Author: Kevin O’Rourke

Gosh, isn’t that exciting!

In a recent post, we read that

With the Social Democrats (S&D) and the conservatives (EPP) neck-and-neck in ever more refined EU wide opinion pools, the lead up to the European elections has never been more exciting. It’s down to one seat whether the next Commission president is Social Democrat or Conservative.

I am sure that there are some in Brussels who think that giving voters an indirect say in who becomes Commission President is exactly what we need to boost interest in the forthcoming European elections, and give the European project some democratic legitimacy.

By the way, does anyone know what the EPP or Social Democratic position on the Eurozone crisis is? (I think I know what Marine Le Pen wants.)

I have another proposal to enhance the democratic legitimacy of the project: allow voters to fundamentally change the direction of policy, should they so choose. Reverse the “treaty-isation” of particular economic policies. Stop trying to make the commitment to austerity democracy-proof.

Any takers?

Barbara Solow

A friend just told me the very sad news that Barbara Solow passed away in February.

She wrote a classic book on Ireland, The Land Question and the Irish Economy, which has a good claim to being the first major cliometric work on Ireland — if by cliometric you mean economic history that is strongly informed by economic theory, and systematically uses data to back up the arguments being made. In more recent years she did terrific work on plantation slavery, which was very influential and certainly made a big impression on me. The last time I saw her was at a conference which she organised in Oxford a couple of years ago to commemorate Eric Williams, and she was as impressive as ever.

I can’t claim to have known her very well, but she was always very nice to me when I was a young Irish economic historian in Boston. She had a wonderful dry sense of humour, and produced one of the great acknowledgment footnotes of all time. Her death is a major loss for the profession, and my heart goes out to her family.

The latest national accounts data

I have been waiting for someone else to post on the national accounts data for 2013, available here, but no-one has yet, and it deserves a thread.

Real GDP, which as we know is mis-measured as a result of transfer pricing, declined 0.3% in 2013. Real GNP, which we learned last year has its problems too, was up by 3.4%. Nominal GDP rose by just 0.1%, which is not good for the debt to GDP ratio. Nominal GNP rose by 4%.

I guess that a marketing problem the government faces is that if it plays up the GNP numbers too much as being clearly superior, which I suppose we still believe they are (?), someone out there may start dividing our debt by GNP.

The future of the euro

I have a piece on the subject in the most recent issue of Finance and Development, available here.

Production lags being what they are, I wrote the article in mid-December. Since then, Wolfgang Münchau has declared the Eurozone policy debate over (and not in a  good way); the German Constitutional Court has issued a ruling on OMT that is potentially much less benign than is commonly assumed; and Italy has installed its third non-elected Prime Minister in a row, with a notorious multiplier denier as Finance Minister thrown in for good measure. None of this has cheered me up.

Class divides and European integration, yet again

This morning’s Eurointelligence briefing put me on to this article in Les Echos, which in turn led me to this Ipsos opinion poll. It contains several sobering findings, notably with respect to foreigners. But the finding that struck me most — since this is something I have been writing about for years now — is that a majority of French working class voters now want to leave the Euro. Indeed, only 34% of French workers think that EU membership is a good thing.

Isn’t it amazing how short run blips in various economic indicators can lead powerful people to assume that all is well with the EMU project? It is slow moving variables — long term unemployment, gradual shifts in public opinion, and so on — that pose the greatest threat to the Euro’s survival. If the far right does as well as people now seem to think it will in the European elections, this will presumably be presented in the media as a “shock” to the system, but has it not been obvious since 2010 at the latest that something like this was likely, given Eurozone macroeconomic policies? And has it not been obvious for years that actually existing EMU is harming the broader European project?

Europe’s political leaders should remember what Ernest Hemingway said about bankruptcy.