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Shifting Europe from Austerity to Growth: A Proposed Investment Programme for 2012-2015

Griffith-Jones, Stephany; Kollatz-Ahnen, Matthias; Andersen, Lars; Hansen, Signe

This paper is focused on finding a policy approach that quickly facilitates and stimulates future growth, and thus goes well beyond austerity. Increasingly, as economic performance has deteriorated in most European countries, EU public opinion and leaders have begun to stress with increased urgency the need for far greater emphasis on growth. Meaningful actions on a sufficient scale have however not yet been taken. In this paper we aim to make specific proposals on how one key and successful EU institution, the European Investment Bank, (EIB) can expand its lending significantly, in ways that will make a meaningful contribution to growth, particularly in the countries, whose economies and citizens have suffered most from the sovereign debt crisis; we will also examine the role which EU Structural Funds can both on their own, and especially as a complement to EIB lending, further contribute to EU growth. After outlining in some detail the type of measures that can be taken, as well as their scale, we model the likely impact on GDP and employment, which would be significant. One important advantage of our approach is that with fairly limited public resources, it can achieve a very large impact, due to the benefits of leverage.

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More About This Work

Academic Units
Initiative for Policy Dialogue
Publisher
Foundation for European Progressive Studies
Published Here
October 12, 2012

Notes

FEPS - IPD - ECLM Policy Brief.