Is Europe going to repeat a Japanese-style stagnation trap?
The growth rate in the core part of the EU has been unsatisfactory for at least two decades. It has been higher in some peripheral EU economies, including new member states in Central and Eastern Europe but very often at the cost of serious macroeconomic overheating and resulting financial and real estate bubbles. The recent global financial crisis has placed even this modest growth record in doubt. In most EU countries recovery is slow and uncertain, and is accompanied by high and growing unemployment rates. Europe faces the danger of the kind of stagnation scenario that has been observed in Japan after its 1990 assets bust. The Lisbon Agenda of the early 2000s failed to deliver its promised goal of transforming Europe into “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion”. The effectiveness of its successor, the Europe 2020 Strategy calling for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth also raises doubts unless it is supported by far-going comprehensive structural and institutional reforms both at the Union and national levels. | |||
| Moderator: CASE Fellow, Director of Centre of Research on Emerging Economies at Staffordshire University Business School |
| Speaker: CASE Fellow and World Bank consultant. |
| Speaker: World Bank Director for Central Europe and the Baltic countries |
| Speaker: Specialist in European and international economic integration at the University of Sussex |
| Speaker: Director of the International Policy Center and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan |
| Speaker: Director of “Economies of the member states III” directorate at the DG ECFIN |
