The Draghi Report, One Year Later: Europe Still at the Starting Blocks
One year after the Draghi Report, Europe remains trapped in a cycle of low productivity and weak investment
Sparse Thoughts of a Gloomy European Economist
Francesco Saraceno's Blog
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Without a True Industrial Policy Rearm Europe is Just a Massive Redistribution Scheme
[This is a DeepSeek translation (with minor edits) of my latest Diario Europeo published in the Italian daily Domani] Last Thursday, gathered in an extraordinary Council meeting in Brussels, the 27 member states gave the green light to the European Commission s RearmEurope package. It is not my intention to discuss the appropriateness of large-scale rearmament, [ ]
Trump’s War on Friends and Foes. Should we Imagine a Multilateral Order without the US?
[This is a DeepSeek translation (with minor edits) of my latest Diario Europeo published in the Italian daily Domani] The first days of the Trump administration were a roller-coaster: from proposals to invade allied countries to the idea of turning Gaza into a resort, passing through tariffs and the dismantling of the U.S. public administration. [ ]
The American lesson: “radical” is not a dirty word
Note: this is a lightly edited AI translation of the piece appeared in Italian on the newspaper Domani Last week, US voters delivered an unequivocal verdict: Donald Trump returns to the White House, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote. This does not mean that the United States has become an extremist country. [ ]
An Interesting Lecture on AI and Shared Prosperity
Yesterday, Daron Acemoglu gave the inaugural Hirschman lecture at UNESCO, in presence of the family (here on Youtube). I found it very interesting and I was left with some questions. Acemoglu started with the standard neoclassical causal link: Innovation Productivity Employment He noticed how, over time, this went sometimes well, but sometimes less so. He [ ]
Taxing the super-rich to save capitalism from itself
[Usual Caveat: AI Generated translation (with slight edits) of a piece written in Italian] The distribution of income has become topical again in recent days, and it is likely going to be one of the issues that will characterize the debate on the global governance of the economy in the coming months. First, U.S. President [ ]
Austerity. The Past That Doesn’t Pass
[As usual lately, this is a slightly edited AI translation of a piece written for the Italian Daily Domani] The European Commission recently revised downwards its forecasts for both growth and inflation, which continues to fall faster than expected. In contrast to the United States, there is no soft landing here. As argued by many, [ ]
Fiscal rules: a return to the past that condemns Europe to irrelevance.
No lessons learned from the past 15 years. The new fiscal rule is fundamentally similar to the old one, and not adapted to the current thinking on the role of fiscal policy.
Wolfgang Schäuble’s Ideas are Alive and Kicking
[As usual lately, this is an English AI translation of a piece written for the Italian Daily Domani] Wolfgang Schäuble was a central figure in the German political landscape. A member of parliament for the centre-right Christian Democrats party from 1972 until his death on Tuesday evening at the age of 81, he was very [ ]
Wages and Inflation: Let Workers Alone
The current wage increase is not only fair. It is also necessary to put the inflation shock behind us