’ social dimension instead of austerity dogma. The new European governance architecture with its central European Semester mechanism of coordination, reporting and monitoring in economic, budgetary, employment, social and many other policies enables the EU to better organise the decentralised policies by common targets and rules. But as progress in [...]
Watch Professor David Held deliver a lecture on his latest book entitled “Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing When We Need it Most” as part of the Castle Lecture Series, Durham University, on 24th April 2013. You can find more information about the book here.
The UNDP claims ‘the Rise of the South’ is having a significant impact on economic growth and societal change. In a notable challenge to the gloom of recession in the West and all the continuing and, indeed scarcely unjustified, talk of continuing crisis, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently published its 2013 Human Development Report (HDR) [...]
The EU Parliament and other EU institutions are considering very seriously the possibility to adopt for all member states a model of management of the labor market that is typical of the Central and Northern European countries. With the obligation of the state to provide young people with a job, training or educational opportunity within [...]
For many years, the European Union’s recommendations regarding economic policy have emphasized the need to lead rigorous economic policies. This is, partly, seen in the European Semester and in the country-specific recommendations in general, as well as in the economic requirements imposed on the southern European countries that have been struck very hard by the [...]
In my previous column, I have argued that prolonged negative output gaps in the Euro Area will reduce potential GDP, long-term growth and employment, because the lack of demand will disincentivize investment. What Europe needs, especially the south, is closing the output gap not by reducing supply but by increasing demand. The question is then, [...]
The current crisis of legitimacy of the EU can be traced in a path-dependent fashion to its roots in the aftermath of World War II. Subsequent historical distance has elided together the anti-fascist popular consensus across the continent after the defeat and delegitimisation of Nazism with the elite integration ‘project’ which came to fruition in [...]
The brouhaha over Carmen Reinhart’s and Kenneth Rogoff’s article “Growth in a Time of Debt” may be the most conspicuous and incendiary scholarly controversy since 1974, when two earlier economists, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, published a notorious book, Time on the Cross, defending the efficiency of American plantation slavery. As with Time on the Cross, the Reinhart/Rogoff controversy, [...]
As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement [...]
How To produce socially just, sustainable and green dynamic growth for a Good Society. The near meltdown of the world economy in 2008 took most academics and decision-makers by surprise. Much of the early analyses concentrated on the “greed is good” incentive structures and “jenga leverage towers” of casino capitalism. However, the crisis was by [...]
Is there any topic less sexy than the ‘social dimension’? Even defining what it is can be tricky as there are many definitions out there so it tends to get mixed up with other terms. It is often used as the equivalent of ‘Social Europe’ or the ’European Social Model’. The debate also pops up [...]
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