politics, economy and employment & labour
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher that publishes content examining issues in politics, economy and employment & labour. This archive brings together Social Europe articles on political issues.
In 1983, the American economist and Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief made what was then a startling prediction. Machines, he said, are likely to replace human labor much in the same way that the tractor replaced the horse. Today, with some 200 million people worldwide out of work – 30 million more than in 2008 – Leontief’s […]
I have long been mulling over how much money the German government has actually saved as a result of the Greek/Eurozone crisis. It has been clear that crisis-driven capital inflows into Germany have led to higher demand for government bonds. As a result prices went up and yields down. If you manage a debt stock of […]
Strengthening the role of the European Parliament has often been proposed as a method for addressing the EU’s alleged democratic deficit. Sergio Fabbrini writes that while there are legitimate criticisms to be made about intergovernmental models of European integration, any attempt to create a system approximating national parliamentary democracy at the European level would be counter-productive. He […]
The Third International Conference on Financing for Development recently convened in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. The conference came at a time when developing countries and emerging markets have demonstrated their ability to absorb huge amounts of money productively. Indeed, the tasks that these countries are undertaking – investing in infrastructure (roads, electricity, ports, and much […]
The UK’s EU referendum is likely to be heavily influenced by the extent to which David Cameron is successful in his attempt to renegotiate the country’s terms of membership. Iain Begg writes that while Cameron’s intention appears to be to gain enough from a renegotiation to win the referendum, he faces a difficult balancing act in keeping […]
In current debates, it is often discussed whether digitalization is good or bad for employees. Some expect that with the so-called digital revolution, work will spill over onto the rest of life even more than it does today. Employees’ self-organization, said to increase through digitalization, threatens to overburden them. Health problems such as burn-out and […]
European companies are rethinking how they can sustainably secure growth and competitiveness in the wake of the biggest global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. And this task, hard enough by itself, is happening in the light of long-term developments in demography, mobility and the internationalisation of markets. We have looked at […]
The IT revolution is transforming politics and opening up a new dimension of inequality. The Labour party can be as technologically savvy as it likes, argues David Runciman, but it cannot become a vote-winning machine again until it sets out a role for the state in the political economy of the digital age. On the […]
A persistent theme – indeed the leitmotif – of the way that German leaders discuss the eurozone is their insistence on the importance of following the rules. That refrain is followed by a chorus from the rest of the monetary union demanding to know why Germany is taking such an inflexible approach. The answer, it […]
From blaming him for the renewed collapse of the Greek economy to accusing him of illegally plotting Greece’s exit from the eurozone, it has become fashionable to disparage Yanis Varoufakis, the country’s former finance minister. While I have never met or spoken to him, I believe that he is getting a bad rap (and increasingly so). […]
If we look at what kinds of jobs have expanded most in recent years, we can split European countries into two: those that experienced job polarization (with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs growing, and the middling type shrinking relatively) and those that experienced upgrading (with a relative expansion of ‘good’ jobs). These patterns can be traced […]
Social Democrats consider themselves to be the party of social and technological progress. The political left must therefore address digitisation as a policy issue. There must be no doubt in our minds that our traditional values of freedom, justice and solidarity continue to apply in the digital realm just as they do in our analogue […]
