Social Europe articles on the economy

The impact of fiscal austerity on the Eurozone as a whole has been immense. In my recent Vox piece, I did a back of the envelope calculation which said that GDP in 2013 might be around 4% lower as a result of cuts in government consumption and investment alone. This seemed to accord with some model […]

The German government has been a strong supporter of austerity programmes, arguing that the associated goals of deficit and debt reduction provide the best, if not the only, route to economic recovery in Europe. Some writers reach back to the hyper-inflation of the 1920s to explain this faith in the virtues of belt-tightening. Recent release […]

On January 21st, 2015, the austerity-based monetary regime of the Eurozone (EZ) was officially abandoned as the European Central Bank (ECB) launched its Quantitative Easing (QE) programme of sovereign bond purchases on secondary markets. The European Court of Justice’s attorney general has certified that the QE programme is not in breach of EZ Treaties, but […]

Yanis Varoufakis, the economics professor and new Greek finance minister, used a press conference with Wolfgang Schäuble last week in Berlin to issue an emotional appeal to Germans for solidarity; they, after all, knew from their experiences of the 1930s how bad the political consequences of an economic depression could be. Are those just the […]

The 4th February late-night decision by the European Central Bank to reject Greek bank collateral for monetary policy operations will, I confidently predict, precipitate not just a run on Greek banks; not just greater price instability across the Eurozone – but ultimately, the collapse of the fantastic machinery that is the ‘self-regulating’ economy of the […]

Europe’s citizens are torn between the European integration project, which requires market liberalization and competition rules promising greater welfare, and national welfare states, which are the framework for redistributive policies and provide social protection. Yet, the European Union is not averse to social welfare. The European model aims for “a highly competitive social market economy” […]

With up to €60 bn of debt a month being bought for the next 19 months, the ECB’s programme of quantitative easing (QE) is massive. But its programme suffers from three major shortcomings (see below). These shortcomings imply that the ECB’s QE programme, even if it does represent a major leap, needs serious redesigning. It […]

In 2014, the world economy remained stuck in the same rut that it has been in since emerging from the 2008 global financial crisis. Despite seemingly strong government action in Europe and the United States, both economies suffered deep and prolonged downturns. The gap between where they are and where they most likely would have […]

A paradox that lies at the heart of capitalism is that economies need consumers to be confident spenders of money on the one hand, while on the other workers’ must accept insecurity and flexibility in their main supply of money: employment income. Professor Colin Crouch considers the implications of this, and looks at the ways it […]

The ECB has been struggling to implement a programme of quantitative easing (QE) that would successfully target deflation. The main difficulty is political, stemming from opposition from German institutions. Their argument against is that a government bond buying programme by the ECB would mix fiscal and monetary policy. This column argues the opposite – such […]

Imagine that it was revealed that 10% of the European Union budget (the money that goes to the EU centre to fund the common agricultural policy and other EU wide projects) had been found to be completely wasted as a result of actions by EU policymakers. By wasted I do not mean spent on things […]

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has been writing about America’s economically divided society since the 1960s. His recent book, The Price of Inequality, argues that this division is holding the country back, a topic he has also explored in research supported by INET. On December 4th, Stiglitz chaired the eighth INET Seminar Series at Columbia University, […]