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.
It has become conventional wisdom that low and stable inflation contributes to economic stability and most central banks in the advanced nations pursue some type of inflation targeting (Svensson 1997). Less widely acknowledged, although arguably more intuitive, is the fact that low-risk government bonds also provide an essential stability anchor for market economies (DeGrauwe/Ji 2013). […]
Or maybe the middle ages, but certainly not anything more recent than the 1920s. Keynes advocated using fiscal expansion in what he called a liquidity trap in the 1930s. Nowadays we use a different terminology, and talk about the need for fiscal expansion when nominal interest rates are stuck at the Zero Lower Bound or […]
A high-profile United States trade delegation appears to have returned empty-handed from its mission in China. The result is hardly a surprise, given the scale and one-sided nature of the US demands. The Americans pushed for a wholesale remaking of China’s industrial policies and intellectual property rules, while asking China’s government to refrain from any […]
Given the scale of poverty and inequality in contemporary Britain (and indeed in the United States), no right-thinking person can presumably be fully happy with the organization of a system of rewards that leaves so many people under daily and severe financial pressure, keeping the millennial generation struggling to enjoy in their 20s even the […]
Will the ‘freedom of establishment’ – one of the basic freedoms in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) – mean that companies can pick and choose the national regulatory regime most favourable to them? Or will it mean that companies will be constrained in their ability to avoid taxation and workers’ […]
From 1949, when Mao Zedong’s communists triumphed in China’s civil war, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall 40 years later, Karl Marx’s historical significance was unsurpassed. Nearly four of every ten people on earth lived under governments that claimed to be Marxist, and in many other countries Marxism was the dominant ideology of the […]
Most Marxists and anti-Marxists alike probably fail to realise that the highest praise for capitalism is to be found in Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), that readily recognised that the capitalist system promoted urbanisation, industrialisation, technical progress, economic growth and prosperity on an unprecedented scale: The bourgeoisie, during its rule of […]
All over the world the Dutch retirement system is considered one of the best but at home it has come under fire. Serious questions are being raised about the stability and sustainability of the pension scheme. Are the concerns justified? The Dutch pension system consists of three pillars: a basic state old–age pension on a […]
A decade after the outbreak of the global economic crisis, the deepest since the Great Depression, a question remains open: what has changed in the international economy? For some analysts, there is a shared feeling of a return to business as usual. That is partially true if we consider, especially after many bailout experiences and […]
Much of the western world is experiencing a social crisis. Basic public services—in the UK, for instance, the National Health Service—are set at unsustainably low levels of funding. Unemployment, already high amongst the young, is set to rise rapidly as workers may be replaced by machines powered with artificial intelligence (AI). These trends, and many […]
Non-EU women immigrants make up about six percent of the prime-age population (25-54 years old) in the EU15 countries. Their lack of integration into the labour market is not only a story of lost opportunity at an individual level. It also carries important macroeconomic and social implications. Take the example of European countries such as […]
It was not supposed to happen like this. The formation of a new German government took so long that it was only after the Italian general election on March 4 resulted in a political earthquake that France and Germany started to work on reforming the eurozone. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron […]
