Welcome to the Institute of European Studies project to promote dialogue about EU-Canada relations. Here you will find traditional research in the form of brief policy papers and analysis. The site is also an interface for the public to express their opinions on EU-Canada relations in general and economic and environmental cooperation in particular. The site will hopefully act as a gateway to the wider news and opinion forums that are available.
As I am writing this text, European economies are falling like dominoes. The yield for Irish bonds is skyrocketing as compared to the returns investors get for the German bonds they hold. Tomorrow may be Portugal´s and Spain´s turn. The day after we could be talking about Italy.
European countries are either frantically cutting public expenses or negotiating multi-billion Euro rescue packages with the main international institutions, including the EU and the IMF. Some of them are doing both things at the same time, though markets will not give them a break, despite such draconian measures. Nearly all countries, even the ones better off, have experienced a regress in their real income. So to speak, we all are poorer now.
A recent report from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, entitled Twenty Years After: Post-Communist Countries and European Integration, is reflective and ambitious in opening new avenues about the present and the future of the European continent. It would thus be unfair to consider it as simply another study on the integration of the Eastern European countries in the EU after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The report is much more than that, for it reviews how (and if) the hopes of those countries after the collapse of the communism have materialized. It evaluates how the EU expectations regarding structural change and integration have been met, and, more generally, which are the challenges, successes and failures of a (re)united Europe, and where its boundaries lay.
Tagged as:
It is forbidden to talk about the European institutions. You cannot review the current policies. In no way you will make suggestions regarding the European Union budget. Thus begins a diabolic request, made by the European Council in December 2007 to a group of experts to analyze the challenges that the EU will face in 2030. The group was chaired by Felipe González, former Spanish Prime Minister, and composed of Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Mario Monti, Lech Walesa, Joschka Fischer, Jacques Delors, and André Sapir among others. Their task was formidable because, in addition to the aforementioned restrictions, the group was not endowed with funds with which to hire additional experts to research the specific areas of the report.
Last week, the World Bank made public a report entitled “Global Economic Prospects Summer 2010: Fiscal Headwinds and Recovery”. The report warned that “a serious loss of confidence in the debt of the five most heavily indebted EU countries (EU-5) that led to a freezing-up of credit in those countries could cause GDP growth to slow by as much as 2.4 percent in 2011”. If one looks at the statistics, the most indebted countries in the European Union are Italy, Greece, Belgium, Hungary and France, in this order.
Source: Eurostat
Tagged as:
