Social Europe articles on the economy

The UK’s exit from the EU means a contributions gap of an estimated €10-14 billion per year, around 7 percent of the EU Budget. Thereby, the discussion about the multi-annual financial framework has already set off in one direction: How do we fill the gap rather than how do we reform the budget? At the […]

Money matters. Money in national budget allocations determines who gets health care, who gets educated, who gets unemployment cover, which industries and companies are favored, and whether the country goes to war. Obviously, national budget line items say much about a society’s moral beliefs, its governance and who wields real power. As the song says, […]

European integration began as a political project to institutionalize peace and cooperation, with the Coal and Steel Community the initial step. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, roughly coinciding with the end of the Cold War, priorities changed – from peace and cooperation to trade competitiveness. The Treaty on European Union (TEU) formalized […]

Social democracy has been – traditionally – in favour of internationalization. In overcoming nationalism, that internationalism symbolized both the openness of social democracy to people and to (economic) progress. Yet, the faith in internationalization and liberalization may have hit its boundaries with the new ‘mega-regional’ trade agreements, such as the TTIP (a free trade agreement […]

After the European Commission’s state aid ruling on Ireland, both Apple and the Irish government assured us that Apple has paid tax at Ireland’s statutory rate of 12.5% since 2014. But our research, following up on the revelations made last November in the Paradise Papers, finds that changes in Ireland’s tax law in 2014 have […]

Before Greece’s 2015 national elections, SYRIZA, led by Alexis Tsipras, harshly opposed the austerity measures implemented by the ND-PASOK (New Democracy-Panhellenic Socialistic Movement) government under the second fiscal adjustment program. In essence, Tsipras appeared as the leader of the anti-memorandum block which took on the pro-memorandum bloc or traditional part of the political system. The […]

Europe is showing visible signs of progress; in most countries, labour markets are healthier than they have been in a decade, with more people active and in work than ever before, while social exclusion is declining. However, it is also a continent in transition, where an imbalance in opportunities for prosperity and quality of life […]

In the midst of continuing heavy discussions on future reforms of the European Monetary Union, the European Commission presented in May its long-awaited proposal for the next EU Budget (MFF) 2021 – 2027. It crucially includes a macroeconomic stabilisation function at the Euro area level. This would address the crucial macroeconomic problem of insufficient aggregate […]

Austerity, coupled with wage and pension cuts, increased taxes on incomes and property, a severe recession, high unemployment and poverty rates, especially in Greece, are often regarded as the cause of a significant increase in inequality in the crisis-hit Southern European countries. However, even before the crisis, two of these countries (Portugal and Italy) ranked […]

Today’s profits are not tomorrow’s investments A picture can say more than a thousand words. This is certainly true for the set of graphs (see below) that the OECD published in its latest Economic Outlook and that show the rate of return on fixed assets – a proxy measure for the rate of profitability on […]

The world is afflicted by problems that people experience in their daily lives: clean air in congested cities, a healthy and independent life in old age, access to digital technologies that improve public services, and treatment of diseases like cancer or obesity that continue to afflict millions of people across the globe. What is the […]