During the Great Recession, several European countries implemented fiscal austerity measures to reduce sovereign debt. This column argues that such policies affect the decision to adopt new technologies and can have negative consequences for productivity and growth in the medium run. Thus, low technology adoption due to fiscal austerity can lead to slow recoveries. These, in turn, can make the fiscal stabilisation unnecessarily costly. Fiscal austerity is desirable only if it is able to reduce the cost of financing debt quickly.
Francesco Bianchi, Diego Comin, Howard Kung, Thilo Kind, 26 February 2019
Pradumna Rana, 22 September 2012
The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s shows what can happen when economists misdiagnose a crisis. This column argues the Eurozone crisis may have been made worse by over-simplifying it as a debt crisis. The author suggests that the large institutional changes now afoot – the shift from Eurozone I to Eurozone II – are finally addressing the root causes, but they may be too little too late.
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