Riccardo Bellofiore and Joseph Halevi

The panorama of the crisis in Europe

14 pages · 3.95 EUR
(October 2011)

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From the introduction:

The contribution by Riccardo Bellofiore and Joseph Halevi, "The panorama of the crisis in Europe", starts from the assertion that the current Euro crisis can be understood properly only by analysing the global features of the political economy of the European Union. They argue that Europe is today in the grip of two intertwined crises: one stemming from its exposure to the financial and economic crisis which originated in 2007 in the U.S.; the other arising from an institutionally engineered stance regarding the state of the public finances of the countries deemed to have an excessive deficit or debt relatively to gross domestic product (GDP). The two crises connect via the export-oriented bias inherent in the outlook of the developed countries of the Eurozone and of Northern Europe. For Bellofiore and Halevi, it is clear that, if intra-European exchange rate variations are eliminated by means of a single currency, the beggar-thyneighbour game falls then on competitive wage deflation and on the budgetary policies of each individual country. The authors somewhat pessimistically conclude that the few chances for an escape from disaster lie entirely in policies that will contradict the mainstream ones.