The EU's Socioeconomic Governance 10 Years after the Crisis: Muddling through and the Revolt against Austerity

Crespy, Amandine

doi:10.1111/jcms.13083

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…During the Eurozone crisis, the German government was strictly against any common debt issuance and the country’s leaders were apportioned much blame for the harsh austerity stance of the ‘Troika’. Particularly Chancellor Angela Merkel was much maligned (Crespy 2020 ) for claims that Greece and other Southern European countries had indulged in fiscal profligacy and had ‘not done their homework’, whereas Germany had removed rigidities in its labour market and had reformed its unemployment benefit system with the sweeping Hartz reforms in the early 2000s (Armingeon and Baccaro 2012 ). The welfare retrenching effects of the Hartz reforms made the prospect of ‘paying other countries’ debt’ with German money unpalatable domestically and any impression to be the ‘paymaster’ for the Eurozone was a political vulnerability that could be exploited by populist opponents in the domestic context.…”

Section: Economic and Political Vulnerabilities In Italy Germany And ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Voices from the past: economic and political vulnerabilities in the making of next generation EU

et al. 2022

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In this article, we show that Next Generation EU (NGEU) is mainly a response to the economic and political imbalances left over from the Eurozone crisis. It is a pre-emptive intervention, especially targeted at structurally weak economies with rising Euroscepticism, to avoid costly ex-post bailouts as in the Great Recession. We demonstrate, using quantitative analysis, that pre-existing vulnerabilities, rather than the impact of the pandemic, drove the allocation of NGEU resources: per capita grants largely correspond to past economic vulnerabilities, as well as to political ones. Countries most vulnerable to another adjustment by austerity after the COVID-19 economic crisis receive most resources. Also, countries with strong anti-EU sentiments are entitled to larger NGEU grants per capita. In contrast, grants are not correlated with the severity of the health crisis. Then, we show the domestic relevance of economic and political vulnerabilities through qualitative case studies of national political debates and domestic positions on NGEU in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Despite its innovative traits, NGEU is a politically constrained solution to address the mess from the previous decade, and as such, it is a Janus solution: promising a fresh start, but haunted by the past.

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Section: Economic and Political Vulnerabilities In Italy Germany And ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Voices from the past: economic and political vulnerabilities in the making of next generation EU

et al. 2022

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“…After the Great Recession, the shift in narrative and policy towards the vision of social Europe has been extraordinary. It has been a high priority for recent Commission presidents to bring the social governance of the EU up to the level of economic and fiscal governance, so as to avoid public dissatisfaction and political division over the direction of the Union (Crespy, 2020). Still, the competence for social policy remains largely in the hands of member states.…”

Section: Setting the Policy Stage: The Minimum Wage Directivementioning

confidence: 99%

Decent wage floors in Europe: Does the minimum wage directive get it right?

Haapanala

Marx

Parolin

2023

Journal of European Social Policy

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The Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages represents a watershed initiative adding substance to the EU’s social dimension. It contains two ambitious objectives: establishing the minimum level of statutory minimum wages at 60% of the gross median wage, and increasing collective bargaining coverage (CBC) to at least 80% of workers. In this article, we assess how statutory minimum wages and collective bargaining coverage are associated with the likelihood of low pay. Using a time series cross-section of EU-SILC for income years 2004–2019, we identify and assess the absolute and relative size of ‘effective wage floors’ for full-time employees in 30 countries. We specify multilevel, random effects within-between regression models to assess the individual and joint associations of SMW and collective bargaining coverage with wage floors. Our results indicate that SMWs and CBC both have distinct roles in establishing the effective wage floor. First, higher collective bargaining coverage is on average associated with a lower share of workers earning below 60% gross median wages. Second, higher SMWs are strongly associated with higher effective wage floors. Third, both collective bargaining coverage and union density are strongly associated with higher wage floors.

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“…Indeed, countries in the periphery were pressured into reducing public spending and enacting strict austerity measures and enact structural reform aimed at Europeanising their economies toward growth, limiting national sovereignty over public finances and worsening the democratic deficit of the EU, the trust of citizens and the support for integration and democracy (e.g. Della Porta, 2015; Notermans and Piattoni, 2020;Pagoulatos, 2020;Papadopoulous, 2020;Crespy, 2020). Within this context, the periphery had to liberalise the labour market (Burlone and Tassinari, 2020) and external pressure gave way to substantial public sector reforms (Mascio et al, 2020), at a high social cost (Guillénn et al, 2016).…”

Section: The Health Legacy Of the Great Recession And Austeritymentioning

confidence: 99%

The State of the Health (Dis)-Union in the EU: the legacy of austerity under the trial of Covid-19

Ceron

Palermo²

2021

Preprint

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Covid-19 highlights the inadequacy of EU governance cross-border challenges, especially transnational health challenges, supporting the call for a Health Union. Health policy remains a near-exclusive national competence whose budget was heavily impacted by EU-driven austerity, especially in Southern Europe. The work provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of the pandemic case evidencing the limits of the current governance framework and tabled reform proposals. The analysis contributes an extended understanding of the implications of the lack of an effective EU public health competence. We assess comparatively (austerity-induced) geographic heterogeneities in health-care preparedness, outbreak, crisis management and outcomes, delineating the extent to which inequalities remain in the absence of a Health Union. Findings evidence an empirically grounded case for sovereignty pooling in the core transnational domain of public health while providing a preliminary policy evaluation of the proposal for a Health Union.

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The EU's Socioeconomic Governance 10 Years after the Crisis: Muddling through and the Revolt against Austerity

Cited by 11 publications

References 23 publications

Voices from the past: economic and political vulnerabilities in the making of next generation EU

Voices from the past: economic and political vulnerabilities in the making of next generation EU

Decent wage floors in Europe: Does the minimum wage directive get it right?

The State of the Health (Dis)-Union in the EU: the legacy of austerity under the trial of Covid-19

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