Tag: economic growth

Following  the election of French socialist President François Hollande, the European Commission has tacked firmly towards the growth agenda and called for a new industrial revolution for Europe.

The American Chamber of Commerce to the EU is calling for simpler visa procedures to make it easier for scientists and researchers to move between Europe and the United States, in response to competition from emerging economies such as China and India.

China has overtaken Japan to become the second-largest economy in the world after the United States. While things are looking up for a German-fuelled recovery in Europe, China's progress has caught the attention of the US, where the economy continues to flounder.

Europe's tentative economic recovery is proving "slower and weaker" that had been hoped, according to Emmanouil Schizas, a senior advisor to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), who told EurActiv Germany that earlier optimism was fuelled by unsustainable government support.

Mounting national deficits will hold back economic recovery in the European Union unless governments manage to reform public spending while restoring competitiveness, according to an EU business lobby.

Manufacturing industries are returning to the heart of the debate on how to put Europe back on a sustainable growth path, as business leaders warn against an over-reliance on the services sector. 

The EU's 2020 strategy to build a sustainable future beyond the current economic crisis is too short-termist and fails to address the fundamental problems of the current growth model, Philippe Herzog, founder of the Confrontations Europe think-tank, told EurActiv in an interview.

The European Parliament will mobilise a majority against Commission President José Manuel Barroso's five billion euro stimulus plan, Claude Turmes, vice-president of the Green / European Free Alliance Group in the European Parliament, told EurActiv in an interview.

A Commission plan to spend five billion euro on clean energy and broadband Internet infrastructure projects to help kick-start the economy edged closer to approval last week after demands from key member states were taken onboard, EurActiv has learned. But there is still doubt as to where the money will come from.

The European Commission on Wednesday (26 November) suggested that EU countries should spend billions of euro to kick-start their economies, saying it would tolerate higher budget deficits under strict conditions and for a limited period of time.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy ruled out joint tax cuts at a meeting yesterday (24 November), underlining Europe's difficulty in developing a coordinated response to the recession ahead of a recovery plan to be unveiled by the European Commission tomorrow (26 November).

The 27 EU countries will be asked to give away 1% of their GDP to contribute to a Europe-wide economic stimulus package, including loans for automakers, aimed at helping restart the economy and weather the effects of the recession, it emerged yesterday.

"Excessively low growth" has brought the European economy to a standstill following a series of violent shocks in the last two years, writes Jean Pisani Ferry, the director of Brussels-based economic policy think tank Bruegel, for Eurointelligence.

Confidence in Turkey’s long-term economic prospects is growing but further labour market reforms, increased spending on education, better transparency of public finances and a more credible monetary policy are required if the country is to maintain its recent impressive growth, according to Rauf Gönenç, the senior officer responsible for Turkey at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), writing for EurActiv Turkey.

Despite innovation being the backbone of economic resurgence in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), most of the investment has come from multinationals (MNCs), which will leave the region's economies vulnerable, argues Paul Lewis in a June 2008 report for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The Lisbon strategy for growth and jobs must remain the bloc's number one priority despite the likely concentration of efforts on rescuing the Lisbon Treaty, Graham Watson, the British leader of the ALDE faction in the European Parliament, told EurActiv in an interview.

Domestic factors are more likely to inhibit economic growth in the EU's new member states than external ones, argue a group of scholars from the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies in a February 2008 paper.

Although economic growth is expected to continue to slow, EU businesses still consider the EU economy sound enough to outperform the US for the third consecutive year, according to an assessment by BusinessEurope.

The Commission has cut its EU-wide growth forecast for 2008 to 2% (1.8% in the euro zone) and predicts a hike in consumer prices in the wake of recent shocks to the global economy.

Finance ministers from the Group of Seven industrialised nations pledged to "take any further action necessary" to enhance the stability of financial markets around the globe as they acknowledged that the fall-out from the US sub-prime mortgage crisis was far from over.

Tax credits and reduced VAT rates for cultural products could help the industry contribute more to economic growth and job creation, according to a European Parliament report adopted yesterday (22 January).

Improvements in governance and environmental protection are among the most serious challenges to achieving sustainable development in China, writes Wing Thye Woo for the Center for Social and Economic Research in Warsaw.

A continuation of the economic growth in central and eastern Europe is "not to be taken for granted", argue the authors of this paper from the think tank 'Lisbon Council for Economic Competitiveness and Social Renewal'.

China's economic miracle is largely built on the liquidation of social and natural capital, argues Dale Jiajun Wen in a paper for the Society for International Development – adding that "the country can no longer ignore the problems created by export-oriented growth".