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 […]

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.

For a Sound Fiscal Policy

The public sector in Germany has massively neglected its investments in the past two decades. The result is a public capital stock that does not meet the requirements of a modern economy and is inadequate to meet the challenges posed by the imminent demographic change and the international commitments for decarbonisation. If the requirements in the areas of education, transport, communication networks and decarbonisation are added together, the additional public investment or public investment promotion required over the next 10 years is around €450 billion, i.e. around €45 billion per year. From a macroeconomic perspective, this amount can be shouldered well, but it is unrealistic to finance these investments solely by redeploying funds in existing budgets. For this reason, the debt rules in the Germen constitution should be extended to include a golden rule allowing borrowing to the extent of net investment. Until such a rule is implemented, room for manoeuvre should be used, for example through extra-budgetary entities. It is also important to provide sustainable debt relief for municipalities, which play a central role in public investment, especially in transport infrastructure.

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Social policy in the European Union 1999-2019: the long and winding road

This volume is the 20th anniversary edition of Social policy in the EU: state of play. It looks back at the main developments in EU social policymaking over the past two decades. Key questions addressed include:

* What was the place of the social dimension during the financial and economic crisis?

* Who has driven, and who has braked, EU social policymaking?

* Which instruments does the EU have at its disposal for ‘market correcting’ policies?

* What are the next steps in the further implementation of the EU’s social dimension, especially in the context of the European Pillar of Social Rights?

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What makes capital cities the best places to live?

Eurofound’s new analysis of the latest European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) compares quality of life and well-being, quality of society, and quality of public services in Europe’s capitals and major cities with respective national averages. The study not only gives an indication of what perceptions of quality of life is like for the 48 million people that live in capital cities in the EU, but also other major European cities such as Istanbul and Belgrade.

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Social Europe Volume Two

This book brings to you some of the best contributions published on Social Europe over the second half of 2019 in easily accessible ebook and paperback formats. The collection is newly edited with a thematic focus on the rise of populism and also includes in text-form previously unpublished material from Social Europe Podcast. This second volume brings together contributions by Cas Mudde, Dani Rodrik, Peter Verovsek, Branko Milanovic, Sheri Berman, Paul Mason, Bela Galgoczi, Mariana Mazzucato and Ngaire Woods.