This study covers the impact of the combination of wage cuts and government austerity on aggregate demand and employment in the euro zone. The focus is on the euro crisis countries and their development since 2008.

Presentation from Jörg Bibow (Skidmore College) and Heiner Flassbeck (Makroskop)

The Panama Leaks committee of inquiry this week dealt with the facilitation of letterbox companies.

 

Maximum profit, but minimum taxes: international corporations such as Apple, Google, Starbucks, McDonald‘s or BASF are using complex tax haven constructions and systematically shirk paying tax on their record profits. According to the OECD this means that as a consequence of this, the general public is losing out on up to 240 billion US dollars per year.

 

This week’s plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg also included a debate on the progress of the negotiations on implementing the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT).

 

The Maltese Parliamentary Secretary Ian Borg described the development of the FTT from the point of view of the Maltese EU Presidency. The negotiations had been complex and time consuming. The Maltese Presidency would support further negotiations, even though Malta was not part of the ten Member States that wanted to be the first to introduce the tax.

 

According to a study of the World Economic Forum and another by the charitable organisation Oxfam, inequality is not only steadily on the rise but also increasingly becoming a problem for the global economy. The discussion on wealth distribution has, therefore, finally reached the economic mainstream.

And yet it moves: economic policy at last recognises inequality as an important issue; for example at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this week.

Its establishment goes back to 2014, chaired by the long-term Italian EU Commissioner and former head of government Mario Monti: the so-called “High Level Group on Own Resources”. Its mission: to come up with ideas as to how financing the EU could become more transparent, simpler, fairer and more democratic.

 

An elusive recovery unable to solve the social crisis Nearly nine years after the meltdown of the financial system of developed countries followed by the euro debt crisis in 2012, recovery in Europe finally started in late 2014. We expect that economic growth is going to slow down in the EU in 2017 (1.6% after 1.9 % in 2016) and in 2018 (1.5%) as tailwinds are turning into headwinds. Brexit is likely to hit UK growth and will have negative, but limited, contagion effects to the rest of the EU.

Diese Studie befasst sich mit dem Auseinanderlaufen der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung nach der globalen Finanzkrise im Vergleich von Eurozone, USA und Großbritannien. Die Eurozone erholte sich seit 2010 deutlich langsamer als die US-amerikanische und die britische Wirtschaft.

On September 26, 2014, Canada and the European Union (EU) announced the conclusion of a far-reaching economic integration agreement, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). The agreement included an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, later tweaked and re-branded as ICS (Investment Court System) in February 2016, which could unleash a corporate litigation boom against Canada, the EU and individual EU member states, and could dangerously thwart government efforts to protect citizens and the environment.