This note argues that the solutions to the euro-area crisis proposed by the EU governing institutions in cooperation with the IMF, based on further austerity and wage cuts, will worsen the crisis. They are unlikely to reduce both sovereign and external debt ratios of countries experiencing these...

Recent literature on the European debt crisis emphasizes that rising external trade and lending imbalances between the European Monetary Union's (EMU) Northern and Southern member states served as a crucial determinant behind speculative divergence between these two regions. However, these...

The first casualty of the Eurozone crisis in Ireland was social partnership and centralized wage bargaining. Despite the fact that a consensual approach to socio-economic policy was the default position of the country’s political economy for twenty three years, the Irish government has so far...