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Valerio Alfonso Bruno

Valerio Alfonso Bruno is a political analyst and senior fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR), also involved with the ASERI at the Università Cattolica of Milan and the Observatoire de la Finance (Geneva).

Valerio Alfonso Bruno

Italy’s election: a far-right high, on a low budget

Valerio Alfonso Bruno 27th September 2022

The honeymoon for a Meloni-led, right-wing government may prove to be shortlived.

Draghi’s resignation: what next?

Valerio Alfonso Bruno 19th July 2022

Only one political figure will benefit from chaos in Italy. He is in Moscow, not Rome.

Ukraine and Europe’s defence spending

Valerio Alfonso Bruno 25th May 2022

Europe’s reaction to the Ukraine crisis will do much to define what kind of Europe it is to be.

Matteo Salvini’s League and the price of unbridled populism

Valerio Alfonso Bruno 24th November 2021

The strength of populism is its simple message that ‘the people’ are traduced by an ‘elite’ linked to ‘foreign’ interlopers. That’s also its weakness.

Science and politics: a new alliance?

Valerio Alfonso Bruno 9th June 2020

The pandemic has brought science and expertise to the fore in the public sphere, as an anchor of trust—and put the populists on the back foot.

Lobbying In The EU: An Often Unholy Alliance

Valerio Alfonso Bruno 16th October 2018

With movies such as Inside Job and Thank you for Smoking or TV series like House of Cards, the US model of influencing decisions and policies of legislators, also known as “pressure and purchase”, has become famous worldwide as enshrining the activity of lobbyists or, more formally, public affairs managers. Millions of US dollars are […]

Towards The Disappearance Of Politics?

Valerio Alfonso Bruno 5th July 2018

The crisis of political debate within contemporary democracies Exactly sixty years ago, in 1958, Hannah Arendt published The Human Condition. In her philosophical masterpiece, Arendt indicated that the “Vita Activa”, a life actively encompassing public political debate and political action, is the only place of real freedom for citizens and sole remedy for totalitarian regimes […]

The Production Of Fear. European Democracies In The Age Of Populisms And Technocracies

Valerio Alfonso Bruno 13th June 2018

Populisms and Technocracies: mastering the art of evoking fears In Europe, home to one of the most ambitious political and institutional experiments in recent history, the European Union, populist movements and technocratic elites have been among the most active actors in taking advantage of the use of fear, beginning immediately after the global financial and […]

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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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#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.


WATCH HERE

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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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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.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

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.


DOWNLOAD HERE

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