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.
The majority of Italians want two things: new political leadership and the euro. The question is whether they can have both. The point about new leadership is uncontroversial. The country’s two ruling populist parties, the League and the Five Star Movement (M5S), together commanded 50% of the vote in the March 4 general election, and, […]
When Italy’s president recently vetoed the appointment of the Euroskeptic Paolo Savona as finance minister in the government proposed by the Five Star Movement-League party alliance, did he safeguard or undermine his country’s democracy? Beyond constitutional strictures specific to the Italian context, the question goes to the heart of democratic legitimacy. The difficult issues it […]
The present debate about Karl Marx oscillates between historicising him as a figure of the distant past and applying his insights for a critical view of the present time. Describing, explaining and criticising capitalism was the centerpiece of Karl Marx’ oeuvre. Markets, merciless competition and the commodification of nearly everything; profit orientation and endless accumulation of […]
US President Donald Trump is not naturally inclined towards the EU. The EU represents the antithesis of what Trump aspires for in himself, or of the value he sees in others. For the President, the EU is an essentially effete project – a civilian power that likes to see itself as human rights based and […]
At what was probably the most unpropitious moment in recent economic history to make the claim, US President Richard Nixon declared that we ‘are all Keynesians now’. In his view, the key problem of macroeconomic management, namely how to stabilise a modern economy, balancing growth (and employment) with inflation, was fundamentally resolved. Less than two […]
I have already written before (in a tweet) that no one who travels through Western Europe, especially in Summer, can fail to be impressed by the wealth and beauty of the continent as well as by its quality of life. The latter is less obvious in the United States (despite its higher per capita income) […]
Economists were certain that free trade would be a major source of general welfare enhancement. Resistance against it has been widely seen as irrationality driven by blind nationalism. Recent developments have shaken this firm belief in the benefits of free trade. The rise of right wing populism with all its severe political repercussions seems to […]
For decades, Western governments (and their economies) have been delivering real growth and economic well-being to their citizens. But changes that have occurred since the 1980s have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish real growth from nominal growth, while the well-being of the majority of citizens has failed to improve. At the beginning of the […]
Historians are often tempted to think that events of the past return to the present under new clothes in a cyclical way. The Greek historian Thucydides was probably the first to propose this cyclical conception of history. In his narrative of the Peloponnesian War, he looked for those causes that drove people to wars repeatedly […]
It is no secret that the Eurozone is not a complete Optimum Currency Area (OCA). Chief among its shortcomings is the uneven level of integration between its monetary and economic aspects. When the Eurozone was created, capital restrictions were eliminated but inflation was slow to converge between the core/Northern low-inflation and the periphery/Southern high-inflation Member […]
Why is democracy under siege throughout the West? How much of the story is cultural or racial, and how much is economic? And can the slide into authoritarianism be reversed? I think it can. In the course of researching these issues, I took a deeper look at the remarkable three decades after World War II, […]
At a Nordic-Baltic Development Forum meeting, held in Riga some years ago, there arose a lively controversy on the relative merits of the Swedish (Nordic) model, on the one hand, and the minimal government and low-tax regimes of the Baltic countries, on the other. Göran Person, former prime minister of Sweden, reminded the audience that […]
