Lifting Binding Constraints On Growth In Europe

Lifting Binding Constraints on Growth in Europe

Focusing on a cross-border perspective, this paper identifies four key binding constraints that hinder firms’ ability to innovate and scale up within the EU single market—fragmented regulations, inefficient financial intermediation, limited labor mobility, and fragmented energy market. To address these constraints and facilitate firms’ cross border scale up, investment and innovation, the paper proposes key action areas for deepening the integration of the single market, including lowering regulatory fragmentation, advancing the capital markets union, enhancing labor mobility within the EU, and integrating the EU energy market. Through illustrative scenarios, the paper highlights that a few actionable steps along these dimensions could lead off the process of deeper integration and deliver a meaningful initial payoff by increasing the EU GDP level relative to baseline by around 3 percent over 10 years—a sizable improvement considering that the EU potential growth is projected to be just above 1 percent annually over this horizon.

The Romanian Journal of European Studies no.5-6/2007

Alternative Development Strategies for the Post-2015 Era

The global economic crisis of 2008-2009 exposed systemic failings at the core of economic policy making worldwide. The crisis came on top of several other crises, including skyrocketing and highly volatile world food and energy prices and climate change. This book argues that new policy approaches are needed to address such devastating global development challenges and to avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences to livelihoods worldwide that would result from present approaches. The contributors to the book are independent development experts, brought together by the UN to identify a development strategy capable of promoting a broad-based economic recovery and at the same time guaranteeing social equity and environmental sustainability both within countries and internationally. This new development approach seeks to promote the reforms needed to improve global governance, providing a more equitable distribution of global public goods. The contributors offer a critical evaluation of past development experiences and report on their creative search for new and well-thought out answers for the future. They suggest that economic progress, fairer societies and environmental sustainability can be compatible objectives, but only when pursued simultaneously by all.