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.
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.
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.
The coronavirus crisis and a euro area contained—in a prisoner’s dilemma
As the eurozone faces into a deep recession, a transparent prisoner’s dilemma is preventing it from stopping the slide.
The new role of monetary policy in the Covid-19 crisis and its climate application
What the US central bank has been doing to address the coronavirus crisis is precisely what is needed to tackle climate change.
EU-wide inequality is back to pre-crisis levels
After almost a decade, EU-wide inequality finally regained its previous low of 2009 due to relatively strong growth in the poorer member states between the Baltic and the Balkans.
Not (yet) up to the task: how eurozone members are gambling away post-Covid economic recovery
The Eurogroup needed a highest-common-factor agreement to match the coronavirus crisis but intergovernmentalism left it with the lowest common denominator.
EUR-bonds in the corona crisis and beyond
Eurobonds are needed to anchor macroeconomic stability and offer a safe path out of the coronavirus storm.
Eurobonds: why they are needed, how they would work
By Einstein’s purported definition, madness would be repeating the errors of the eurozone crisis and expecting a different outcome—eurobonds would break with that.
Capitalism’s triple crisis
After the 2008 financial crisis, we learned the hard way what happens when governments flood the economy with unconditional liquidity, rather than laying the foundation for a sustainable and inclusive recovery.
Combating Covid-19 and climate change—one fight
The same socially oriented approach must be taken to defeat the coronavirus and, over the longer run, stop climate catastrophe.