Euro

Tag: EC

  • Too Much Trust in EU Institutions

    The general impression is that the EMU zone (which gathers countries belonging to, or potentially belonging to, the euro) suffers from a crisis of trust. How can we move forward with European integration when people lack trust in EU institutions? The facts may however be quite different: there is too much trust in the EU…

  • A Not-So-Surprising Accession

    On January 1st, 2014, the day on which the euro had its 15th birthday, Latvia became the 18th member of the eurozone. This accession was prepared over many years and Lithuania is scheduled to follow in 2015, but still this will have come as a surprise to many. Given the predicaments to which eurozone members,…

  • What is EU Membership all About?

    This is my last entry in the Eurozone 2013 blog. I want to conclude with some general remarks tackling what sounds like a rather innocent question and is the subject of a paper I am working on: What is EU membership all about? The question was put to me for a talk at a summer…

  • Barroso Stretches the Limits of Subsidiarity

    By Adriaan Schout and Judith Hoevenaars (Instituut Clingendael) The eurocrisis has reignited debates on subsidiarity. On June 21st, the Dutch government presented the (disappointing) results of a subsidiarity review, listing 54 EU measures or policy fields which could better be regulated at the national level. The UK is working on a more extensive proposal to…

  • Reckless Spending and Excessive Wage Growth: Myths Debunked

    If I were to pinpoint the two most harmful and most often repeated myths at the core of the orthodox account of the euro crisis, these would surely be, first, that the public debt crisis across the eurozone was solely or mostly caused by reckless government spending; and second, that the fundamental competitiveness problem of…

  • Frau Merkel and the ‘C-Word’

    Both the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have just published findings about the performance of the German economy and the state of structural reforms. While there is plenty of discussions in Berlin about what ‘the others’ (in particular France) are not getting right, there is not much of a debate on what…

  • Doubts about Rehn’s Position as Independent Commissioner

    Rehn has spoken. Friday 3 May, the independent Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs gave his verdict on the state of the national economies in the EU. His statements were remarkable in several ways and come at a time when he has to prove his worth as an independent Commissioner. France, which has been dragging…

  • Euro crisis: a View from Lisbon

    In my first contribution to this blog, I would like to start with outlining what I’ll set out to do in the coming months. The readers of this blog will be quite familiar with the ‘orthodox’ account of the current crisis in the eurozone: profligate public spending by governments in the European periphery, which need…