Search Results for: emmanuel martin
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Lord David Alton of Liverpool: At the crossroads: Will the free world choose isolationism or global leadership?
History teaches us that isolationism leads to disaster. Will the United States and Europe choose a different path at this critical juncture?
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Charles Millon: Red alert in the Sahel
Violence and fanaticism are spreading in the Sahel. Could the region become a new terrorist caliphate?
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Emmanuel Martin: Sickly Germany and France pose a risk to the eurozone
Their structural problems differ, but both result in the same outcome: subpar productivity, declining competitiveness and sluggish growth.
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Pawel Kowal: A Central European perspective on EU strategic autonomy
Europe’s strategic vulnerabilities will not be rapidly overcome. But they need to be addressed, or a rift will grow between European countries.
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Emmanuel Martin: France’s politics of mistrust
France’s latest legislative elections have shown that a majority of voters have lost faith in mainstream politics.
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Emmanuel Martin: The many challenges facing France’s reindustrialization
French reforms aimed at reindustrialization may be too modest to succeed, unless economic crisis provokes a more dramatic shakeup.
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Emmanuel Martin: The energy divide between Germany and France
Until the golden age of renewables arrives, France and Germany have taken conflicting stances on energy sources needed for the transition period.
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Emmanuel Martin: The ever-ambiguous European Union project
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: France’s education crisis
The desire to reduce inequality led to an erosion of academic standards. Yet entrenched defenders of the status quo are unlikely to accept meaningful changes.
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Emmanuel Martin: Vocational lessons from Germany and France
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: The spirit of ’68 and its legacy
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: 2019 Global Outlook: Economic reform in France
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: France torn between Morocco and Algeria
Energy needs and historical ties have pulled France toward Algeria. Meanwhile, relations with Morocco have grown strained, but this might change.
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Emmanuel Martin: France and the sociology of bad governance
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Blockchain and its potential for economic disruption
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: The dangers of centralized science
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Europe’s risky recovery funds
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Emmanuel Macron’s shrinking revolution
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Modern Monetary Theory: The future of money?
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Macron and the European strategic autonomy trope
The notion that Europe needs a separate security strategy and a military force aside from NATO animates mostly the officials in Paris, but the idea stubbornly returns.
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Emmanuel Martin: The political corruption of monetary policy
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Europe’s ‘historic’ deal and the future of the EU
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: An Algerian spring?
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Algeria’s ‘system’ hangs tough
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: The pitfalls of adopting a European minimum wage rule
While designed to provide the poorest workers with a decent standard of living, the European Union approach is flawed and may lead to greater unemployment and higher costs.
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Emmanuel Martin: Personal responsibility in a post-Covid society
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Which Fed monetary policy ‘normalization?’
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?
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Emmanuel Martin: Dilemmas of development aid
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: African democracy’s long and winding road
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Trade wars are bad, and nobody wins them
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: The economics and geopolitics of global fisheries
Overfishing is a global environmental and economic problem that resists administrative solutions. Giving control to local stakeholders would help.
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Emmanuel Martin: The return of the battle over free speech
Freedom of speech could suffer from the ability of lobbies to impose their “truths” by regulation capture and social groups playing the victimization game
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Emmanuel Martin: The challenges of supply chain regulation
European efforts to police global supply chains are likely to be limited in their effectiveness while jeopardizing economic development.
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Emmanuel Martin: Beware the pitfalls of stakeholder capitalism
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: High hopes for the African Continental Free Trade Area
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Pension reform in France: Diagnosis of a crisis
Despite facing immense political backlash, Emmanuel Macron’s plans for pension reform may not go far enough to avert fiscal chaos.
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Emmanuel Martin: Will France decentralize or recentralize?
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Yellow Vests are a symptom of France’s dysfunctional democracy
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: The worrisome mechanics of fiscal illusion
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: The future of macroeconomic policy
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: The accountability deficit: Lessons from France
Genuine accountability, a critical ingredient for liberal democracies, has been eroded in Western governance through bureaucracy and fiscal illusion.
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Emmanuel Martin: France’s bureaucratic challenge
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: The specter of degrowth
Economic growth has been the engine of our civilization and, lately, a source of environmental angst. However, turning it off is not the solution.
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Emmanuel Martin: Roboshoring: the path toward deglobalization?
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Africa’s poaching wars
Poaching destroys Africa’s animals for their valuable tusks and horns. To protect wildlife, a new, out-of-the-box thinking of conservation is needed.
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Emmanuel Martin: Unforeseen results of nation-building
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?
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Emmanuel Martin: The “Great Reset”: Prospects and Risks
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?
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Emmanuel Martin: Measuring prosperity: The quest to replace GDP
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: The specter of secular stagnation
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.
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Emmanuel Martin: Millennials and democratic socialism
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.