Economics

谁的经济改革？

Jul 30, 2013 Jean Pisani-Ferry

巴黎—结构性改革和财政整合一起成了欧洲新咒语。国际组织和欧盟机构将结构性改革视为经济复苏、增长和缓和失业之痛的先决条件。

事实上，希腊政府和“三驾马车”（IMF、欧洲央行和欧盟委员会）之间达成的协议包括了一份48页的详细改革清单。非所有国家都有如此之长的待办清单，但自从2010年欧盟新立法被采纳以来，所有国家都收到了具体建议。比如，意大利收到的提要包括了关于公共管理效率、反腐斗争、银行部门公司治理、劳动力市场、学校、税收、开放服务部门以及基础设施等方面的建议。

平心而论，欧洲国家迫切地需要实施深度改革。萎靡的生产率增长和顽固的失业证明，它们的经济需要全面转变。但如果说这给出了改革的理由，那么它并没有给出勾勒有效经济复苏计划的足够的基础。

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 4 Comments on this article

Carol Maczinsky Aug 9, 2013

That argument feels like it's 1995 again.
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Jose araujo Aug 2, 2013

The problem is that the so called reforms imposed by the troika are not only blind but extremelly biased. The reform they are inposing on us aims only at labor flexibility and lower wages, so we can achieve the so called competitive deflation.

Now lowering wages and increasing labor percarity, in countries were the levels of precarity are already high, doesn't sound like a structral reform, its what a export substitution advocate would recomend.

What is amazing is what are true structural reforms like communication networks, edducation, health investments are being called by the troika overspending, and the root cause off all peripheric troubles.

This is aimed at disguising what is obvious, the EURO is a failed experiment, and its pushing countries into misery. So its time to end this aberration and get back to normality, where structural reforms are indeed reforms on the structures of the countries.
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hari naidu Jul 31, 2013

Of course, only governments can set priorities and act, as you so rightly claim (as a Frenchman). However the real constraint in the periphery is fundamentally the issue of governance and their policy priorities.

Hollande is a serious case in point of not only bad but very poor governance in France. How would you like to be associated with a Socialist Govt which might rightly become the *sick man* of Europe?
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Zsolt Hermann Jul 31, 2013

The main problem is not with what kind of reforms people want to implement.
The problem is everybody is acting in a vacuum without any stable reference points.
Humanity has decided that we have become independent, above the natural system we evolved from and we can build our own human subsystem with its own laws, principles, demands and lifestyle.
The best expression of this attitude is the constant quantitative growth economic system, based on brainwashing people to keep buying products they do not need, that are harmful, and for which products they have no money for.
And when this system becomes unsustainable, when we exhausted our human resources we try different artificial solutions, trying to reinvent the wheel all the time.
But the main reason we have no reference points and we drift in a vacuum is that we have become completely disconnected from each other and we all try to go after our own minds, our own ideas, demands, presumed necessities. We compete with each other most of the time succeeding at the expense of others.
All these things are unprecedented in nature, and since humanity is still part of the natural system this causes the present crisis as the way we want to progress is unsustainable.
Most people today agree that we exist in a global, and integral human network, but we still don't want to behave adapted to such a system. The necessary mutual, integral communication is totally broken and the interconnections are still used in the opposite way to normal, only for self benefit, regardless of the state of the whole system.
In Europe and in fact all over the globe only a full integration, a socio-economic system based on mutual responsibility and mutually complementing cooperation can offer solutions.
The system around us with unbreakable natural laws is not going to change or yield, only we can change, adapt.
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