Braconier, Η. and Pisu, M., (2014), “Roads to deeper European integration”, VoxEu, 20 Φεβρουαρίου. Over the past 60 years, increasing European integration has brought peace and security, besides contributing to large social welfare gains (through lower prices and a larger variety of products). Still, national borders matter a lot within Europe and a vast literature has documented the large negative effect of national borders on trade – also known as …Read More

Barbulescu, R., (2014), “EU freedom of movement is coming under increasing pressure in the UK and other European states”, LSE Blogs, 20 Φεβρουαρίου. EU citizens have the right to live and work in any other EU state. As Roxana Barbulescu writes, however, this principle of freedom of movement has come under pressure from a number of recent developments. Focusing on the UK, she notes that while there are substantial economic …Read More

Wolff, G., De Sousa, C., Sapir, An., and Terzi, Al., (2014), “The Troika and financial assistance in the euro area: successes and failures”, Bruegel, 19 Φεβρουαρίου. This study provides a systematic evaluation of financial assistance for Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus. All four programmes, and in particular the Greek one, are very large financially compared to previous international programmes because macroeconomic imbalances and the loss of price competitiveness that accumulated …Read More

Mariniello, M., (2014), “Why Competition Policy matters for Growth?”, Bruegel, 18 Φεβρουαρίου. Economic literature suggests that competition can have broad economic effects in three areas: the total amount of economic wealth available in the market at a given point of time, companies’ productive process, and their incentives to innovate or improve the quality of their products. In the first area, any transaction creates some value. An increase in prices resulting …Read More

Priestley, J., (2014), “EU election fault lines: Jobs and growth”, Policy Network, 18 Φεβρουαρίου. No-one, not even UKIP (presumably), supports increasing youth unemployment. But just because politicians from the main European political parties share the view that something has to be done about nearly 6 million youngsters who cannot find work, while recognising that governments have to pursue fiscal responsibility does not mean that there is a consensus about the …Read More

Wyplosz, Ch., (2014), “What you ought to know about the ECB and Unemployment”, Social Europe Journal, 18 Φεβρουαρίου. Τhe unemployment rate in the Euro area has increased by more than 50% since 2007, starting from an already unacceptably high level. The financial crisis that hit the world in 2007-8 is of historical proportions and explains some of this increase, of course. Figure 1 shows that the decline has been much …Read More