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.
Why has migration become such a big problem? Many reasons can be adduced: the war in Syria, the integration of Eastern Europe, lack of new jobs in many Western countries following the Global Financial Crisis etc. But listing individual reasons is insufficient to understand it and think what to do about it. The origin of […]
A gang of bankers and lawyers has plundered the treasuries of eleven European countries. The estimated damage from what is known until now: over 55 billion Euros are gone. Cum-Ex is reportedly the biggest tax scandal in history. The answer to this bankers’ raid affecting at least 11 countries can only lie in a stronger […]
The last few months have been unkind to basic income experiments. In Ontario, the newly elected Provincial Government reneged on its promises and on 31 July unceremoniously announced the experiment would be cancelled. The fallout in Ontario is considerable and the jury is still out on what will happen with the 4,000 participants in the […]
Trust in national governments has reached worryingly low levels in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE), at least compared to the EU-15 average. In addition, trust in the EU is generally higher than trust in national governments, underlining the importance of the prospect of joining the EU in these societies. Very recently, the Organization for […]
Italy’s draft 2019 September Budget Law, which will enter into force in January 2019, has been defined as a “courageous manoeuvre” for change by the political forces which have designed and implemented it very recently. Indeed, it may indeed take much courage to introduce a measure of basic income (the so-called ‘reddito di cittadinanza’) which […]
Ireland has been subject to a great deal of international criticism of its corporate tax regime. While Irish people might feel defensive about this, there are good grounds for at least some of this criticism. Together with a small number of other Irish economists (see here and here), I have long argued against Ireland’s reliance […]
The International Monetary Fund, other economic institutions, politicians, experts, and a good number of indicators predict a new economic downturn. The causes will be diverse but the significant one is that debt worldwide has grown at an exaggerated rate. According to the report of the International Finance Institute, IIF, global debt is $247-plus trillion, 318% […]
It’s a well-established fact that the eurozone as a monetary union is a weird animal. Among the main reasons that surely stands out is its one-size-fits-all monetary policy that does not fail to be continually targeted by criticism from economists, politicians and other stakeholders in the various member countries. The ECB’s monetary policy interventions share […]
In the acres of recent coverage about the causes of the Lehman Brothers collapse and how to ensure it doesn’t happen again, there was much emphasis on changing the EU’s economic imperatives away from austerity policies that contributed to Brexit, the rise of the extreme right, increasing opposition to immigration and sluggish economic activity, particularly […]
Ten years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers people are frequently asking themselves why the crisis has done so much to strengthen populism and nationalism everywhere you go. However, economically and socially, the process that lies behind this development is, unfortunately, all too easy to describe. Governments to the rescue of finance… In this type of […]
Recently more than 200 academics published an open letter in support of the demands for an economic system that abandons growth as its central objective. In the European Parliament a major conference was organized on ‘post-growth’ and the European Trade Union Confederation held a ‘post-conference’ on the same topic. The open letter contains many statements […]
In his recent op-ed and the associated working paper, Thomas Palley warns against the Ricardian vice of ignoring political-economy considerations when laying out policy proposals, thus focusing too narrowly on strict economistic reasoning. In the big-picture debate on an employer of last resort (or job guarantee programme, JGP) scheme, this is a vice on which […]
