Author: Kevin O’Rourke

The collapse in trust in the EU and its institutions

I spent a few hours today revising and updating this paper, and was both astonished, and not surprised at all, to see the extent to which trust in the EU and its institutions collapsed in 2011. The figures below show the percentage of respondents in Eurobarometer surveys saying they trusted the institution in question, minus the percentage who said they didn’t trust it. The decline in 2011 is really quite dramatic. I am sure that the usual suspects will tell us that what Europe obviously needs is a better communications strategy. Personally, I think that less destructive economic policies would have a bigger impact.

(Source: Eurobarometer)

More on competitiveness

Since Brendan and Philip have both posted on competitiveness in the past couple of days, I thought I’d follow up with a link to the following piece by Gaulier, Taglioni and Vicard.

Time for the IMF to play tough

Eurointelligence points us to a piece by Alan Beattie on the political difficulties which the IMF faces in dealing with the Eurozone crisis. As we know in Ireland all too well, while the IMF has generally been on the side of the angels, it is the ECB and EC that have called the shots, with the result that the IMF’s reputation suffers by association with Troika policies that are a complete and utter disaster. The dilemma for the IMF is that a complete withdrawal from the Eurozone crisis, while the single currency collapses, won’t do its reputation much good either.

Charles Goodhart and Sony Kapoor have it right, I think: it is the Eurozone that is dysfunctional, and in the future IMF conditionality has to be directed at the ECB and other Eurozone-level bodies as much as (if not more than) it is directed at individual member states. It’s time for the IMF to decide whether it wants to prove Peter Doyle right, or prove him wrong.

INET Council on the Euro Zone Crisis

I am part of an INET-sponsored group that has been considering whether and how a collapse of the Euro can be prevented. Details of our discussions to date are available here.

It’s make your mind up time

Like many people, I suspect, I usually check in on Sunday night to see what Wolfgang Münchau has said this week. This week’s article was a cracker, and it’s hard to see where he’s wrong. Either governments decide to make the radical reforms that are needed, or monetary union collapses: the news from Brussels this morning suggests that they are not going to do the necessary any time soon. The Government and Central Bank have had a long time now to get contingency plans in place, and it would be nice to think that they had actually done so.

Update: for similar views, see Sony Kapoor here, and Karl Whelan here.