The EU and the Eurozone

Abstract

The past years have been dominated by a fundamentally sterile debate about the public sector (and fiscal rules) propagated from a northern perspective and the idea that any sort of fiscally or monetarily induced growth allows Europe to escape from a debt trap (from the southern perspective). Neither of these approaches is well suited to capturing a need for economic and social transformation that will produce entrepreneurship, growth, and dynamism. This chapter suggests a number of ways of introducing a new flexibility, including a mechanism for allowing parallel currencies (for instance of non-Eurozone members to circulate in addition to the Euro), completion of the banking union, greater fiscalization of the EU, a European social insurance, an energy union, a people union (to deal with refugee issues), a military union, more opportunities for the training and mobility of the young, and greater policy coordination on a global level.