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With the start of a new year, the time has come to reflect on what has passed and look towards what is to come in 2017. A shortlist of 5 unmissable articles published by The Broker in 2016 provides a great start.

A genuinely democratic debate on the CMU cannot shy away from looking into what securitization really is about: making profit out of people’s debts.

Broadening the debt-led accumulation system means that claims on future income and production are used to solve today’s problems while lessons learnt from past crises are wilfully ignored.

The political project to erect a Capital Markets Union (CMU) could be the dawn of a new era of financial (re)deregulation in Europe.

Drawing on rhetoric of resilient markets and the need for diversity, the European Commission is pushing for a capital markets union to extend market-based finance in the EU. This move risks marginalizing current attempts to control the potential f…

The stepping up of the capital market-based financial system and consequent financial liberalization is neither necessary nor desirable.

Does Europe’s reignited love affair with the financial sector come at the price of a divorce from its commitments to climate change, development and human rights?

Critiquing the Capital Markets Union plan is invaluable, but only effective as part of a larger critique on the historical, anti-democratic form of European integration.

Has post-crisis regulation of the financial sector gone too far? The European Commission seems to think so.

After a few years of crisis-born reticence, the European Commission is back in love with the financial sector. Presented as a way of stimulating the dragging economic growth in the EU, the Commission has recently proposed a series of new financial…

Although in the long-term the Eurozone needs full democratic control of the monetary union, including competence over labour and social policy, this will not happen soon enough. A feasible alternative is that rights bodies such as the ECSR provide…

For the single currency to survive, Europe needs both more political integration and less political integration. The trick is to understand when less is more.

The European Central Bank is holding together a poorly-designed monetary system in difficult circumstances. But this does not justify the fact that democratic governments have no way of holding it accountable.

The Euro Treasury Plan is an alternative recovery program for the Eurozone. It combines the much warranted public investment initiative with a joint funding facility in a step closer towards a fiscal union.

The fear of northern Eurozone members that the introduction of Eurobonds will result in their southern European companions automatically taking cheap loans again is unfounded.

If the only reason to stay in the Eurozone is that it is difficult to get out, the case for the single currency is weak. Staying in may well be the smart thing to do, but it is still politically toxic to put this decision beyond popular control.

Since the summer of 2015, European media and politicians have devoted significant attention to the refugee crisis. As a result, the crisis in the Eurozone, which had previously dominated discussions in the media and among politicians, seems to hav…

Is the current recovery policy for the financial and economic crises in the Eurozone a genuine answer for the complexity and diversity of the problems that all member states face? Not really. The responses are too one-sided and mainly export and a…

The structural causes of the euro crisis – high unemployment, low growth rates and debt-ridden states in the eurozone – are not the fault of lazy Greeks, Portuguese and Spaniards. The euro itself cannot be blamed either. The problem is that the Eu…

The argument that pits the lazy Greek or Spaniard against the hard-working Dutchman or Fin is clearly too simplistic. It is not a clash of nations, but of economic classes.

The introduction of a single European currency was for many member states of the European Union a logical next step in a single market. With assumed improvements for trade, employment and wealth distribution, the euro was expected to bring all the…

Countries need more time during recession to decrease their budget deficit while increasing economic growth.

Governments should not hesitate to visibly and accountably occupy their empty seat in the cockpit of the financial system. In our new research article ‘The licence to create money’ we explore the alternatives to what is currently at the heart of t…

Private banks create most of our money. The rest – coins and banknotes – make up only a small percentage. Several recent developments challenge this historically-evolved arrangement. Monetary reform could be as urgent as preventing the next bankin…

The hard knocks being suffered by the European middle class are leading to shifts in the political landscape of Europe. The causes date back to long before the financial crisis of 2008. It is therefore an illusion to hope that this dip is temporar…

Import competition, offshoring and automation are threatening the middle classes in Europe. New jobs have been created mainly for the lower and the upper segments of the labour market. But not for the middle. And because most of those jobs are in…

After Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, the breakdown of financial markets caused significant losses for investors with savings in risky assets. These investment decisions were often based on bad, or at least incautious, advice from financial experts….

The much-debated squeeze of the middle class in Europe is real, but very different from country to country. The squeeze is felt most in the countries most affected by the financial crisis, like Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece, where austerity me…

You can read it in the newspapers every day: national economies are not creating enough jobs and fewer quality jobs in the productive sectors. Globalization, automation and financialization of the economy have been identified as the drivers of cur…

Linking precarious work to the debate on income inequality shows that precarious work not only affects the ‘losers’ of globalization, but also the ‘winners’.

The shift from wages to profits has led to an increase in inequality over the last three decades.

The stagnation in labour demand in the US is linked to the rise of finance. Strategies to encourage long-term employment growth must be found in that direction too.

By their excessive use of debt, private equity companies in the US increase the risk of bankruptcy of real economy companies they acquire.

