Category: Austerity
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Portuguese Labour Market Reforms in the Aftermath of the Eurozone Crisis: The Problems Behind the Recovery
This is a extended repost of a blog written with Jasper Simons for Critcom, the blog of the Council of European Studies. If one were to believe the assessments of European institutions, Portugal is on the path to recover from the severe economic crisis it suffered from 2010 onwards, and the drastic reforms implemented in…
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How did David Cameron manage to win the 2015 elections in spite of austerity?
The poor hit by austerity don’t vote, while the rich who benefit do How can we explain the Conservative victory in last week’s British elections in the context of the austerity measures the Tories have been pushing through since they came to office? Indeed, even if the deficit hasn’t come down near the levels announced…
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Does fiscal austerity strengthen UKIP?
In their manifesto published yesterday, the Conservative party have pledged to increase funding for the NHS by 8bn a year, besides other policies that have been criticized for for not being clearly funded. Many observers have argued that all these spending increases will need to be be compensated somehow by deep cuts in other domains,…
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A Theory of (British) University Business Cycles
Put simply, the theory of political business cycles goes like this: in the run up to elections, governments increase public spending or/and lower interest rates (if they can control them) in order to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment. They supply voters with more goods or cheap credit as a way to make them happy…
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A modest proposal to curtail the political influence of the elderly
Modern political economies are strongly skewed towards the interests of older people. In the United states, per capita spending on the old via pensions or medicare stood at $26’000, while spending on the young via child benefits or other programs was at less than $12’000 (data for the graph below from here). Pensions in particular…
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Dealing with email bankruptcy
On January 1st, New York Times journalist Nick Bilton, acknowledging that he would never be able to answer all of them, deleted a backlog of 46,315 unanswered emails and, officially declared email bankruptcy. A number of high-profile individuals have declared email bankruptcy over the last decade, the first being Lawrence Lessig in 2004. Just like…
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What if More Austerity Meant More Immigration?
Since January 1st, citizens from Romania and Bulgaria can freely access the labour markets of all EU member states, including the United Kingdom. Fed by the threat of UKIP and a tabloid press that doesn’t really bother with facts, both Tories and Labour are up in arms in the face of a potential “invasion” of…
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Reforming Southern Europe: How to Square the Triangle of Employment, Fiscal Austerity and Inequality?
Mass unemployment is probably one of the most worrying features of the Eurozone crisis. As youth unemployment is hitting record levels (one in four people under 25 in Europe and more than one in two in Spain are officially out of work), many observers are warning against the rise of a “lost generation”, especially in…
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How Margaret Thatcher Made Britain a Soviet State
When I moved to the United Kingdom a year and a half ago, I thought that I was moving to a free market experiment. Margaret Thatcher and her followers – from Blair to Cameron – had crushed the unions, liberalized labour and financial markets, privatized public services, reformed the state following business principles and reduced…
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The Vicious Circle of Inequality, Debt, Crisis, and Austerity
We are in a time of austerity. Public services are being cut, social benefits are being capped, and real wages are shrinking. In the last 5 years, the UK has gone through a big wage squeeze: real wages have declined by 5.5% since 2010, on par with countries such as Greece and Portugal. All these…
Alexandre Afonso 