The price increases that matter for the poor
Rich-country governments are not adequately addressing the causes of food-price inflation—the world’s poor continue to suffer as a result.
Amazon and the power of big digital platforms
Platform power is often traced to markets, implying anti-trust action. The source, and the solution, lie elsewhere.
Social-ecological policy options: free green services
How to avoid ecological policies having adverse social effects? Make the associated services (partly) free.
‘Leaving no one behind’: putting words into actions
The climate transition and its social dimension demand more powerful instruments than the European Commission proposes.
First collective agreement for platform workers in Spain
The agreement follows a critical Supreme Court judgment and the ‘riders’ law’ deriving from social dialogue.
While social apartheid endures, so will the pandemic
Denying vaccination to Africa was always bound to rebound on the global north.
Not only a vaccine waiver: WTO reform is urgent
‘Intellectual property rights’ as the foundation of ‘free’ markets is a notion difficult, intellectually, to sustain.
Unnecessary tradeoffs
Progressive ideas can prevail in a democracy, Sheri Berman writes—but only if they are pitched in universal terms.
Learning accounts—filling the training gaps
Individual learning accounts can make the right to training tangible for all but EU member states will need to raise their commitment.
Russia: it’s raining men without umbrellas
What is Russia up to, at the Ukraine border and beyond? It takes a gender lens to see.
Spain’s labour reform: less transience, more balance
While still subject to political negotiations, the labour-market reform agreed by Spain’s social partners should bring more security.
Germany’s reliance on its healthcare ‘brown angels’
The recruitment of nurses to meet shortages in the global north has side-effects—not all good—on their countries of origin.
Online surveillance thrives when fear takes over
European law-enforcement agencies have been pushing to end encryption and survey everyone’s online communications.
European Green Deal: can it tackle the climate crisis?
Public-private partnerships must be replaced by public-community collaborations for wellbeing and the climate.
Higher public debt = lower growth?
The pandemic-induced crisis has seen fiscal policy relaxed. Ill-evidenced orthodoxy must not be allowed to reinstate austerity.
Digitalisation and telework—the ‘new normal’?
New working arrangements could hold out more self-determination for workers. Too often they have meant more stress.
High-speed rail along a ‘European silk road’
The Recovery and Resilience Facility aims to finance national projects. Yet a pan-European rail network could yield big emissions cuts.