Let this time be different!
Europe needs a green industrial recovery strategy to exit the pandemic.
Economy
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher driven by the core values of freedom, sustainability, and equality. These principles guide our exploration of society’s most pressing challenges. This archive page curates Social Europe articles focused on economic issues, offering a rich resource for innovative thinking and informed debate.
Fiscal regimes and equality among states
Amid talk of a ‘Hamiltonian moment’, the Next Generation EU recovery fund recalls a later US Treasury secretary as a fiscal union emerges.
The Covid-19 crisis: inflationary or deflationary?
Peter Bofinger warns especially German inflation-phobes that deflation is a greater downside risk in the aftermath of the pandemic.
A global economy in uncharted waters
Governments must learn from the financial crisis if they are not to repeat the errors of the recovery from it.
Time to expose the reality of ‘debt market discipline’
As another sovereign-debt crisis looms, Adam Tooze warns against repeating the mistake of delegating to anonymised ‘markets’ accountable political choices.
Europe’s leaders must stem falling trust
A mass online survey across the continent has found Europeans reeling from the coronavirus crisis—and losing trust in their leaders’ ability to manage it.
The pandemic and the day after
Emergence from the coronavirus crisis cannot be to ‘business as usual’ but must urgently open a transition to socio-environmental sustainability.
If it comes with interest, it’s no recovery
EU leaders must not behave like generals fighting the last war. If the Recovery Fund is to be adequate to the challenge of the coronavirus crisis, this time must be different.
An investment plan for European reconstruction
Europe must look beyond keeping companies on life support and staunching national debts to a continent-wide reconstruction driven by public investment.
German court decision ends treaty pretences
With ‘coronabonds’ stymied, an exit from the crisis had depended on ECB monetary operations—until the German constitutional court weighed in.
Overconsumption, globalised supply chains and the Covid-19 crisis
We must build back more resilient, just societies that consume within ecological limits.
Transnational social production networks—an answer to the coronavirus security crisis
The coronavirus crisis has highlighted the need for transnational collaboration to produce socially useful goods—an idea aerospace workers in the UK hatched decades ago.
The ‘frugal four’ should save the European project
Peter Bofinger argues that additional loans of inadequate amount do not add up to a rescue package which can save Europe from the coronavirus crisis.
Four scenarios for Europe’s future after the crisis
What kind of Europe will take shape after the coronavirus crisis? Four scenarios, widely varying in their social and ecological consequences, are possible.
Returning our food systems to business as usual would be a historic mistake
Amid the coronavirus crisis, some are calling for a deferral of European ecological action. Yet unsustainable food systems are one source of new human diseases.
A Marshall plan for Europe—or a Draghi plan?
Decades of neoliberal inculcation have deprived the political class of the historical memory needed to derive the new Marshall plan today’s crisis demands.
The German debt blindspot in the European crisis
The postwar German debt experience should inform a spirit of co-operation and goodwill today.