Can sustainable finance really help solve the climate crisis?
It is wrong to believe the financial sector will contribute to ecological transformation. Economic and environmental policies remain key.
Economy
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher driven by the core values of freedom, sustainability, and equality. These principles guide our exploration of society’s most pressing challenges. This archive page curates Social Europe articles focused on economic issues, offering a rich resource for innovative thinking and informed debate.
The end of neoliberalism and the rebirth of history
For 40 years, elites in rich and poor countries promised neoliberal policies would lead to faster growth and the benefits would trickle down so that everyone would be better off.
Germany can reduce its external surplus
For years, Germany's ballooning current-account surplus has rankled the rest of the world. It is a result of policies fully within the government's power to change.
Antifragile states
Branko Milanovic explains how globalisation has allowed small states to become major players and big cities to outgrow their nation-states.
The German impasse
Adam Tooze dissects how the macroeconomic policy discourse is disabling necessary German, and European, steps forward.
International tax emergency: a critical time for developing nations to speak up!
An OECD proposal to reduce transnational tax evasion contains flaws which developing countries must challenge before it is set in stone.
Finally a eurozone budget, probably the wrong one
A eurozone budget is an idea whose time, at last, may have come. But what is on the table contains familiar flaws.
Europe’s Green Deal is turning red
The European Green Deal does not just aim at combating the climate crisis. It’s also an opportunity for social change.
Central-bank digital currencies: proceed with caution
Peter Bofinger argues that introducing central-bank digital currencies would need to be subject to very careful consideration.
The Manchester revolution
Paul Mason reimagines the Manchester of his birth in a postcapitalist age—and raises the challenge of getting there.
Our shrinking economic toolkits
For four decades, mainstream economists and policymakers have been wedded to fixed dogmas. Their blind belief in fiscal discipline threatens the very stability of societies.
Ireland’s recovery: from bust to buoyancy … to Brexit?
If procyclical domestic policies inflated Ireland’s economic bubble, procyclical austerity demanded by the troika which bailed it out makes Ireland’s recovery all the more remarkable.
Preventing digital feudalism
Reforming the digital economy so that it serves collective ends is the defining economic challenge of our time.
A Green New Deal beyond growth
A genuine European Green New Deal must place social justice and ecological protection ahead of fiscal discipline and economic growth.
A novel European Green New Deal to tackle climate change
Support has been surging on both sides of the Atlantic for the idea of a Green New Deal. Time to turn it into action, and jobs, on the ground.
Ireland’s route from boom to bubble to bust
Ireland’s volatile economic path of recent decades has wider European policy implications. Part one: the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and its demise
Should we worry about income gaps within or between countries?
The rise of populist nationalism throughout the west has been fuelled partly by a clash between the objectives of equity in rich countries and higher living standards in poor countries.