Social Europe articles on politics

The social policy track record of the European Union is bleak at best. But in one field the EU did make a marked difference: in 1994 it agreed on the European Works Councils Directive. In multinational companies of a certain size, employee representatives from across Europe have since enjoyed the right to be informed and […]

Remarkably, the profundity of current events is such that even last week’s damning verdict by the UN that the UK breached international human rights law by pursuing a regressive austerity-based policy agenda might be considered relatively insignificant. It shouldn’t be. It might be more important than we realise. It appears that the Leave vote was located […]

Europe 1941: A stateless refugee On November 25, 1941, my great-grandfather Max lost German citizenship through the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law, a simple legal act. He was guilty both of being Jewish and having left the territory of the German Reich. Three years earlier Max had been released from Buchenwald upon proof […]

One of the key findings from the 2016 Employment Outlook just released by the OECD is that easier firing does not create jobs. Moreover, the OECD also finds that loosening job protection in the middle of an economic downturn results in immediate and substantial job losses. However, instead of cautioning policy makers against the danger […]

After the shock of the British referendum on EU membership last week, many pointed to a possible silver lining for the EU. Brexit could spark off further integration among the 27 member states that remain. The political paralysis that has emerged following the Eurozone and refugee crisis, characterised by fundamentally divergent thinking about further integrative […]

Devastation, sadness, jubilation, joy, regret, fear, anxiety, denial, disappointment, betrayal… All are emotions that the Brexit vote propelled into the public sphere. Following the result, the weekend editions of newspapers were also peppered with confessions of trauma and anger, but also exhilaration. This highly uncertain political and economic post-referendum period is also an emotional time. […]

One year after the Greek referendum, a new shock hit the wobbly European edifice. On June 23rd, UK voters decided to leave the European Union. This put an end to the sequence of events that started with Cameron’s promise of a referendum, aiming to curb the outflow of votes benefiting the extremist UKIP party. The […]

Now that the UK has voted to leave the EU, all the attention has been focused on how it will go about leaving, or even whether it will leave in the end.  But equally important is how the EU responds to Brexit:  whether as an isolated case to be quarantined in order to avoid contagion […]

However many reasons British voters had for voting to leave the European Union, it is generally agreed that resentment about immigration was at the top of their concerns. Economists have come forward over the years with numerous studies concluding that labour migration from the rest of the EU is beneficial for the UK economy as […]

Nowadays, both economists and policy makers have rediscovered the importance of income distribution, while in the past this research remained the domain of a handful of scholars, usually in the heterodox tradition. In a number of recent papers, even the IMF has warned about the risks stemming from increasing inequalities but the recommendations inferred from […]

Brexit, the long-dreaded and/or -anticipated event that some of us believed would never actually happen, has come to pass. History has been made and we will all have to live with the consequences, whatever they may be. The image of the EU as a kind of Hotel California from which no country, having entered, could […]

We seem to be living in an accelerated age of revolutionary technological breakthroughs. Barely a day passes without the announcement of some major new development in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, digitization, or automation. Yet those who are supposed to know where it is all taking us can’t make up their minds. At one end of the […]