About Kostas Botopoulos

Kostas Botopoulos is Doctor of Constitutional Law, a former Socialist MEP and former President of the Greek Capital Markets Authority.

The “New Soft” Brexit

by Kostas Botopoulos on 17 July 2018

After the recent developments, and especially the UK Government’s “Chequers Statement”, a new reality has dawned regarding the outcome of Brexit: there will either be a ‘cliff-edge’ scenario – UK crashing out in 2019 without any deal – or a “3rd country-regime-with-some-but-not-even-remotely-the-same-as-before-advantages”, which we might call ‘soft(er) Brexit’. Thus understood, ‘soft(er)’ Brexit has taken the […]

How To Defeat The Populist Progression

by Kostas Botopoulos on 14 March 2018

Since 2015 international politics have sped up and changed direction. The return to power of the Law and Justice Party (PiS), led by Jaroslav Kaczynski in October 2015, the Brexit vote in June 2016 and the Trump victory in November 2016 should be seen in conjunction and taken as portents of a new political era. […]

Pasok: New Leadership, New Discourse To Revive Greek Social Democracy

by Kostas Botopoulos on 29 November 2017

What would you say is the current situation of Pasok, the Greek social democratic party? What is the historic position of social democracy in the Greek political system? Given the recent Greek crisis, where does the party now stand? I’ve been working for some 30 years now around the socialist parties. Not only in Greece […]

No More Crises As Opportunities: An Answer To Yanis Varoufakis

by Kostas Botopoulos on 19 October 2017

The concept of crises engendering opportunities for the “rebirth” of Europe should have died with the Greek experience in the most dramatic phase of which Yanis Varoufakis took an active part. Having worked with former Prime Minister George Papandreou before embarking on his “radical Left” experiment, which nearly cost Greece its place in the Eurozone, Varoufakis should have learned that courting the abyss and generating crises is never a […]

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Employment and working conditions of selected types of platform work

Platform work, understood as the matching of the supply of and demand for paid work through an online platform, is still relatively small in scale but is developing rapidly in the EU and becoming increasingly important for the digital economy. This new report identifies 10 common types of platform work, which cover most platform workers in the EU. It highlights the diverse nature of platform work as one of the main reasons that it has been so challenging to define and regulate, and identifies some actions that can be taken to not just harness the potential of platform work for economic development, but also to ensure that it develops in a way that respects workers' rights and is fair and sustainable for business.

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Social Europe Edition Book

Zygmunt Bauman was a towering intellectual who saw and analysed – right up to his death in early 2017 – the great socio-political changes, often convulsive, in modern western society long before his peers. Here we highlight his prescient insights into what he dubbed ‘liquid modernity’ with 24 chapters on topics ranging from online loneliness via precarity/poverty/inequality to migration, fear of the ‘Other’ and the decline of the nation state. Chronicle of Crisis, 2011-16, written by one of the great chroniclers of our times, will be read and re-read for decades and more to come.

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The Positive Economic Impact Of Germany's Statutory Minimum Wage

With the empirical analyses of the macroeconomic effects of the introduction of the statutory minimum wage in Germany, the IMK tries to determine the short-term and expected medium- to long-term growth, price and employment effects with the help of a macro-econometric model. As a result, economic growth tended to be stimulated by the introduction of the minimum wage. This was mainly due to the higher wages of the minimum wage beneficiaries and a spillover effect on adjoining wage groups. In particular, this benefited people whose low savings rate led to a particularly strong increase in real private consumption. The price increases triggered were negligible on a macroeconomic scale.

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New Social Europe Book

Is an unconditional basic income without means-test or work-test compatible with social justice and individual self-worth? Does it open up the space for an end to demeaning labour and a resurgence of voluntary work and cultural life? Is it affordable? This collection of short but compelling essays, all previously published in Social Europe, allows both proponents and opponents to make their case and is designed to extend this vital discussion to a wider audience.

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Multi-employer bargaining under pressure

This edited volume maps different trajectories in national collective bargaining systems in Europe since the Great Recession. Since the start of the crisis in 2008, wage setting and collective bargaining systems in many EU countries have been under tremendous pressure to follow the logic of companies and market imperatives. Fostering decentralization of collective bargaining has been one of the key objectives of the New European Economic Governance.

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