Restoring Europe´s Prosperity Triangle: An economist´s perspective on the EU in the 2020s
$ 44.5
Description
In marked contrast to the muddled EU reaction to the financial crisis and its aftermath, the EU economic response to the Covid-pandemic has been impressively swift and comprehensive. But the socio-economic agenda remains tightly packed with fostering integration and cohesion in the Union an essential element. Europe needs to reload its prosperity model of combining stability, efficiency, and fairness. The medium-term structural challenges for our societies - already visible before the financial crisis 2008 and its specific European manifestation - have not gone away, and obviously, the Covid-pandemic has put additional strong tensions into the fabric of our societies. It is time to resume vigorous preparation for what the future has in store for us in terms of environmental, demographic, technological and societal transformation.
Mapping out a new narrative for European prosperity can be usefully framed in terms of re-establishing positive feed-back-cycles between stability, efficiency, and fairness. Efficiency per se is obviously not an end, it is an essential driver of growth and well-being in society, but it also needs to be stable and sustainable, with the benefits it brings being widely and fairly shared across society. Stability is of course crucial - not in the narrow sense of short-run cyclical consumption smoothing, but in the more fundamental sense of safeguarding against the risk of systemic crises endangering broad standards of living -, even if it may entail some short-run sacrifice.