debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
Paul Krugman picks up on the Eurostat statistics on wages and wage developments in the private sector across Europe. He concludes that the experiment of an ‘internal wage devaluation’ which the Euro Area in particular is trying to practise is very hard to achieve since downwards nominal wage rigidities (DNWR) are preventing nominal wages from falling. [...]
A recent ECB household-wealth survey was interpreted by the media as evidence that poor Germans shouldn’t have to pay for southern Europe. This column takes a look at the numbers. Whilst it’s true that median German households are poor compared to their southern European counterparts, Germany itself is wealthy. Importantly, this wealth is very unequally [...]
Last week the ECB published a report containing an incredible revelation: Cypriot and Spanish households are wealthier than German households.[1] How is this possible? We are dealing with an accounting fiction. Spain and Cyprus have a much higher rate of home ownership than Germany, and most household wealth consists of real estate. Both countries saw [...]
How Crisis Policies in Southern Europe Threaten the EU’s Social Dimension. The harsh austerity measures that, according to official policy, are supposed to overcome the euro crisis have once again plunged Europe into recession in 2012. Austerity policy has proved – in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain (GIPS) – to be primarily an attack on [...]
A massive party financing scandal rocked the Partido Popular last week. El País published documents purporting to show that senior party figures, up to and including Mariano Rajoy, systematically accepted payments over a prolonged period of time from a secret party slush fund. The overwhelming documentary evidence has been met with a flat out denial [...]
Five years after the international financial crisis hit Spain, and less than two years after the Spanish economy started experiencing a weak recovery, the country has fallen back into recession. Negative economic growth rates of over 0.4% in the first half of 2012 have been accompanied by a worsening labor market situation, with almost 25% [...]
The argument in favour of internal devaluation is deceptively simple. First, you are shown a graph comparing unit labour costs (ULCs) in Germany to unit labour costs on the European periphery. A “competitiveness gap” has opened up over the past decade between the North and the South. Once upon a time, you could devalue the [...]
The year 2012 turned out to be as bad as I thought. The recession in Europe was the predictable (and predicted) consequence of its austerity policies and a euro framework that was doomed to fail. America’s anemic recovery – with growth barely sufficient to create jobs for new entrants into the labor force – was [...]
The more the evidence builds up on the disastrous effects of austerity on economic activity and jobs, the more those that are responsible for this failure become lyrical. The Commission’s autumn economic forecasts already carried the imaginative title of ‘sailing through rough waters’. Last Monday, an opinion piece in the FT can be read as [...]
Given the current low level of noise about the future of the Euro and potential changes in the composition of the Eurozone one could conclude that the worst scenarios of the past turn out to be exactly – scenarios. Michel Barnier, Commissioner for Financial Services, even declared the beginning of the end of the Eurozone [...]
Spain has recently passed its five-year anniversary of job destruction, and yet there are more job losses still to come. Spaniards are getting poorer, and it will get worse before it gets better.[1] Old-age pensions have just been cut for the first time, which is just the latest in a long line of broken electoral promises on the [...]
In the first of two interviews with EUROPP editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson, Noam Chomsky discusses technocratic governance in Europe, why the eurozone’s austerity policies are failing to solve the crisis, and the rise of the far-right in countries such as Greece and France. What do you think the use of technocratic governments [...]
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