politics, economy and employment & labour
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher that publishes content examining issues in politics, economy, society and ecology. This archive brings together Social Europe articles on the economy.
Italy’s populist government has been keen to blame Brussels for its fiscal-policy constraint. But its own choice of crowd-pleasing spending over public investment and reform should be scrutinised. Italy’s stand-off with Brussels over its 2019 budget deficit ended a few days before Christmas, after two months of intense negotiations, forcing the Italian Parliament hastily to […]
The Spanish government’s budget proposals show some break with the austerity of its conservative predecessor. But there is still an excessive commitment to the orthodoxy of rapid fiscal consolidation. Macroeconomic analysis teaches us that certain decisions which seem reasonable for an individual may have opposite results when all individuals act in a similar way—or when […]
Official EU statistics mask the alarming extent of poverty and inequality in Europe. Despite slight recent easing, its dangerous scale threatens Europe’s social and political cohesion. Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, has published official figures on pan-European poverty and inequality since 2005, in the form of the poverty rate and the S80/S20 ratio. The poverty […]
GDP figures are often in the public eye but they are insufficient measures for well-being. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz explains why we need to look beyond GDP. Just under ten years ago, the International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress issued its report, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add […]
There are two reasons why we should be concerned about the current state of the Spanish economy. First, all the forecasts made by international organizations share a common view: we are likely to enter a slowdown period. This is worrying since unemployment still stands at 15 percent and many people have yet to return to […]
In a recent contribution, Francine Mestrum raised the concern that instead of degrowth, we are in need of a ‘positive alternative that will not make people afraid of the future but involve them in shaping it and making it sustainable’. While we share many of the conceptual points she makes, we decidedly oppose her reading […]
Weakened by a decade of unresolved economic crisis and shaken by the awakening of populism, the European Union (EU) project currently faces four disintegrating factors: Brexit, democratic disaffection, monetary and financial fragmentation and territorial dislocation. If EU member states want to escape those looming risks, they must, as they always have in the last five […]
In a recent LSE blog, (reproduced here), Donato Di Carlo presents empirical evidence for what he considers a ‘quiet rebalancing’ of the German economy. Using 2010 as a reference point, he bases his argument on a comparison of the growth of real unit labour costs, real expenditures, and import-export relations of Germany vis-à-vis other European […]
Brexit, it is claimed, has widened an intergenerational divide. Baby boomers voted for Brexit, while millennials remained silent. This argument remains although youth turnout in the Brexit referendum was, in fact, relatively close to the UK national average. Focusing on a generational divide suits a simplistic oppositional narrative that has pervaded many Brexit debates, yet […]
In the second quarter of 2018 global debt reached a new peak, climbing to 260 trillion dollars ($260,000 billion). At the same time, the global debt to GDP ratio crossed the 320% threshold for the first time. Of that total, 61 percent (160trn) is private debt of the non-financial sector, while only 23 percent is […]
There was a time, not long ago, when most economists did not consider inequality in the distribution of income and wealth all that important. True, in Scandinavia and Austria, for example, distributional issues were embedded in economic policy through “social partnership” from the 1950s onward on the conviction that an equitable income distribution would help […]
Growing inequality between eurozone members is one of the least welcome legacies of the euro- and sovereign debt crisis. The idea that the less well-off member states would catch up with the better-off in terms of GDP per capita was one of the great promises of the Maastricht Treaty, although very little emphasis is given […]
