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Barry Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen is Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley; and formerly Senior Policy Adviser at the International Monetary Fund.

Barry Eichengreen

The Populists’ Euro

Barry Eichengreen 19th June 2018

The majority of Italians want two things: new political leadership and the euro. The question is whether they can have both. The point about new leadership is uncontroversial. The country’s two ruling populist parties, the League and the Five Star Movement (M5S), together commanded 50% of the vote in the March 4 general election, and, […]

Two Myths About Automation

Barry Eichengreen 12th January 2018

Robots, machine learning, and artificial intelligence promise to change fundamentally the nature of work. Everyone knows this. Or at least they think they do. Specifically, they think they know two things. First, more jobs than ever are threatened. “Forrester Predicts that AI-enabled Automation will Eliminate 9% of US Jobs in 2018,” declares one headline. “McKinsey: […]

The Euro’s Narrow Path

Barry Eichengreen 19th September 2017

With Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election, and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union enjoying a comfortable lead in opinion polls ahead of Germany’s general election on September 24, a window has opened for eurozone reform. The euro has always been a Franco-German project. With a dynamic new leader in one country and a […]

Is Germany Unbalanced Or Unhinged?

Barry Eichengreen 15th May 2017

For US President Donald Trump, the measure of a country’s economic strength is its current-account balance – its exports of goods and services minus its imports. This idea is of course the worst kind of economic nonsense. It underpins the doctrine known as mercantilism, which comprises a hoary set of beliefs discredited more than two […]

The Age Of Hyper-Uncertainty

Barry Eichengreen 9th January 2017

The year 2017 will mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. Forty years is a long time, but it is worth looking back and reminding ourselves of how much Galbraith and his readers had to be uncertain about. In 1977, as Galbraith was writing, the world was still […]

Globalisation’s Last Gasp

Barry Eichengreen 22nd November 2016

Does Donald Trump’s election as United States president mean that globalisation is dead, or are reports of the process’ demise greatly exaggerated? If globalisation is only partly incapacitated, not terminally ill, should we worry? How much will slower trade growth, now in the offing, matter for the global economy? World trade growth would be slowing […]

The Brexit Alarm

Barry Eichengreen 15th April 2016

I have no special expertise on the question of whether Britain should leave (or “Brexit”) the European Union. True, I did live in the United Kingdom until a bit less than a year ago. And here in California, we have our own Brexit-like debate, with a movement to place a proposal to secede from the […]

Why The World Economy Needs Fiscal Policy To Overcome Stagnation

Barry Eichengreen 18th March 2016

The world economy is visibly sinking, and the policymakers who are supposed to be its stewards are tying themselves in knots. Or so suggest the results of the G-20 summit held in Shanghai at the end of last month. The International Monetary Fund, having just downgraded its forecast for global growth, warned the assembled G-20 […]

The Crisis Europe Needs

Barry Eichengreen 15th October 2015

It’s hard to be optimistic about Europe. Last summer, a political cage match between Germany and Greece threatened to tear the European Union apart. In country after country, extremist political parties are gaining ground. And Russian President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Ukraine, in the EU’s backyard, has turned the common European foreign and security policy […]

Saving Greece, Saving Europe

Barry Eichengreen 14th July 2015

Whatever one thinks about the tactics of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government in negotiations with the country’s creditors, the Greek people deserve better than what they are being offered. Germany wants Greece to choose between economic collapse and leaving the eurozone. Both options would mean economic disaster; the first, if not both, would be […]

We Are A Matter Of Weeks Away From A Greek Default Unless A Deal Can Be Reached

Barry Eichengreen 22nd May 2015

With no agreement yet reached between Greece and its creditors, there are doubts over whether the country will be able to make a scheduled debt repayment to the International Monetary Fund in early June. In an interview with EUROPP’s editor Stuart Brown, Barry Eichengreen discusses whether a compromise is still possible, what a default would mean for […]

Losing Interest

Barry Eichengreen 14th April 2014

Two of the world’s most prominent economic institutions, the International Monetary Fund and Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, recently warned that the global economy may be facing an extended period of low interest rates. Why is that a bad thing, and what can be done about it? Adjusted for inflation, interest rates have been falling for […]

The Fed, The Dollar And The Damage Done

Barry Eichengreen 13th February 2014

The US Federal Reserve is being widely blamed for the recent eruption of volatility in emerging markets. But is the Fed just a convenient whipping boy? It is easier to blame the Fed for today’s global economic problems than it is to blame China’s secular slowdown, which reflects Chinese officials’ laudable efforts to rebalance their […]

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


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Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound Talks: housing

In this episode of the Eurofound Talks podcast, Mary McCaughey speaks with Eurofound’s senior research manager, Hans Dubois, about the issues that feed into housing insecurity in Europe and the actions that need to be taken to address them. Together, they analyse findings from Eurofound’s recent Unaffordable and inadequate housing in Europe report, which presents data from Eurofound’s Living, working and COVID-19 e-survey, European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and input from the Network of Eurofound Correspondents on various indicators of housing security and living conditions.


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Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The summer issue of the Progressive Post magazine by FEPS is out!

The Special Coverage of this new edition is dedicated to the importance of biodiversity, not only as a good in itself but also for the very existence of humankind. We need a paradigm change in the mostly utilitarian relation humans have with nature.

In this issue, we also look at the hazards of unregulated artificial intelligence, explore the shortcomings of the EU's approach to migration and asylum management, and analyse the social downside of the EU's current ethnically-focused Roma policy.


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Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

WSI European Collective Bargaining Report 2022 / 2023

With real wages falling by 4 per cent in 2022, workers in the European Union suffered an unprecedented loss in purchasing power. The reason for this was the rapid increase in consumer prices, behind which nominal wage growth fell significantly. Meanwhile, inflation is no longer driven by energy import prices, but by domestic factors. The increased profit margins of companies are a major reason for persistent inflation. In this difficult environment, trade unions are faced with the challenge of securing real wages—and companies have the responsibility of making their contribution to returning to the path of political stability by reducing excess profits.


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