Almunia’s Test Case

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Economics Commisioner Joaquim Almunia is reportedly rolling his sleeves up. He is apparently preparing to use Italy’s continuing excess deficit as a test case, to show the way the new SGP will be applied. Forgive me if I am a little skeptical, but then again a French no on Sunday may leave him with little alternative.

“Revisions to Italian data by Eurostat, the European Commission’s statistical agency, showed the country breaching the 3 per cent limit on budget deficits (in 2003 and 2004 Edward). The changes will be used by Joaquin Almunia, EU monetary affairs commissioner, to underpin a recommendation that action be taken against Italy under the stability and pact“.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".