Mitchell, B. (2015) “Eurozone unemployment – little to do with international competitiveness“, Bill Mitchell Blog, 21 Μαρτίου.
The so-called ‘Informal European Council’ released a document on February 12, 2015 – Preparing for Next Steps on Better Economic Governance in the Euro Area: Analytical Note – which has been used as a background paper to batter the Greeks into submission in the latest round of the Eurozone crisis. It was published under the authorshop of Jean-Claude Juncker (President of the European Commission) with “close cooperation” with Donald Tusk (President of the European Council), Jeroen Dijsselbloem (President of the Eurogroup of Finance Ministers) and Mario Draghi (ECB boss). All that is missing is the Madame from the IMF to complete the Troika. This is a very dishonest document, deliberately framed to advance the austerity agenda and damage the living standards of some of the nations within the monetary union. It is hard how any serious economist would put their name to this sort of analysis.
The document opens with an extraordinary account of “The nature of Economic and Monetary Union”.
Factually, everything is fine. But what it denied is the interesting part.
It says that:
The euro is more than a currency. It is also a political project. Our monetary union requires Member States give up their previous national currencies once and for all and permanently share monetary sovereignty with the other euro area countries. The euro has thus created a “community of destiny” between the 19 Member States that share the euro as their currency; this requires both solidarity in times of crisis and respect by all for commonly agreed rules.
The great European visionaries in the immediate post World War II period did not desire to put the European economies into a straitjacket of austerity and hardship.
Rather they aimed to achieve peacetime prosperity. Europe’s political leaders devised the ‘European Project’ as an ambitious plan for European integration to ensure that there were no more large scale military conflicts fought on continental European soil.
Σχετικές αναρτήσεις:
- Escudero, V., Horne, R., Kühn, S., Milasi, S., López Mourelo, E., Pignatti, C. & Silvander, J. (2015) “An Unemployment-Oriented Investment Strategy for Europe“, International Labour Organization (ILO) Research Department, Studies on Growth with Equity, Ιανουάριος.
- Beblavý, Μ., Gros, D. & Maselli, I. (2015) “Reinsurance of National Unemployment Benefit Schemes“, Social welfare policies, CEPS Working Documents, Centre for European Policy Studies, 08 Ιανουαρίου.
- Dolls, M., Fuest, C., Neumann, D. & Peichl, A. (2014) “An Unemployment Insurance Scheme for the Euro Area? A Comparison of Different Alternatives using Micro Data“, Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Discussion Paper No. 14-095, 28 Οκτωβρίου.