Social Europe articles on the economy

Recent developments in EU-Turkey relations are revealing. The EU-Turkey high level meeting of May 2015 gave the green light for upgrading bilateral trade. Less than six months later, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered a military crackdown on the Kurdish region, causing hundreds of civilian deaths and the destruction of cities, towns and livelihoods. […]

Two small countries, Iceland and Latvia, were severely affected during the global crisis in 2008. Iceland was the first to be hit and Latvia the hardest hit. Two fundamental differences influenced their response. Iceland’s banking system was in local ownership and Iceland was not an EU member state, but Latvia was in the EU and […]

After the controversial European Monetary Fund (EMF) proposal by the European Commission of December 2017, it’s clear that the debate about the future role and structure of the European Stability Mechanism is not over. It will only end when the Euro area benefits from a unified government bond market with a single risk-free yield curve. […]

Aristotle measured the quality of democracy by the extent to which politics constrains the economically powerful, allowing the preferences of the landless to be reflected in public policy. According to a new analysis, American democracy gets a failing grade on Aristotle’s test while the countries of northern Europe are star pupils. Path-breaking recent research has […]

The outcome of the first negotiation package agreed between CDU/CSU and SPD needs to become more precise before being approved by their congresses. There is a long way to go for the creation of a new “grand coalition” and in the meantime, there are some issues that need to be addressed. On one hand, regarding […]

Reports of the death of growth have been greatly exaggerated. As the IMF noted last month, the world enjoyed in 2017 the “broadest cyclical upswing since the start of the decade”. In other words, after ten years of real downturns, false starts and speculations on “secular stagnation”, a genuine global recovery has finally materialized. The […]

A few weeks ago Athens persuaded private holders of about €30 billion in Greek debt to swap short maturity bonds for five new ones of longer maturity so as to improve market liquidity and push yield rates down before the country emerges from bailouts in August 2018. Actually, the 10-year bond dived swiftly below the […]

Social democracy in Europe is not in good shape. Perhaps the main reason for social democratic parties losing support has been their perceived association with austerity policies. Where, however, the centre-left has more categorically rejected austerity, as in the case of Antonio Costa’s Socialist Party in Portugal and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, its popularity has remained […]

There is currently a big debate about productivity growth. Is it as slow as it has been measured or have changes in the economy led to growing measurement errors? If slow growth is real, what causes it? I don’t claim to know but it is noticeable that periods of slow productivity growth often follow large […]

Since independence in 1991 the Baltic states have implemented neoliberal economic policies with weak social systems and income and wealth distribution that is among the most unequal in the European Union. Among the consequences is large-scale outward migration. At independence the Baltics collectively had about 7.8 million inhabitants and Sweden about 8.6m. Now the Baltic […]