Europe

Europe’s revamped fiscal rules promise discipline and stability, but Italy’s numbers tell a different story. Once realistic multipliers and hysteresis are built in, consolidation pushes debt up, growth down, and recessionary pressure outwards across the eurozone, hardly a recipe for sustainability.

Investigations into the possible effects of the fiscal consolidations required under the new European fiscal rules on Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio find that the new governance framework may lead to the pro-cyclical tightening, weaker growth and adverse debt dynamics that characterized earlier phases of EU fiscal governance.

A new INET Working Paper by Yaroslav Melekh, James Dixon, Katrina Salmon, and Michael Grubb, interrogates the contradictions between fossil lock-in through LNG import capacity and overcontracting, and policy-driven demand reduction. Here is a summary of the paper’s main findings.

This paper examines in detail the interrelationships between the EU’s concerns, its energy policies, and the resulting challenges and uncertainties facing European gas through the rest of the decade, and beyond.

The most crucial issue in European policy, and one on which no big party campaigned and no important public discussion took place, was the fiscal policy stance for the next few years.

Behind bogus promises of job creation and economic growth lies a dangerous agenda to shred social safety nets.

Germany’s debt brake and EU fiscal rules will make it well neigh impossible for EU countries to fund the investments needed to decarbonize their economies.

The wage effect of hostile working conditions, mainly in terms of sexual harassment risk in the workplace, should be considered and monitored as a first critical step in making women less vulnerable at work and increasing their bargaining power.

Changes to deeply entrenched systems of unequal gender power dynamics, roles and relations, underpinned by patriarchal values, are part of an effective response to the prevention of sexual harassment and its economic consequences.

This research project develops, estimates, calibrates, and deploys a new class of stock flow consistent macroeconomic models to try to understand Ireland’s macroeconomic collapse since 2007.

In Europe, imbalances in the structure of the automotive and a lack of industrial policies risk creating a deadly cocktail for millions of European workers just as the auto sector is undergoing decisive changes.

In Europe, imbalances in the structure of the automotive and a lack of industrial policies risk creating a deadly cocktail for millions of European workers just as the auto sector is undergoing decisive changes.

Populist parties and the decline of progressive politics in Italy

This paper analyzes the role of local spending, particularly on social welfare, and local inequality as factors in the Italian political crisis following the adoption in 2011 of more radical national austerity measures.

An alternative look at the “global savings glut”