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Global Shift: Implications of a Post-Western World Panel One: Competing Economic Models Jacob F. Kirkegaard, Peterson Institute. The EU Crisis Diagnosis Different EU Economic Models The Long-Term Concerns Concluding Remarks. Outline. The EU Crisis Diagnosis.
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Global Shift: Implications of a Post-Western World Panel One: Competing Economic Models Jacob F. Kirkegaard, Peterson Institute
The EU Crisis Diagnosis • Different EU Economic Models • The Long-Term Concerns • Concluding Remarks Outline
Design Flaws, Fiscal or BoP Crisis? • No agreement exists regarding the cause of the European debt crisis; • The inevitable result of a flawed construction of a monetary union without being reasonably close to an OCA, i.e. without labor mobility or a central transfer mechanism/fiscal union? • The inevitable result of a loss foreign financing for excessively large current account deficits, arising from competitiveness divergences, i.e. German wage compression? • The inevitable result of unsustainable fiscal policies, which markets ignored for ten years and then suddenly woke up to when the real estate/construction growth model collapsed? In my opinion, it was mostly 3), although 2) played an unhelpful role Result: The EU sovereign debt crisis of 2010 accelerates global shifts, but were not caused by them The EU Crisis Diagnosis
The EU will decline substantially as a share of world GDP, but far less so in GDP/capita terms • EU members (and their economic models) face different degrees of challenges in the Post-Western World: • Southern/Eastern Europe – rigid, low-skilled, low-tech and depopulating (and now without German interest rates!) – most at risk • North-West Europe – more flexible, higher skilled, higher-tech and less dramatic demographic trends – will cope better • Europe has had a “good crisis” so far in terms of dealing with several of its rigidities • Principal longer-term political challenge “for Europe” from both crisis and the rise of Asia will be the end of economic convergence between the center and periphery Concluding Remarks