For more than two years, the European Union has been endeavouring to cope with an unprecedented public debt crisis. Under pressure from the financial markets, the EU and its member states have put in place a new set of regulations, procedures and institutions that have come to be known as the “new... Find out more

Latvia is used by the ‘austerians’ as a case showing that hard and painful austerity can get an economy out of recession. This policy brief argues the opposite and shows that what actually happened in Latvia is that policymakers decided not to continue but to break with the policy of austerity. This... Find out more

The original Greek adjustment programme, as spelled out in the Memorandum of Understanding signed in May 2010, contained, from the outset, the seeds of its own failure. This is the conclusion of the authors of the present Working paper which assesses, on its own premises, the original adjustment... Find out more

Eleven Eurozone countries recently decided to press ahead with the introduction of a system of taxing financial transactions (sometimes called a “Tobin Tax” after James Tobin, the Nobel-prize winning U.S. economist who first launched the idea).In this Policy brief, ETUI senior researcher Andreas... Find out more

The emergence of macroeconomic imbalances among EU member states is often seen as a major underlying factor of the recent European debt crisis. In order to identify and tackle these imbalances, the European authorities established, in 2011, a new surveillance tool incorporating rules to prevent... Find out more

Since 2001, the ETUC and ETUI have produced Benchmarking Working Europe for the European Social Summit to draw attention to the state of working Europe. This publication aims to provide a genuine benchmarking exercise applied to the world of labour and social affairs grounded in effective labour and... Find out more