Social Europe articles on the economy

This was to have been the year of exit from quantitative easing. Instead, 2016 is going to be the year of negative interest rates. For more than a decade we have been told that the world suffers from a glut of savings, resulting from the surpluses of Asian countries and Germany. The excess supply of capital […]

The world economy is visibly sinking, and the policymakers who are supposed to be its stewards are tying themselves in knots. Or so suggest the results of the G-20 summit held in Shanghai at the end of last month. The International Monetary Fund, having just downgraded its forecast for global growth, warned the assembled G-20 […]

Something interesting has emerged in voting patterns on both sides of the Atlantic: Young people are voting in ways that are markedly different from their elders. A great divide appears to have opened up, based not so much on income, education, or gender as on the voters’ generation. There are good reasons for this divide. […]

The Troika is in Athens and will not leave without deep cuts to pensions, even though the country is back in recession. Far from last summer’s media glare, a renewed clash of powers is on course between the Troika and the Tsipras government that could severely impact upon the exhausted Greek economy. Among the controversial 48 points […]

Discussions about building a green future tend to focus on the need to improve the generation of energy from renewable sources. But that is just the first step. Better mechanisms for storing and releasing that energy – when the sun isn’t shining, the wind isn’t blowing, or when electric cars are on the move – […]

The ECB has announced a further expansionary shift by beefing up a range of existing policy instruments. Barring unexpected positive shocks this will not be enough to break out of a deflationary environment and convincingly underpin growth and a rapid reduction in unemployment. For that to happen fiscal policy must turn expansionary and/or the ECB […]

It is tempting for journalists in particular to treat arguments against fiscal consolidation (austerity) during the depth of the recession as the same as arguments against fiscal consolidation now. Of course there are connections, but there are also important differences. Austerity during a recession Case against The case against austerity in the depth of the […]

The global economy faces a chronic problem of deficient nominal demand. Japan is suffering near-zero growth and minimal inflation. Eurozone inflation has again turned negative, and British inflation is zero and economic growth is slowing. The US economy is slightly more robust, although even there recovery from the 2008 financial crisis remains disappointingly slow, employment […]

These are not happy times for Europe. Ukraine, Russia, and rising anti-democratic influences in Hungary and Poland represent latent threats at the European Union’s eastern front. The prospect of Brexit is a more acute one at its western front. After letting loose manifold conflicting forces that continue shaping internal politics in many EU countries and […]

The 1992 Treaty of Maastricht that lay the basis for the euro committed signing governments to several economic targets. Subsequent treaties and protocols made these targets stricter. The targets suffer from serious technical mis-specification. The problems of the criteria have their basis in a fundamental flaw that must be recognized and corrected to prevent further economic […]

It has often been argued, loosely following Keynes, that economists should be like doctors. Martin Wolf writes “The austerity obsession, even [sic] when borrowing costs are so low, is lunatic”. The IMF, the OECD and pretty much the whole of informed opinion agree. Yet those subject to this austerity obsession are in charge of levels of public investment in […]

In 1935, John Maynard Keynes wrote to George Bernard Shaw: “I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize – not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years – the way the world thinks about its economic problems.” And, indeed, Keynes’s magnum opus, The General […]