Social Europe articles on the economy

Europe needs to spend €1.5 trillion on social infrastructure between now and 2030 to redress the massive underspend over recent years and to address the increasing demands on social services. This is one of the main arguments of the report, Boosting Investment in Social Infrastructure in Europe, from the High-Level Task Force (HLTF) set up […]

It is intellectually excusable for those on the political right to want to restrict the meaning of work to labour, or income-earning activity. It is inexcusable for those on the political left to do so. Social democrats are paying a heavy political price for having done so throughout the 20th century. They fell into their […]

I wish we would stop using the word Capitalism. It is a 19th-century term, derived from 19th-century economic philosophy. But today people who would run a mile from any suggestion that they had Marxist  sympathies freely use the terminology of that era. In the 19th century, business was normally organised by and around the owner-proprietor. […]

Discussions on Germany at European level invariably focus on the country’s strong economic performance and how this relates to the labour market and broader society. This is a narrative I have myself contributed to in a previous blog piece. However, Eurofound’s European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) 2016 shows us that, when it comes to […]

Digital platform operators and workers need to talk, seriously. As the platform economy grows it is extending far beyond the well-known names such as Uber and Deliveroo. Yet much of the sector remains an unregulated free-for-all in which workers struggle to earn a decent living. That’s why trade unions want operators to sit down with […]

The financial and economic crisis and the drastic situation in the Eurozone have shown the limitations of liberalised markets in ensuring – of their own accord – some sort of consistent order. For more than thirty years, our politicians have relied on the theory of efficient markets, i.e. on the generalised dismantling of barriers to […]

“A flat tax is for a flat earth”: This was my answer to Grzegorz Kolodko, Poland’s Minister of Finance and First Deputy Premier for the Economy (1994-97 and 2002-03), when in the mid-1990s he asked me – his adviser sponsored by the European Commission – for an opinion on the feasibility and desirability of introducing […]

Not long after the onset of the global financial crisis, Greece came into the European spotlight. Heavy public indebtedness became apparent after a revision of fiscal data in 2009 by the (then) newly elected socialist government led to an increase in the deficit figures from 3.7 per cent of GDP to 13.6 per cent, and […]

Strange to say, but between the international debt crisis of the 1980s and the Great Recession of 2008, Europe has shown an overall GDP growth rate greater than the rest of the world. In that period two major political events occurred: German reunification in 1990 and the birth of a single interest rate term structure […]

Back in 2006 I tried to start a project titled Economics for Democratic and Open Societies. At that time, I sent proposals to several foundations. Nothing came of them so the project died, apart from my website which has soldiered on. With the recent flourishing of interest in the fragility of liberal democracies, the project […]

Does the financial crisis reveal that economists are at the leeches and mercury stage of their subject, and as a result policy makers and the public have every right to ignore what they say? Does the fact that economists working in finance failed to recognise the prospect of a systemic crisis, and that macroeconomists both […]

If approved, the results of the agreement in principle (German text here) on the renewal of the Grand Coalition in Germany could be an important milestone in stabilising the Eurozone. In essence, they give the green light to a good portion of French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to turn the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) into […]