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Jean Pisani-Ferry

Jean Pisani-Ferry is a Professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and currently serves as the French government’s Commissioner-General for Policy Planning. He is a former director of Bruegel, the Brussels-based economic think tank.

Jean Pisani-Ferry

Europe Could Miss Its Opportunity For Political Realignment

Jean Pisani-Ferry 10th September 2018

“There are two sides at the moment in Europe. One is led by Macron, who is supporting migration. The other one is supported by countries that want to protect their borders.” This is how Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described the European political landscape during his August meeting with the Lega party’s Matteo Salvini, the strongman in the […]

The Upheaval Italy Needs

Jean Pisani-Ferry 2nd May 2018

Two months after the Italian general election on March 4, amid continuing uncertainty about what kind of government will emerge, a strange complacency seems to have set in. Yet it would be foolish to believe that a country where anti-system parties won 55% of the popular vote will continue to behave as if nothing had […]

The Lesser Evil For The Eurozone

Jean Pisani-Ferry 4th April 2018

It was not supposed to happen like this. The formation of a new German government took so long that it was only after the Italian general election on March 4 resulted in a political earthquake that France and Germany started to work on reforming the eurozone. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron […]

Germany’s Dangerous Obsession

Jean Pisani-Ferry 14th November 2017

As Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), seek to form an unprecedented “Jamaica coalition” with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens, the rest of Europe anxiously awaits the government program that will result from their negotiations. The stakes are high for Europe, because these […]

Preventing the Next Eurozone Crisis Starts Now

Jean Pisani-Ferry 9th December 2016

European leaders have devoted scant attention to the future of the eurozone since July 2012, when Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank’s president, famously committed to do “whatever it takes” to save the common currency. For more than four years, they have essentially subcontracted the eurozone’s stability and integrity to the central bankers. But, while the ECB has […]

The Geography Of Elections

Jean Pisani-Ferry 10th October 2016

In many countries, where you live tends to be an accurate predictor of what or whom you are voting for. This was most evident in the maps of the electoral geography of voting for “Leave” and “Remain” in the United Kingdom’s June referendum on European Union membership. A similar pattern can be found in the distribution of […]

Why Democracy Requires Trusted Experts

Jean Pisani-Ferry 21st August 2016

Last month, I wrote a commentary asking why voters in the United Kingdom supported leaving the European Union, defying the overwhelming weight of expert opinion warning of the major economic costs of Brexit. I observed that many voters in the UK and elsewhere are angry at economic experts. They say that the experts failed to […]

Why Are Voters Ignoring Experts?

Jean Pisani-Ferry 5th July 2016

By the time British citizens went to the polls on June 23 to decide on their country’s continued membership in the European Union, there had been no shortage of advice in favor of remaining. Foreign leaders and moral authorities had voiced unambiguous concern about the consequences of an exit, and economists had overwhelmingly warned that leaving the […]

A British Test of Reason

Jean Pisani-Ferry 6th June 2016

If voters in the United Kingdom decide in the country’s referendum on June 23 to leave the European Union, it will not be for economic reasons. They may choose Brexit because they want full sovereignty, because they hate Brussels, or because they want migrants to return home, but not because they expect great economic benefits. […]

Preparing For Europe’s Next Recession

Jean Pisani-Ferry 1st April 2016

If you do not understand what is happening to the eurozone economy, you are not alone. One day we are told that growth is definitely passé; the next that recovery is on track; and the third that the European Central Bank is considering sending checks to all citizens to boost output and revive inflation. Rarely […]

Responding To Europe’s Political Polarization

Jean Pisani-Ferry 6th January 2016

In Europe, 2015 began with the far-left Syriza party’s election victory in Greece. It ended with another three elections that attested to increasing political polarization. In Portugal, the Socialist Party formed an alliance with its former archenemy, the Communists. In Poland, the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party won enough support to govern on its […]

Europe’s Three Fault Lines

Jean Pisani-Ferry 2nd December 2015

Ten or 20 years ago, the existential question facing the European Union was whether it still had a purpose in a globalized world. The question today is whether the EU can respond effectively to major external shocks. Europe’s neighborhood is poor and dangerous. South of Gibraltar, income per capita drops more than fivefold. War has […]

Social Benefits In The Age of Uber

Jean Pisani-Ferry 3rd November 2015

When it comes to compensation, the company you work for often matters more than how good you are at what you do. In 2013, the average employee of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, earned $383,000 – much higher than what the best-performing employee in most firms can hope to take home. Pay differences across companies […]

The End Of Work As We Know It

Jean Pisani-Ferry 11th August 2015

In 1983, the American economist and Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief made what was then a startling prediction. Machines, he said, are likely to replace human labor much in the same way that the tractor replaced the horse. Today, with some 200 million people worldwide out of work – 30 million more than in 2008 – Leontief’s […]

Europe According To Mario Draghi

Jean Pisani-Ferry 1st September 2014

Central bankers are often proud to be boring. Not Mario Draghi. Two years ago, in July 2012, Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, took everyone by surprise by announcing that he would do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. The effect was dramatic. This August, he used the annual gathering of top central bankers […]

Will Vladimir Putin Bolster The Eurozone?

Jean Pisani-Ferry 1st April 2014

Jacek Rostowski, Poland’s finance minister until last November, recently suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have dared to annex Crimea if he had not observed Europe agonizing over a solution to the euro crisis. Is Rostowski right? At first sight, such a connection seems far-fetched. Putin’s show of strength involved military force and […]

Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


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Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

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Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

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ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


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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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