The crisis may have opened a window of opportunity, but positive change cannot be taken for granted. To truly recover in the years ahead, Europe will need a new socio-ecological contract bringing together questions of inequality, climate and the digital economy.
In a shift away from European Central Bank orthodoxy, a senior bank executive has argued that even though the ECB’s monetary policy led to a decrease in labour income inequality, its asset purchase programs would lead to wealth inequality.
Seven years ago, the combined wealth of 388 billionaires equaled that of the poorest half of humanity, according to Oxfam International. This past January the equation was even more unbalanced: it took only eight billionaires, marking an unmistakable march toward increased concentration of wealth. Today that number has been reduced to five billionaires. Trying to understand such growing inequality is usually the purview of economists, but Bruce Boghosian, a professor of mathematics, thinks he has found another explanation—and a warning.
Trotz der Erleichterung, dass ein Bankrott Griechenlands vermieden worden ist, wächst an den Finanzmärkten die Kritik an der Realitätsferne der Rettungspläne.
While the Europe 2020 strategy actively promotes entrepreneurial self-employment as a means to create good jobs, policy makers at national and EU level are actively looking at better social protection for self-employed workers. Understanding this paradox requires looking beyond the ‘self-employed’ label and acknowledging it as an umbrella term covering a widely differing group of workers.
G. Corneo. Journal of Public Economics, 90 (1-2):
37--58(2006)Free University of Berlin, CEPR, CESifo, IZA, Germany
Received 25 April 2005; revised 19 July 2005; accepted 14 August 2005. Available online 21 September 2005..