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French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to abolish France’s left/right political divide and shake up the country’s bloated bureaucracy. Yet his promised spending and tax cuts have been underwhelming, while his timid attempts to downsize the “layer-cake” administration have only stirred up fierce opposition.

The street revolts targeted authority and promised liberation from the traditional social order. In today’s infantilized societies, perhaps the only way to avoid a dystopian version of “bread and games” is for the social pendulum to swing back toward personal responsibility – assuming anyone is still interested in such old-fashioned values.

Like his predecessors, President of France Emmanuel Macron has ended up raising taxes instead of reforming the economy. The “national dialogue” to come following the Yellow Vest protests could bring better democratic representation – and more economically responsible governance.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has become a popular philosophy among advocates of government spending. Traditional economics holds that MMT would lead to inflation, yet its proponents argue that the orthodoxy no longer applies.

In early 2020, France began considering government reforms meant to boost efficiency and reduce centralization. Delayed by the pandemic, the plan could face backlash from the left – and could easily be derailed in the event of unexpected developments related to Covid-19.

Until the golden age of renewables arrives, France and Germany have taken conflicting stances on energy sources needed for the transition period.

France has finally fractured between its metropolitan areas and a low-wage periphery. What started as a tax revolt has become a diffuse and unstructured uprising. Many of the movement’s demands would only perpetuate France’s centralism, yet its appearance shows that this political model may no longer be sustainable.

The EU political system is increasingly hard to sell to societies. Stranded in a no-man’s-land between a federal state and a confederation, today’s EU features neither sound democracy, nor prudent governance, nor a vibrant economy.

Around the world, governments are finding ways to hide how much they are taxing their citizens. Though the practice of fiscal illusion creates a huge drag on economies, current political trends favor increased government spending.

While the scale of the pandemic requires government intervention, it is worth asking what the consequences of those rescue measures will be. Left unchecked, some European countries’ bloated public sectors could become even less efficient as a result of Covid.

The 2008 U.S. housing crash and the European debt crisis led many politicians to question the importance of independent central banks. This approach is not without consequences. There are now several patterns of influence on central banks.

France is the poster child for rule by the bureaucracy. The Covid-19 crisis has revealed major faults, offering opportunities for serious readjustment. But the nature of French bureaucracy is such that reform will prove extremely difficult.

Many have hailed the EU’s July decision to partially mutualize its newly issued debt as a “historic step.” Massive as it is, the stimulus package is unlikely to fix Europe’s fragile and crisis-stricken economies, even if the Union’s show of unity has firmed it politically.

In France’s ideal republican model, the enlightened elite lead the public toward a unified, egalitarian system. The model is corrupted, however, with some “more equal” than others. The resulting lack of accountability creates a dysfunctional French governance system.

The philosophy of stakeholder capitalism has gained traction in recent years as people try to determine whether companies should help solve big social problems. Demanding that companies take a holistic view about how they serve the community has some merit.

The Afghanistan catastrophe has put forth some hard questions about the feasibility of nation-building as a foreign policy objective. Why has it failed in Afghanistan when, as many argue, it worked brilliantly in Germany and Japan after World War II?

The “Great Reset,” a blueprint of wide-ranging changes meant to lead to a greener and fairer society, is gaining momentum. It proposes an ambitious redesign of today’s economic system. How suitable a model is it for a post-Covid future?

The EU strategy towards Covid-19 recovery involves gigantic stimulus response programs. While financial support makes sense, these initiatives often lead to fraud and corruption. Recent reforms may not be enough to prevent a repeat of these negative consequences.

For years, gross domestic product (GDP) has been the dominant metric for measuring a country’s prosperity. Recently, however, it has come under criticism for not including factors such as equality or environmental sustainability. Replacing it will be a tricky task.

After a rise in popularity in the 19th century, the concept of self-regulation fell out of favor in the aftermath of the two World Wars. Albeit behaviors like delaying gratification have been declining since then, the Covid crisis could teach us accountability and discipline again.

Despite considerable technological innovation in recent years, many Western democracies have been plagued by sluggish growth and secular stagnation. There is no widespread consensus among economists on what causes the trend.

The start of the African Continental Free Trade Area has come with high hopes. But free trade agreements in themselves are no silver bullet for backward economies. Infrastructure investments and institutional reforms will be key for the development to accelerate.

Should policies centered on more broadly defined money supply replace traditional preoccupation with interest and inflation rates? Is there a way to tame overregulation in the financial sector while making it more stable and more squarely based on entrepreneurial responsibility?

Millennials are increasingly supporting socialism as a remedy for today’s political and economic ills. 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, some might be surprised. A lack of academic rigor, cultural shifts and economic trends may all have contributed to the trend. So far, socialism has always ended in failure.

Algerians realize they have a historic opportunity to remove the country’s ruling coterie. Yet, as the protests movement grows and the momentum for regime change in Algeria builds, there is a reason to worry about the people’s expectations.

