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Sandro Scocco

Sandro Scocco is Chief Economist at the Stockholm-based think tank Arena Idé and has a background as the Chief Economist of the governmental research institute ITPS. He is also a former Director at the Labour Market Board and served during the 1990s as an adviser to several Swedish social democratic ministers.

Sandro Scocco

Why Did The Populist Far Right In Sweden Make Gains?

Sandro Scocco 18th October 2018

The success of the xenophobic far right party, Sweden Democrats (SD), has brought international attention to Sweden’s latest general election. As The Guardian noted: “far right gains threaten Europe’s most stable political order”. Sweden is, what’s more, one of Europe’s most stable economies. Unemployment is below the EU average, GDP growth has outpaced almost all […]

The Vicious Circle Of Inequality

Sandro Scocco 1st November 2017

For more than a decade, organizations such as the IMF, OECD, ILO and even World Economic Forum have issued stern warnings that the global trend of increased inequality will harm growth, social cohesion and the business community. So, is Europe doing anything about it? No, and the real question is: Why not? One reason is […]

Greater Inequality Not Due To New Technology And Free Trade

Sandro Scocco 9th December 2016

A popular narrative today is that low-income groups in the western world have fallen behind owing to jobs lost to new machines and to low-paid jobs overseas. Political populists like Trump or Le Pen have happily exploited this frustration with nostalgic, nationalistic and anti-free trade messages. A new study shows that this narrative has little […]

Immigration Benefits Are Underestimated

Sandro Scocco 17th June 2016

Immigration seems to be a very good thing if you look at economic research, and not just in terms of benefits for public finances in the long run, but also for natives and even low-skilled natives. Fewer dirty jobs with better pay – who can say no to that? If this were a more common […]

The Tale Of Lazy Greeks

Sandro Scocco 5th March 2015

Angela Merkel proclaimed at an early stage that the Greeks could not retire earlier and have longer holidays than the Germans. Der Spiegel’s interpretation was: “We aren’t going to give our hard-earned German money to lazy southern Europeans.” Sweden’s Minister of Finance, Anders Borg, echoed this whilst on the way to an EU meeting: “Obviously, Swedes […]

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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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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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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Let’s end involuntary unemployment!

What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


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