Author: Kevin O’Rourke

This is no time to go wobbly, EEA edition

There is a depressing amount of wishful thinking going on in the UK right now: for a recent example see here. When Iceland’s banking system collapsed, that was a real emergency requiring capital controls: the sort of eventuality envisaged by the now-famous Article 112 of the Agreement on the European Economic Area. It isn’t at all clear to me that the rest of the EEA will view the argument that “there are too many of your lot in our country, so let us keep them out” in the same light. There is also a big difference between triggering an emergency clause in a contract, when an emergency arises which was unexpected when the agreement was signed, and saying from day one that you want to opt out of a key part of an agreement. And the have-your-cake-and-eat-it brigade also fail to mention that, in addition to Article 112, there is Article 114, which states that

If a safeguard measure taken by a Contracting Party creates an imbalance between the rights and obligations under this Agreement, any other Contracting Party may towards that Contracting Party take such proportionate rebalancing measures as are strictly necessary to remedy the imbalance. Priority shall be given to such measures as will least disturb the functioning of the EEA.

It seems to me that England cannot afford wishful thinking right now, and that those who wish her well need to be crystal clear about the choice it faces, so that there is no mis-understanding on the English side.

I recently published an article on the subject, aimed above all at former Remainers, here. That was a heavily-edited-for-newspapers version of something I originally wrote for this site. Since I use this blog in part as a reminder to myself of what I have written, I reproduce the original blog post below the fold, links and all.

An astonishing dereliction of responsibility

Continue reading “This is no time to go wobbly, EEA edition”

The leprechauns are in Luxembourg, not in Ireland

Colm makes an important point on those Irish GDP statistics here.

Danish lessons for the UK, and in particular Northern Ireland?

Reading this article by Fintan O’Toole got me thinking about my other country, Denmark. The Kingdom of Denmark isn’t just Denmark proper, it includes two other autonomous countries as well. Only Denmark is in the EU.

Just saying.

Update: a researcher in Aalborg who actually knows something about Greenland had much the same thought as I. And they are practical people up in northern Jutland.

Markets and states are complements

The main point of my 1999 book with Jeff Williamson was that globalisation produces both winners and losers, and that this can lead to an anti-globalisation backlash. We argued this based on late 19th century evidence, but opinion poll evidence (citations here) suggested that something similar was at work in the late 20th century as well, a hunch confirmed in the early 21st century by the 2005 and 2008 French and Irish referenda.

What was missing from all this was an analysis of what, if anything, governments can do about this. Which is where Dani Rodrik’s finding that more open states had bigger governments in the late 20th century comes in. Dani’s interpretation is that markets expose workers to risk, and that government expenditure of various sorts can help protect them from those risks. In a series of articles, and an important book, Michael Huberman showed that this correlation between states and markets was present before 1914 as well: countries with more liberal trade policies tended to have more advanced social protections of various sorts, and this helped maintain political support for openness.

Anti-immigration sentiment was clearly crucial in delivering an anti-EU vote in England. And if you talk to ordinary people, it seems clear that competition for scarce public housing and other public services was one important factor behind this. If the Tories had really wanted to maintain support for the EU, investment in public services and public housing would have been the way to do it: if these had been elastically supplied, that would have muted the impression that there was a zero-sum competition between natives and immigrants. It wouldn’t have satisfied the xenophobes, but not all anti-immigrant voters are xenophobes. But of course the Tories were never going to do that, at least not with Osborne at the helm.

If the English want continued Single Market access, they will have to swallow continued labor mobility. There are complementary domestic policies that could help in making that politically feasible. We will have to wait and see what the English decide. But there are also lessons for the 27 remaining EU states. Too much market and too little state invites a backlash. Take the politics into account, and it becomes clear (as Dani has often argued) that markets and states are complements, not substitutes.

 

This really is a slow train wreck

I see that everyone is now arguing that globalisation has distributional consequences, and that losers may eventually decide they have had enough. Which is something that I and others have been writing about since at least the 1990s.

I don’t expect anyone to take much notice of a bunch of academics, but how can we be surprised at the Brexit vote when we have had practical, political experience of the class divides surrounding European integration (viewed and experienced as a regional manifestation of globalisation) since at least 2005, when the French rejected the so-called Constitutional Treaty? And here is my very first ever Vox.Eu column, on the Irish Lisbon 1 vote.

And so my question is: when this has been so obvious for so long, how come nobody has done anything about it? Where are the enhanced safety nets, or the more elastic provision of public housing and other services that would surely have made a difference in the English debate? It really is quite extraordinary.