Adam Smith emphasized that the wealth of nations hinge on the quality of their institutions. The rules of the game can be inclusive, offering opportunities for all or protecting the rents of a few. But an effort to introduce one such rule – formal property rights – shows that even small changes can have complex effects in alien cultural settings.

Since the collapse of communism, the West has kept urging countries in Africa to establish democracy, which is a complex institution that does not always adapt well to multiethnic and impoverished societies. Additionally, it has often been used to legitimize “elected autocrats,” yet there are signs the import will take if grafted onto native roots.

Like other areas of public policy, development aid has had its recurrent fads. The pendulum has swung from socialist-style big-push schemes to pro-market reforms and their latest iteration, results-based aid. This micro-oriented approach has come under attack for neglecting the wider “macro” environment of states and institutions.

Algeria seems headed down a road already taken by other resource-rich authoritarian countries like Venezuela. Low oil and gas prices have made it harder to buy off the public with subsidies and benefits. Their latest expedient is to use the central bank to fund a government stimulus program, but that only delays the day of reckoning.

The rise of industrial robotics has led some analysts to hail the beginning of a new era of “reshoring” and “deglobalization,” in which companies bring manufacturing back home. The data show a more nuanced story, though, and any manufacturing that returns will not create many jobs.

decentralized ledger of transactions that uses computer technology to link, secure and encrypt records – has the potential to become a hugely disruptive technology, rendering financial intermediaries unnecessary and making money transfers nearly instantaneous.

United States President Donald Trump insists that trade wars are “good” and “easy to win,” but history tells otherwise. His plan to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will hurt U.S. producers and will likely cost far more jobs than they protect.

Germany is a model of the vocational education system, with youth unemployment of just over 6 percent. France, where 22 percent of young people don’t have jobs, has long known its vocational training system needs fixing. A comparison of how these countries prepare pupils to become employees might be a practical guide for others.

For politicians, who desperately want to appear green to attract voters, much is at stake in the transition to renewable energy. But imposing a top-down agenda on the scientific community and industry comes with serious risks, chief among them the adoption of biased applied science to satisfy political aims.

Freedom of speech could suffer from the ability of lobbies to impose their “truths” by regulation capture and social groups playing the victimization game

With Europe facing unprecedented geopolitical challenges and political transition in key countries, will the EU act together, as a federation in the making, or fall back on divergent national positions?

In its coalition agreement, Germany’s new traffic light government states that it wants to further develop a “federal European state.” But with the United Kingdom out of the equation, this could simply amount to caving to the wishes of France and the Mediterranean countries.

With a new bilateral treaty to foster French-Italian cooperation, Emmanuel Macron and Mario Draghi are signaling an interest in revamping the EU’s fiscal rules.

It is now clear that social media is a historic technology. It has destroyed the monopoly over the dissemination of ideas, connects like-minded people and empowers political fringe groups.

Huge economic imbalances are weighing on Western economies, while global power shifts threaten the world order. But those are not the problems that leaders in Europe and many politicians in the U.S. have chosen to focus on.

In Western democracies, the leaders have given up on promoting the common good and would rather chase supporters by paying lip service to utopian goals. If the political elite wants to regain the trust of the people, it must ensure a fair and open public discussion.

After delaying elections for two years, former DRC President Joseph Kabila appears to have arranged for a stand-in, nominally from the opposition, to win the presidency in a manipulated ballot. The international community seems to be turning a blind eye because it prefers stability to the prospect of turmoil and civil war.

After a wretched result in last year’s general elections, Germany’s Social Democrats are now voting on whether to enter another grand coalition with the CDU/CSU. Whatever they decide, it may already be too late for the party to pull out of its tailspin. The SPD’s sad decline is part of a much broader eclipse of social democracy in Europe.

Germany and France want to lead the European Union, but their leaders, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Emmanuel Macron, have adopted policies that endanger the bloc. Calls for greater centralization will alienate other member states, while hypocritical criticism of the U.S. and Russia will leave the Union isolated.

Large parts of the world are still in the grip of severe economic and health crises. Many hope that, with effective vaccines, both issues will abate. But in Germany, the level of government intervention starkly increased with the pandemic.

Judging by the declining numbers of new migrants, Europe is no longer facing an acute immigration crisis. But you would never know it from the decision by the European Council in June to set up holding camps for asylum seekers. Instead, the get-tough policy of EU leaders is increasingly driven by domestic political pressures.

Reelected President Emmanuel Macron favors reducing the European Union’s dependence on nations outside the bloc while promoting French national interests from within.

Europe was never a house where everyone lives under the same rules, but a village in which all the houses work together. Today, however, harmonization is the dominant dogma used to brand skeptics as “anti-European” – when Europe’s strength used to be its variety.

The new ruling coalition in Berlin would like to see a more centralized federal European state. But this change could be offset by the upcoming elections in France. If President Emmanuel Macron’s popularity continues to drop, a new French leader could step up and defend the sovereignty of European nations.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Poland was an effort to offset post-Brexit centrifugal forces pulling at the EU. Unfortunately, the most of his remarks consisted of lecturing Central European states about the benefits of harmonization.