An Activist Industrial Policy for Europe?
Is Europe again flirting with an activist industrial policy as model for increased competitiveness? Events in the last few years suggest that the trend towards a non-interventionist industrial policy may have come to a halt. The financial crisis of 2008-09 and the severe recession that followed prompted governments to give financial support to industries. These interventions, in response to exceptional events, seemed to indicate a greater willingness on the part of governments to support industries that were deemed to be too important to fail. Will this trend continue – and what can new efforts to design industrial policies learn from Europe’s past experience in that field? In a new ECIPE Occasional Paper, Sir Geoffrey Owen presents a new study on European industrial policy. He talks about ways to define the government’s role, and the balance between horizontal and sectoral policies. His aim is to identify successes as well as failures, drawing on European as well as American and Japanese experience, and to present some conclusions about what policies are likely to be effective in current circumstances.
In FocusChina's Challenges: Can it Reform its Economic and Political System? The global economic crisis has changed the perception that many Western countries shared on China. In his new paper, China's Challenges, Guy de Jonquières concludes that the country is no longer viewed as an unruly and disruptive pupil, but rather a potential financial paymaster. He identifies and describes the challenges that China is facing in its new role. The paper argues that Chinese developments in three areas – economy, foreign policy and openness for public debate – are imposing increasing strains on the country’s political system and institutions, and demand new approaches both inside and outside the country. Guy de Jonquières concludes that the future for China is still uncertain due to the much vulnerability in economic, domestic and foreign policy. And he recommends Western countries to engage with China as much as is possible without conceding on essential principles.
European Vertigo – Remedying the Eurozone Crisis Will the result of the crisis summit in Brussels be enough to calm European bond markets and avoid the possibility of a Eurozone breakup? In a new Briefing Note, Fredrik Erixon takes stock of thecrisis and previous crisis packages – and outlines an agenda for what need to happen now for the Eurozone to survive. The key thing, argues Erixon, is todress up the Euro bride as best as possible to make her attractive for courtship from the ECB and the IMF. It is no longer in the power of EU governments to solve the crisis by fiscal policy – greater assistance from the ECB and the IMF will be needed.
The Eurozone Crisis - A Crisis of the Sovereign The Eurozone crisis is no longer only a sovereign debt crisis - it is a crisis of the sovereign, or a crisis of the state and state authority. Eurozone leaders no longer commands necessary authority to convince a increasingly sceptic market about their crisis-fighting credentials. Yet the problem extends beyond the current crisis, argues Fredrik Erixon in a new essay, and concerns increasing mistrust in the strategy to supplant national governments by pan-European governance. Eurozone leaders can still recover their authority to fight the crisis, but the longer they have waited the more they have raised the bar for what markets demand and what they need their electorates to accept.
Free flow of information - for free trade or human rights? Hosuk Lee-Makiyama discussed censorship and other new trade barriers that threaten the digital economy at an ECIPE seminar on November 15th and at the WTO Public Forum on September 21. Lee-Makiyama has called for a new plurilateral agreement that encompass both products and online services as outlined in his proposal for an International Digital Economy Agreement. ECIPE also hosted a lecture by Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on Free Expression and Opinion. La Rue’s report on online freedoms has received broad support, including the Dutch and Swedish Foreign Ministers Uri Rosenthal and Carl Bildt speaking at an ECIPE event the summer. La Rue and leading MEPs debated Internet access and human rights issues, a discussion that echoes the digital authoritarianism dilemma addressed in a recent paper by Fredrik Erixon and Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, and internet censorship as used for online protectionism.
What is Driving Healthcare Expenditures to Rise? The last 40 years have seen a rapid increase of healthcare expenditures. Increasing healthcare expenditures form a significant part of these outlays, and its share of total government expenditure has risen rapidly. The next 40 years is likely to witness an even faster expansion of healthcare expenditures in many European countries. In a new study, Fredrik Erixon and Erik van der Marel examine cost drivers in European healthcare systems and conclude supply-side inefficiencies is a central problem. Low or falling productivity pushes up the real cost of healthcare and the healthcare sector will have to be reformed to improve the efficiency in the use of resources. Erixon and van der Marel conclude that trade should form a central part in a new drive to gear up healthcare productivity.
Europe’s Energy Market and Anti-trust Action Competition on Europe’s gas market is weak. Yet now the European Commission has started anti-trust investigations of prominent energy firms and is especially interested in their contractual relations with subsidiaries. A group of ECIPE scholars arrived to similar conclusions in a study presented last year. The called for systematic anti-trust investigations into the pricing and contractual models of especially Gazprom and its affiliates in the Eastern part of Europe. The study concluded that more competition, not less, in the EU’s gas markets is required to achieve a Single Market and to therefore reduce Europe’s vulnerability to gas supply cuts originating in Russia.
Ideas for New Transatlantic Initiatives on Trade The US and the EU have the capacity to play a leading role together in promoting international trade liberalisation. They remain the economic giants in the world trading system despite the growth of emerging economies. In this new ECIPE/GMF working paper, produced for the Transatlantic Task Force on Trade, Fredrik Erixon and Lisa Brandt examine the economic rationale behind different potential forms of a transatlantic free trade initiative. Possible scenarios include maintaining status quo; FTAs in goods and/or services; or plurilaterals. Ultimately, an ambitious transatlantic initiative would be beneficial both to bilateral trade and to the multilateral system as a whole.
|
Latest Publications
ECIPE Occasional Paper No. 1/2012
ECIPE Policy Brief No. 01/2012
ECIPE Working Paper No. 05/2011
ECIPE Working Paper No. 04/2011
ECIPE Policy Brief No. 01/2011
ECIPE Occasional Paper No. 5/2011 Upcoming Events
2012-01-31
2012-02-03
2012-02-15
2012-02-29 Articles, Opinion and Commentary
2011-12-28
2011-12-17
2011-12-17
2011-12-01
2011-11-27
2011-11-27
2011-11-16
2011-11-12
2011-11-12 |