debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The Commission has just issued an analysis (in-depth review, IDR) of thirteen EU countries considered to have macroeconomic imbalances.* In principle this is a sensible exercise. Macroeconomic imbalances had built up in the pre-crisis years. They have important cross-border spillover effects. Resolving them is thus a matter of the common interest of all the member [...]
How rising income inequality contributed to Germany’s macroeconomic imbalances. ‘New growth agenda’ or ‘structural reforms’? This seems to be the new dividing line in the economic policy debate in Europe, opposing, in particular, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the new President of France, Francois Hollande. Although everybody agrees that Europe will need economic growth [...]
Paul Samuelson, the recently deceased doyen of what used to be mainstream macroeconomics, once said that God gave the economist two eyes. One for supply and one for demand. I was reminded of that quip today when within just a few minutes Eurostat sent two statistical updates that tell you if not quite all then [...]
I spent the second half of last week at the conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) in Berlin. The central policy topic was – of course – again the euro-crisis. While the vast majority of speakers agreed that the crisis was much more than a simple fiscal solvency crisis (in contrast to what sometimes [...]
A country faces an economic and political abyss; the government is on the brink of bankruptcy and pursues fierce austerity policies: public employees take huge pay cuts and taxes are drastically increased; the economy slumps and unemployment rates explode; people fight each other on the street while banks collapse and international capital flees the country. [...]
George Irvin is right to emphasise the importance of sectoral (im)balances in understanding the current debate on fiscal consolidation and austerity. It may seem evident that cutting spending and raising taxes reduces a government deficit, but the extent to which that actually happens – indeed, under certain circumstances, whether it does so at all – [...]
The European Commission has presented draft legislation that, if adopted by the European Parliament and the European Council, would mark the biggest reform of economic governance in Europe since the start of monetary union. Europe urgently needs to reform its system of economic governance. But it does not need these proposed changes. While marking progress [...]
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