In one of the chapters in the book ‘Het crisisdiner’ (The Crisis Dinner, published in Dutch, February 2014), Oxfam Novib director Tom van der Lee writes about the impact of inequality in the United States and Europe on the current economic downtur…

Global efforts to counter tax avoidance by multinational companies call for a rethink of policies on the taxation of aid workers and development projects.

The key to avoiding the risk of a jobless recovery in Southern Europe lies in the combination of wage flexibility and human capital accumulation.

It is time to recognize the usefulness of creating institutions that aim to guarantee people’s welfare instead of conditioning them to market imperatives.

Fundamental systemic change is needed, starting with a cultural paradigm shift based on appreciation of our environment.

Economic growth should go hand in hand with an improvement in wage share and vice versa. However, current economic policy does not.

Food price hikes, natural disasters, environmental degradation, and financial crises share at least two things in common: They’re on the rise, and they unequally burden the poor. 

The economic crisis is being handled in a way that benefits a small and wealthy group of technocratic European politicians, investors and entrepreneurs. It therefore appears to serve as an instrument to cut down on democracy and to increase inequa…

Normally I avoid discussions about the future of NGOs like the plague – they either involve a bunch of academics with only the vaguest idea of what we actually do all day, or a lot of senior managers emitting sonorous pronouncements on how we need…

While Busan is hosting a high level discussion on aid effectiveness, doubts are mounting on the very concept of development aid itself.

Sir Richard Jolly discusses why the reduction of inequality is crucial for economic growth and greater prosperity

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Myriam Vander Stichele, a dedicated senior researcher at the Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations. She spoke about this week’s WTO Public Forum discussing “Seeking answers…

The IOB (de Inspectie Ontwikkelingssamenwerking en Beleidsevaluatie) convened a meeting on the Evaluation of the Paris Declaration on September 5th 2011 at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague.

How much inequality are we prepared to accept, asks Nicky Pouw. If we can’t live together, we are going to die alone.

England has been in the grip of looting, rioting and vandalism during the past days. And being in England at the moment – with BBC News on in the background – I’m reading a speech by Professor of Economics at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Pa…

Andy Storey, lecturer at University College Dublin and chairperson of Action from Ireland, questions the validity of the euro. He argues that the monetary union was designed to foreclose democracy….

Editor Evert-jan Quak comments and reflects on new research, publications, blog posts, conferences and current affairs in the field of inclusive and sustainable economy.

The Broker will publish interesting publications and current affairs in de field of global development.

The blog ‘Current Global Affairs’ provides a window for reflection on news events, topical issues and developments. The blog focuses on the wider implications of current affairs, beyond the immediate impact of events as-they-unfold. Would you like…

Owen Barder writes in his latest blog post about the spending plans for the coming four years the Conservative government in the UK presented yesterday. ‘Overall, this spending review is a seismic political event’, Barder writes, with spending cut…

Does Ecological Economics have the ability to cope with short term crises of the capitalist economy, if we are primarily concerned with long-term cumulative phenomena, coevolutionary responses both by nature and institutions?A key area for our wor…

ISEE President John Gowdy talks to The Broker about the challenges ahead in the field of ecological economics at the 2010 ISEE conference ‘Advancing Sustainability in a Time of Crisis’ in Oldenburg and Bremen, Germany, August 2010….

Momentarily we find ourselves on the highway of one economic crisis leading to another. We are busy bandaging our ill economy where a short-term focus determines the vision at the cost of the long-term consequences. You don’t need to be a socialis…

On Sunday I join the working group on political strategies. The two dozen people assembled in the courtyard repeatedly return to a big question that begs a satisfactory answer in order to develop viable political strategies for degrowth. Back in…

Could de-growth reduce poverty and avoid climate change? A scientific study coordinated by researchers of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona has recently argued that “The solution both t…

The financial crisis has prompted a discussion on the re-structuring of the world’s financial system. 

The decisions that are made in the autumn of 2009 will shape Europe’s international role in the future.

In my last blog I discussed the fact that poverty and even rights-based agendas can be easily co-opted into a ‘Washington Consensus’ policy paradigm. How then can we avoid this propensity? In my background paper I suggested that this should be don…

Marieke Hounjet is reporting live from the Brussels Forum for The BrokerThe second plenary of the High Level Policy Forum today in Brussels was titled: ‘What are the key meta-processes shaping development over the next 10-15 years and what do they…

I’d like to blog on the ‘After 2015’ theme from the point of view of having co-led the 23 June with colleagues and friends at IDS, The Broker, ActionAid, DSA, and EADI.Looking for key emergent themes I’ve also just re-read the special policy brief…

Increasingly, researchers are debating issues on the Internet, through blogs and other forums, rather than just in journals and at conferences. Each issue of The Broker will now include an ‘Online debate’ section, which provides summaries of exper…

Over the last four months, two events have changed global prospects profoundly. The financial crisis has done more than just shake the seemingly most powerful and inviolable countries, companies and institutions in the world. It has definitely KO’…