Tag Archives: the single currency

Euro in trouble?

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English weblog England Expects has an intriguing post on the vitality of the euro. More precisely, about its lack of vitality:

For the first time, an official French report has criticised the Euro. Indeed, the latest report of the Council for Economic Analysis (CAE) given to the French government on 23 March, “Economic policy and Growth in Europe” and written by Philippe Aghion, Élie Cohen and Jean Pisani-Ferry, draws up for the first time a really tough assessment on the single currency and the actions of the Euro zone.

I have no time to comment, as usual, but the report is definitely worth a read (308 pages). Teaser:

“Economic integration has stagnated and no longer promotes growth. The euro’s creation has not produced the knock-on benefits expected. The increase in trade has been relatively modest and financial and credit markets remain segmented. The single currency even seems to have had a “numbing” effect on the EU members, which no longer need to protect against a foreign-exchange crisis and have become complacent in their efforts to control spending and make structural reforms. Moreover, the euro area’s macroeconomic framework has become obsolete. Furthermore, the Lisbon strategy has become bogged down in procedures and has degenerated into rhetoric. This is because it doesn’t have the means to achieve its objectives, since EU-members remain responsible for supply-side policies and the political economy of reform is still mostly national.”

You can find the report here (pdf).

He Would Say That Wouldn’t He II

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In some ways I think this story may run and run over the months to come. Bloomberg have an update on their earlier article. According to the latest account:

1/. The German Finance Ministry have declined to comment on the Stern report that discussions took place last week between Finance Minister Hans Eichel, Bundesbank President Axel Weber and various economists on a possible failure of European Monetary Union.
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The Mediterranean Diet?

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This should come as a shock, but somehow I am not exactly surprised. Mediterranean cooking evidently isn’t always as benign and healthy as it seems.

Greece was warned on Thursday that it could face legal action for grossly under-reporting its national deficit and debt figures but was told it would not be ejected from the 12-country eurozone.

Revised figures revealed Greece broke the single currency’s 3 per cent of GDP deficit ceiling every year in the 2000-3 period.

The European Union will launch an inquiry to check the veracity of the figures it provided before 2000, the year Greece qualified to join the single currency.

The scale of the inaccuracies has sent shockwaves across the single currency area, which relies on member states to provide sound economic data.

…………Eurostat, the EU’s statistical arm, could start legal proceedings against Athens for breaching accounting rules.

Greece, however, is unlikely to be ejected from the eurozone, even though there are now doubts about whether it complied with the membership rules before 2000.

The new data revised the Greek 2000 deficit to 4.1 per cent from a prior estimate of 2 per cent.

The 2001 and 2002 deficits now stand at 3.7 per cent compared with 1.4 per cent previously. The 2003 deficit, which had already been revised up in May to 3.2 per cent from 1.7 per cent, is now shown to be even higher – at 4.6 per cent of GDP.

Cost-overruns on the building of venues and transport systems for last month’s Athens Olympics games, estimated at more than ?2.5bn ($3bn, ?1.7bn), contributed to a projected deficit of 5.3 per cent of GDP this year.
Source: Financial Times

It is also worth bearing in mind that the accumulated Greek deficit currently is one of the highest in the EU and stands at around 100% of GDP. The interesting question now is what happens next.

A fistful of Euro[s]?

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Michael Everson is one of the more interesting characters in my strange little branch of human knowledge. I’ve never met him, but I’m pretty sure we have some mutual acquaintences on various standards committees. He is one of the people behind the Unicode character encoding standard and has been particularly instrumental in getting a number of smaller and more out-of-the-way characters and scripts into the Unicode standard.

He has also been especially vocal in bringing linguistic issues to bear on the European common currency, the most nagging of which is: What is the correct plural of “euro”?
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