Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth have just published a CEPR Discussion Paper looking at the relationship between austerity and social unrest in Europe between 1919 and 2009.
Category: Political economy
..which is why it makes sense that this article should have appeared in the Telegraph rather than the Guardian (HT FT Alphaville).
I have a column today over at Eurointelligence which uses Dani Rodrik’s political trilemma as a framework within which to discuss the political economy of EMU and the EU more generally.
Shamefully, it has taken me several weeks to realise the full import of the attached Irish Times piece by Garret FitzGerald. He has for many years sought to draw the attention of the Irish public to the role of the European Commission as defender of smaller states’ interests. Here he warns, in much more modest language than that with which I have entitled this entry, that the current German-French proposal for euro zone reform “represents a new attempt to bypass the union’s tried and tested decision-making system… There is a new danger that the decision-making system that for over half a century has sustained and kept in balance an inherently cumbersome union… may lose its hitherto carefully preserved cohesion, and for the first time become dominated by some larger states.”
Via the indispensable Eurointelligence, here is yet another astonishing statement by a senior German policymaker (in this case, Axel Weber):
“We have to put into the constitutions of member states a balanced budget rule of (sic) a deficit reduction rule, some way or another.”
Never were Tonto’s words so politically to the point.