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Economy


Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher. We use the values of freedom, sustainability and equality as the foundation on which we examine society’s most pressing challenges. We are committed to publishing cutting-edge thinking and new ideas from the most thought-provoking people. This archive page brings together Social Europe articles on the economy.

Why Global Trade Might Become Less Important

Adair Turner 23rd July 2014 2 Comments

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 […]

Inequality is Falling Globally! (And Similar Nonsense)

John Weeks 23rd July 2014 3 Comments

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% […]

Europe Must Escape A Savings Trap, Not A Liquidity Trap

Andrea Terzi 23rd July 2014 2 Comments

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, Living Standards And Inequality

Paul Collier 16th July 2014 9 Comments

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 […]

Why Isn’t Europe More Keynesian?

Seán Ó Riain 14th July 2014

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 […]

Real Business Leaders Want To Save Capitalism

Robert Reich 19th June 2014 2 Comments

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 […]

It’s Time To Stand Up To Troika Austerity (Part I)

Thomas Fazi 16th June 2014 6 Comments

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 […]

Inequality: Why Thomas Piketty Is Mostly Right

Amartya Sen 13th June 2014 5 Comments

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 […]

The Great Credit Mistake

Adair Turner 10th June 2014 4 Comments

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 […]

Why Banking Crises Happen In America But Not In Canada

John Kay 5th June 2014 3 Comments

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 […]

Creating An Innovation Society

Joseph Stiglitz 4th June 2014 1 Comment

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 […]

Why Is Capital In The 21st Century (C21C) Such A Success?

John Weeks 30th May 2014 1 Comment

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 […]

Angry Economics Students Are Naive – And Mostly Right

John Kay 23rd May 2014 7 Comments

Students of economics are in revolt – again. A few years ago, even before the crisis, they established an “autistic economics” network. After the crisis, in 2011, a Harvard class staged a walkout from Gregory Mankiw’s introductory course. That course forms the basis of textbooks prescribed in universities around the world. This year, 65 groups […]

Secular Stagnation And The Road to Full Investment

Robert Skidelsky 22nd May 2014 1 Comment

A specter is haunting the treasuries and central banks of the West – the specter of secular stagnation. What if there is no sustainable recovery from the economic slump of 2008-2013? What if the sources of economic growth have dried up – not temporarily, but permanently? The new pessimism comes not from Marxists, who have […]

The ECB’s Troubling Future Policy Conundrum

John Ryan 21st May 2014

In the German Constitutional Court ruling on the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme by the European Central Bank (ECB), judges said they were “inclined to regard the OMT decision as an Ultra Vires act”, adding that this “creates an obligation of German authorities to refrain from implementing it”. The court judgment has ruled that the […]

Piketty And The Zeitgeist

Dani Rodrik 16th May 2014

I get the same question these days wherever I go and from whomever I meet: What do you think of Thomas Piketty? It’s really two questions in one: What do you think of Piketty the book, and what do you think of Piketty the phenomenon? The first question is much easier to answer. By sheer […]

How To Combat Inequalities Produced By Global Capitalism

Guy Standing 12th May 2014 4 Comments

Rising inequality is one of the most salient issues in global and European politics. Guy Standing writes that what we have witnessed in recent decades is not simply an increase in inequality, but also the emergence of a new globalised class structure. A key component of this structure is what he terms ‘The Precariat’: a new class […]

The Eurozone: Out Of The Ashes?

Simon Wren-Lewis 7th May 2014

I was at a gathering a year or so back in which sensible economists were thinking about the transition path for the Eurozone to full fiscal (and banking) union. They viewed recent events as confirming that monetary union alone was not tenable, and that fiscal union was the way forward. Many share that view. I remember asking […]

The Mismeasure Of Technology

Ricardo Hausmann 1st May 2014 1 Comment

There is nothing better than fuzzy language to wreak havoc – or facilitate consensus. Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that philosophical puzzles are really just a consequence of the misuse of language. By contrast, the art of diplomacy is to find language that can hide disagreement. One idea about which economists agree almost unanimously is that, beyond […]

Some Reflections On Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’

Thomas Palley 24th April 2014 1 Comment

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a six hundred and eighty-five page tome that definitively characterizes the empirical pattern of income and wealth inequality in capitalist economies over the past two hundred and fifty years, and especially over the last one hundred. It also documents the grotesque rise of inequality over the past […]

The Banks And Austerity: A Simple Story Of The Last Ten Years

Simon Wren-Lewis 23rd April 2014

There are probably a number of reasons why bank leverage (the amount of lending banks do in proportion to their capital) increased rapidly in the 00s: reduced regulation, underestimation of systemic risk as a result of the Great Moderation, a search for yield when interest rates were low, simple greed. Bank profits rose, and so did the […]

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