Kurt Huebner, author at Social Europe

About Kurt Huebner

Kurt Huebner is Professor of European Studies and the Jean Monnet Chair at the Institute for European Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Jamaica And The Eurozone

by Kurt Huebner on 26th October 2017

Now that the CSU and CDU have come up with a formula to limit the number of eligible refugees, Jamaica negotiations between CDU/CSU, Free Democrats and the Green Party have started in earnest. This is bad news for those who want to make progress in completing the institutional architecture of the eurozone and make the […]

How Bad Can It Get? Prepare For Economic Nationalism

by Kurt Huebner on 5th January 2017

2016 was already quite miserable in so many respects; 2017 promises to get even worse. Looking at the chamber of horrors President-elect Trump is putting together and assuming that he will indeed prove at any price that he is the maverick President he promised to be during the campaign, then Washington D.C. will turn into […]

Why Brussels Needs To Read Karl Polanyi

by Kurt Huebner on 28th November 2014

The project of European integration is going to run into walls. In political terms, it has become evident that its active as well as its passive support is decreasing. To some degree this loss in faith is tied to the social implications of years of austerity policies that were imposed to many nation-states in the […]

How A German Sovereign Wealth Fund Could Help To Rebalance The Eurozone

by Kurt Huebner on 28th February 2014

Germany is on the dock, big time. In its 2013 ‘Alert Mechanism Report’ the European Commission announced that Germany jointly with Luxembourg would have to undergo a thorough review of its potentially disturbing high current account surplus. The procedure is a legal necessity given that over the last three years Germany’s surplus has been above […]

The macroeconomic effects of the EU recovery and resilience facility

This policy brief analyses the macroeconomic effects of the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). We present the basics of the RRF and then use the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to analyse the facility's macroeconomic effects. The simulations show, first, that if the funds are in fact used to finance additional public investment (as intended), public capital stocks throughout the EU will increase markedly during the time of the RRF. Secondly, in some especially hard-hit southern European countries, the RRF would offset a significant share of the output lost during the pandemic. Thirdly, as gains in GDP due to the RRF will be much stronger in (poorer) southern and eastern European countries, the RRF has the potential to reduce economic divergence. Finally, and in direct consequence of the increased GDP, the RRF will lead to lower public debt ratios—between 2.0 and 4.4 percentage points below baseline for southern European countries in 2023.

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Benchmarking Working Europe 2020

A virus is haunting Europe. This year’s 20th anniversary issue of our flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe brings to a growing audience of trade unionists, industrial relations specialists and policy-makers a warning: besides SARS-CoV-2, ‘austerity’ is the other nefarious agent from which workers, and Europe as a whole, need to be protected in the months and years ahead. Just as the scientific community appears on the verge of producing one or more effective and affordable vaccines that could generate widespread immunity against SARS-CoV-2, however, policy-makers, at both national and European levels, are now approaching this challenging juncture in a way that departs from the austerity-driven responses deployed a decade ago, in the aftermath of the previous crisis. It is particularly apt for the 20th anniversary issue of Benchmarking, a publication that has allowed the ETUI and the ETUC to contribute to key European debates, to set out our case for a socially responsive and ecologically sustainable road out of the Covid-19 crisis.

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Industrial relations: developments 2015-2019

Eurofound has monitored and analysed developments in industrial relations systems at EU level and in EU member states for over 40 years. This new flagship report provides an overview of developments in industrial relations and social dialogue in the years immediately prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. Findings are placed in the context of the key developments in EU policy affecting employment, working conditions and social policy, and linked to the work done by social partners—as well as public authorities—at European and national levels.

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Read FEPS Covid Response Papers

In this moment, more than ever, policy-making requires support and ideas to design further responses that can meet the scale of the problem. FEPS contributes to this reflection with policy ideas, analysis of the different proposals and open reflections with the new FEPS Covid Response Papers series and the FEPS Covid Response Webinars. The latest FEPS Covid Response Paper by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, 'Recovering from the pandemic: an appraisal of lessons learned', provides an overview of the failures and successes in dealing with Covid-19 and its economic aftermath. Among the authors: Lodewijk Asscher, László Andor, Estrella Durá, Daniela Gabor, Amandine Crespy, Alberto Botta, Francesco Corti, and many more.

The Brexit endgame is upon us: deal or no deal, the transition period will end on January 1st. With a pandemic raging, for those countries most affected by Brexit the end of the transition could not come at a worse time. Yet, might the UK's withdrawal be a blessing in disguise? With its biggest veto player gone, might the European Pillar of Social Rights take centre stage? This book brings together leading experts in European politics and policy to examine social citizenship rights across the European continent in the wake of Brexit. Will member states see an enhanced social Europe or a race to the bottom?

'This book correctly emphasises the need to place the future of social rights in Europe front and centre in the post-Brexit debate, to move on from the economistic bias that has obscured our vision of a progressive social Europe.' Michael D Higgins, president of Ireland

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