Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher driven by the core values of freedom, sustainability, and equality. These principles guide our exploration of society’s most pressing challenges. This archive page curates Social Europe articles focused on economic issues, offering a rich resource for innovative thinking and informed debate.
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, […]
In the pantheon of economic theories, the tradeoff between equality and efficiency used to occupy an exalted position. The American economist Arthur Okun, whose classic work on the topic is called Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, believed that public policies revolved around managing the tension between those two values. As recently as 2007, when New […]
Deficit Politics A few days ago the Italian government objected to the way that putative technocrats at the European Commission calculated their country’s “structural deficit”. To all but the few familiar with the arcane intricacies of the Maastricht Criteria, the Six-Pack and the Two-Pack the objection might seem esoteric at best. However, it has the […]
The recent decision by the Bank of Japan to increase the scope of its quantitative easing is a signal that another round of currency wars may be under way. The BOJ’s effort to weaken the yen is a beggar-thy-neighbor approach that is inducing policy reactions throughout Asia and around the world. Central banks in China, South Korea, […]
Economic growth, as we learned long ago from the works of economists like MIT’s Robert M. Solow, is largely driven by learning and innovation, not just saving and the accumulation of capital. Ultimately, economic progress depends on creativity. That is why fear of “secular stagnation” in today’s advanced economies has many wondering how creativity can be […]
Slowly but surely a new consensus is emerging emphasizing the need for Europe’s currency union to organize public investment as a means to overcome its crisis, by now in its seventh year; the outlook being truly grim. Back in July President-elect of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker called for a €300bn public-private investment program. ECB […]
The global economy is like a jetliner that needs all of its engines operational to take off and steer clear of clouds and storms. Unfortunately, only one of its four engines is functioning properly: the Anglosphere (the United States and its close cousin, the United Kingdom). The second engine – the eurozone – has now […]
Growth in the Eurozone has declined significantly over recent months, raising fears that Europe could be heading toward another economic crisis. Bob Hancké writes on what it would take to generate growth in Eurozone states. He argues that the best – and possibly only – option for European governments is to adopt a strategy of public investment […]
Everyone knows that the Eurozone suffered a crisis from 2010 to 2012, as periphery countries could no longer sell their debt. A superficial analysis puts this down to profligate governments, but look more closely and it becomes clear that the formation of the Euro itself led to an excessive monetary stimulus in these periphery countries. […]
Every economic collapse brings a demand for debt forgiveness. The incomes needed to repay loans have evaporated, and assets posted as collateral have lost value. Creditors demand their pound of flesh; debtors clamor for relief. Consider Strike Debt, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, which calls itself “a nationwide movement of debt resisters fighting for economic […]
When, almost a year ago, Paul Krugman wrote six posts within three days laying into the stance of Germany on the Eurozone’s macroeconomic problems, even I thought that maybe this was a bit too strong, although there was nothing in what he wrote that I disagreed with. Yet as Germany’s stance proved unyielding in the face of […]
Economic recovery in the Eurozone is not delayed. It is non-existent. The Financial Times for the first day of October carried several articles assessing the European economies, written as if a prize would go to the most pessimistic — stagnation and decline of EU manufacturing, the European Central Bank initiates asset purchases to prevent deflation […]