Social Europe articles on the economy

With the returning regularity of a bad habit, the Financial Times reassures us that yet again German economic growth snatches the euro zone from the jaws of recession. Just a day later the same august source bemoaned “sluggish” growth in the euro zone. And a few days later the European Central Bank confirmed non-recovery with […]

Over the past decade, income inequality has come to be ranked alongside terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and economic stagnation as one of the most urgent issues on the international policy agenda. And yet, despite all the attention, few potentially effective solutions have been proposed. Identifying the best policies for reducing inequality remains a puzzle. To […]

Foreign Affairs has just published my latest on the secular stagnation hypothesis. I am increasingly convinced that it captures what is going on in the industrialized world and that the risks of long term weakness on the current policy path are growing. Unfortunately since I put forward the argument in late 2013, the data have […]

The fight for the UK to remain a member of the European Union is now fully on. The country will have a momentous decision to make on 23rd June this year. I unfortunately won’t have a vote on my future as a German living in the UK, the country I have lived and paid my taxes […]

Mario Draghi and Wolfgang Schäuble are experienced people who know the euro bloc is in an impasse. The European Central Bank president and Germany’s finance minister need to seal a monetary and fiscal compact to guide Europe out of crisis. Beset by immigration upheavals and enhanced support for unorthodox populist parties, euro members are relying […]

Trade-offs have long been at the center of economics. The aphorism “there is no such thing as a free lunch” captures a central economic idea: You cannot get something for nothing. Among the many trade-offs emphasized in economics courses are guns vs. butter, public vs. private, efficiency vs. equity, environmental protection vs. economic growth, consumption […]

Despite the unprecedented attention that income and wealth inequality has received in this year’s presidential campaign in the United States and in several recent elections in Europe, one cannot but have the impression that, for many centrist politicians, inequality is just a passing fad. Their belief is, I think, that once the economies return to […]

The 50th anniversary issue of Intereconomics is out, and I have a contribution which summarises how I think the Eurozone could succeed without deeply problematic attempts at fiscal and political union. I look at three areas where change is required, and then rerun history to show how the Eurozone crisis could have been transformed into no more […]

The severe financial crisis of recent years hit Eurozone industrial production; in a bank-centric currency area this resulted in tremendous growth of NPLs (non-performing loans), amounting today to €900 billion. In some countries, banking system issues arose from real estate bubbles and structured finance transactions. The absence of a unified economic policy and of a […]

Until very recently, one of the biggest challenges facing mankind was making sure there was enough to eat. From the dawn of agriculture until well into the Industrial Age, the common human condition was what nutritionists and public-health experts would describe as severe and damaging nutritional biomedical stress. Some 250 years ago, Georgian England was […]

On 1 January 2016 the EU’s banking union – an EU-level banking supervision and resolution system – officially came into force. The move to a banking union has been the most significant regulatory outcome of the crisis – ‘a change of regime, rather than an act of institutional tinkering’, as Christos Hadjiemmanuil of the London […]