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.
It has been pretty clear since at least the spring of this year that the ECB was keen to see the euro weakening. At the time the euro stood near to $1.40. Policymakers in a number of euro area member states issued calls for a more competitive exchange rate, directing barely hidden criticisms in this […]
Is a shrinking population always a bad thing? Judging by the lamentations of some economists and policymakers in the advanced economies, where people are living longer and birth rates have fallen below replacement levels, one certainly might think so. In fact, the benefits of demographic stability – or even slight decline – outweigh any adverse […]
Two years have passed since Mario Draghi promised to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. The bond markets have calmed down but the crisis of the euro zone has not yet abated. Isolated pieces of positive information do not automatically imply a sustained recovery let alone justify triumphalism. While improving marginally, the rate of unemployment […]
In recent weeks, the managers, employees, and customers of a New England chain of supermarkets called “Market Basket” have joined together to oppose the board of director’s decision earlier in the year to oust the chain’s popular chief executive, Arthur T. Demoulas. Their demonstrations and boycotts have emptied most of the chain’s seventy stores. What was […]
Macroeconomic forecasts produced with macroeconomic models tend to be little better than intelligent guesswork. That is not an opinion – it is a fact. It is a fact because for decades many reputable and long standing model based forecasters have looked at their past errors, and that is what they find. It is also a […]
Ten years ago, the world emerged from the dot-com bust and started to look more soberly at the Internet’s potential. While speculative greed and fear of missing out might have overplayed the short-term outlook, the Internet’s immense longer-term prospects were never in doubt. I, and other optimistic economists, assumed that free information and communication would […]
Poor countries export raw materials such as cocoa, iron ore, and raw diamonds. Rich countries export – often to those same poor countries – more complex products such as chocolate, cars, and jewels. If poor countries want to get rich, they should stop exporting their resources in raw form and concentrate on adding value to […]
“You shouldn’t get to call yourself an American company only when you want a handout from the American taxpayers,” President Obama said Thursday. He was referring to American corporations now busily acquiring foreign companies in order to become non-American, thereby reducing their U.S. tax bill. But the President might as well have been talking about all […]
The European economy is still in crisis. Real incomes in the Euro area are below the level of 2008 and unemployment is in the double digits in the southern European countries. While the crisis has originated in the USA, it is Europe that has fared worse. The European economic policy regime and European institutions, far […]
Since 2008, global trade has grown slightly more slowly than global GDP. The Doha Round of World Trade Organization negotiations ended in failure. Transatlantic and transpacific trade negotiations are progressing slowly, held back by the resistance of special interests. But, though many experts fear that protectionism is undermining globalization, threatening to impede global economic growth, slower growth in global trade may […]
I bet you think that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. A few well-known facts might lead you to this conclusion. For example, in the United States income after tax per household is now over 100% greater than forty years ago (1972), while average weekly earnings in the private sector are 14% […]
The anti-austerity vote in the European elections reflected two different kinds of discontent. One is a feeling of frustration, which is invigorating nationalism: the vote for “less Europe.” The other is a lack of confidence in current EU policies: the vote for “another Europe.” In both cases, voters revealed that they have lost interest in […]
Rent-seeking is the activity of generating and allocating transfers between economic actors. It results in waste and inequality. The rise of rent-seeking, with its epicentre in the accountancy, legal and banking professions, has been seriously damaging. In the OECD the damage is most evident in the USA, where rent-seeking has faced fewer policy impediments than […]
It is little surprise that Europe continues to struggle to generate the economic and employment growth that would make the debt crisis more manageable. The EU policy approach to escaping the Great Recession has drawn almost exclusively on the most contractionary elements of each of the models of capitalism within the region. Mario Draghi’s talk […]
A few weeks ago I was visited in my office by the chairman of one of the country’s biggest high-tech firms who wanted to talk about the causes and consequences of widening inequality and the shrinking middle class, and what to do about it. I asked him why he was concerned. “Because the American middle […]
In my book, The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent – and How We Can Take It Back, published some months ago by Pluto Press, I argued that the austerity policies imposed on European member states (especially those of the periphery) by the Berlin-Brussels-Frankfurt ‘axis of rigour’ and by the troika were […]
In an interview with British Politics and Policy at LSE’s editor Joel Suss and EUROPP’s editor Stuart Brown, Amartya Sen discusses Thomas Piketty’s recent work, the consequences of widening inequality, and his views on India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose BJP party won the country’s 2014 general election. Thomas Piketty and other academics have documented the growth […]
Before the financial crisis erupted in 2008, private credit in most developed economies grew faster than GDP. Then credit growth collapsed. Whether that fall reflected low demand for credit or constrained supply may seem like a technical issue. But the answer holds important implications for policymaking and prospects for economic growth. And the official answer […]
Tim Geithner’s memoir, published last month, tells us of his life as a firefighter: constantly on call to extinguish a fresh blaze. His baptism of fire, as it were, was in the Mexican financial crisis of 1994: he gained more firefighting experience when called out to Thailand – followed in short order by South Korea […]
Citizens in the world’s richest countries have come to think of their economies as being based on innovation. But innovation has been part of the developed world’s economy for more than two centuries. Indeed, for thousands of years, until the Industrial Revolution, incomes stagnated. Then per capita income soared, increasing year after year, interrupted only by the […]
About a month ago — this is a true story — after a meeting of Economists Against Austerity, I hailed a taxi in Westminster (the workers of the underground system were on strike). During the ensuring discussion with the driver I mentioned that I taught economics at the University of London before retiring. The driver then […]