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 seven decades since the end of World War II were an era of trade agreements. The world’s major economies were in a perpetual state of trade negotiations, concluding two major global multilateral deals: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the treaty establishing the World Trade Organization. In addition, more than 500 […]
European leaders have devoted scant attention to the future of the eurozone since July 2012, when Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank’s president, famously committed to do “whatever it takes” to save the common currency. For more than four years, they have essentially subcontracted the eurozone’s stability and integrity to the central bankers. But, while the ECB has […]
Europe has gone through significant economic change over the past decade. Businesses have had to manage unprecedented challenges posed by the financial crisis, globalisation and a rapidly changing labour market. But fresh challenges do not always require radical new approaches – innovation can be found in the ways new measures and reforms are implemented with employee […]
This is a different post from my normal posts. It is a primer and I must ask indulgence from many readers for whom this is all too well-known and obvious. Why do I write it then? Because recently I was several times surprised by the casualness with which people talk of “labour theory of value” apparently […]
When it seemed the ECB had “hibernated” the spread in its balance sheet for good, back it comes. In recent weeks, the yield spread between Italian and German government bonds over ten years has risen by more than 60 points in 60 days. We can expect a further surge while market fears over the Italian […]
Since the beginning of the crisis, improving competitiveness has become the dominant frame of reference for European crisis management based on austerity and internal devaluation. This strong focus on competitiveness relies essentially on a narrow conception of the crisis as one of cost and price competitiveness, which in turn is caused by divergent developments in […]
It’s wages, stupid! Analysts are pondering why millions of the same voters who favored President Obama in 2008 and (less enthusiastically) in 2012 pivoted to favor his antithesis, Donald Trump, in 2016. Economic frustration centered on stagnant wages is mostly the answer, reflected in a generalized desire for “change” expressed by 39 percent of voters […]
Does Donald Trump’s election as United States president mean that globalisation is dead, or are reports of the process’ demise greatly exaggerated? If globalisation is only partly incapacitated, not terminally ill, should we worry? How much will slower trade growth, now in the offing, matter for the global economy? World trade growth would be slowing […]
The global financial crisis exposed the euro’s original sin of depriving member states of their fiscal autonomy without transferring this spending power to a higher authority. This left member states utterly defenceless in the face of economic crises such as the 2008 booms-gone-bust. Yet, the crisis didn’t bring about, as one might have expected, a […]
Here we examine the main differences between Fiscal Money or Tax Discount Bonds (TBDs) which are issued by the state and backed by the future tax revenues, Helicopter Money, that involves a central bank dropping free money straight into people’s pockets – and Quantitative Easing for the People (QEP). Helicopter Money (HM) has recently been […]
Seven Eurozone member-states have received a warning letter from the European Commission on potential deviations from the prescribed budgetary norm in 2017 and likely need for fiscal tightening. Cyprus, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Finland, Belgium and Lithuania face problems in abiding by the rules and requirements of the Pact (S&GP) with respect to the rate of […]
The discussions about CETA, the trade agreement between Canada and the European Union, have focused almost exclusively on two questions. They are important but certainly not the most fundamental ones. In this article I first discuss these two questions and then turn to the more fundamental question of how far we should push globalization. The first […]
