In purely economic terms, and on the surface, the Euro crisis appears to be over. The recovery has gained in both strength and depth. Unemployment is now below its pre-crisis average. A number of former crisis-hit countries are staging an impressive recovery. Public debt ratios are coming down and the ECB is preparing to wind up its QE program by the end of the year. Nonetheless the recent meeting between Chancellor Merkel and President Macron in Meseberg, Brandenburg in the run-up to the forthcoming European Council meeting on 27-29 June can still rightly be seen as crucial. Economic misery continues, especially in Greece and Italy, but the deep wounds of the crisis have yet to heal in many countries. More fundamentally, the recovery hides the fact that major structural issues remain unresolved. The recent crisis of government formation in Italy illustrated this well, leading to a major spike in interest rates not only in the third-largest EMU-economy, with its low growth and debt ratio north of 130% of GDP, but also in other countries like Spain, with much lower debt and fast growth. The risk of contagion and of break-up has clearly not gone away. The recovery has merely papered over the cracks; but every recovery in history has given way to a downturn. The Euro Area, as currently institutionalised and with debt ratios still high, monetary policy highly expansionary, and political trust in short supply, cannot withstand a renewed downturn. [Read more…]
Analysis of the proposal „A constructive approach to Euro Area reform“
A group of 14 prominent economists, seven each from France and from Germany, has issued a detailed and rather comprehensive proposal for reform of the Euro Area (CEPR 2018).* This is a welcome initiative. There is a window of opportunity for reform in the Euro Area. Economically it has been created by the strengthening and increasingly broad economic upturn: policymakers can leave firefighting mode and focus on structural governance reforms. Politically it has been opened up by the 2015 report by the five presidents of the EU institutions, the initiatives by the new French President Macron, the proposals by the European Commission of December 2017, and, most recently, the declarations of intent on Europe emerging from the grand-coalition talks in Germany.
Together Germany and France account for half of Euro Area GDP. The authors of the report are all well-known in policy-oriented circles, while coming from different traditions. For all these reasons the report is set to be very influential. This appraisal follows the structure of the report itself, examining the underlying philosophy and problem analysis (1), the proposals relating to the financial sector (2), to fiscal governance (3) and finally institutional questions (4). An overall assessment with recommendations for extensions and alternatives concludes (5). [Read more…]
Unemployment in the Euro Area passes a milestone
With the latest unemployment figures from Eurostat, for November 2017[1], the Euro Area has passed a milestone: for the first time the unemployment rate, at 8.7%, is below the average of the “normal times” prior to the economic crisis. This provides a good occasion to evaluate the current state of the labour market, as far as unemployment rates are concerned, in the Euro Area and its member states. To what extent have the scars of the crisis healed? Where do the most serious challenges remain?
Figure 1 shows the labour market recovery from the double whammy of the global financial and then the Euro crisis: it begins in the spring of 2013, in the wake of the belated “whatever it takes” announcement by the European Central Bank. Unemployment fell from its peak of 12.1% and by January 2017 it was below its average for the entire history of the common currency to date (9.6%). By November the continued improvement had brought the figure down below the average recorded up to the crisis (8.8%). Over the last 12 months the unemployment rate has fallen at an average of almost 0.1 percentage point – around 130 000 persons – a month. [Read more…]
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