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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 […]

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Spring Issues

The Spring issue of The Progressive Post is out!


Since President Trump’s inauguration, the US – hitherto the cornerstone of Western security – is destabilising the world order it helped to build. The US security umbrella is apparently closing on Europe, Ukraine finds itself less and less protected, and the traditional defender of free trade is now shutting the door to foreign goods, sending stock markets on a rollercoaster. How will the European Union respond to this dramatic landscape change? .


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WSI Minimum Wage Report 2025

The trend towards significant nominal minimum wage increases is continuing this year. In view of falling inflation rates, this translates into a sizeable increase in purchasing power for minimum wage earners in most European countries. The background to this is the implementation of the European Minimum Wage Directive, which has led to a reorientation of minimum wage policy in many countries and is thus boosting the dynamics of minimum wages. Most EU countries are now following the reference values for adequate minimum wages enshrined in the directive, which are 60% of the median wage or 50 % of the average wage. However, for Germany, a structural increase is still necessary to make progress towards an adequate minimum wage.

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