Economic Growth and Structural Reforms in Europe

In contrast to the USA, Europe has struggled to return to the growth path it was on prior to the financial crisis of 2007–11. Not only has the recovery been slow, it has also been variable with Europe's core countries recovering more quickly than those on the periphery. It is widely believed that the best way to address this slow recovery is through structural reform programmes whereby changes in government policy, regulatory frameworks, investment incentives and labour markets are used to encourage more efficient markets and higher economic growth. This book is the first to provide a critical assessment of these reforms, with a new theoretical framework, new data and new empirical methodologies. It includes several case studies of countries such as Greece, Portugal and France that introduced significant reforms, revealing that such programmes have very divergent, and not always positive, effects on economic growth, employment and income inequality.

Nauro F. Campos is Professor of Economics at University College London and Research Professor at ETH-Zürich. His main fields of interest are political economy and European integration. He has taught at the Universities of Bonn, Brunel, CERGE-EI (Prague), Newcastle, Paris 1 Sorbonne and Warwick. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, a Robert McNamara Fellow at The World Bank, and a CBS Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is a Research Fellow at IZA-Bonn, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the (Central) Bank of Finland, a Senior Fellow of the ESRC Peer Review College and was a visiting scholar at the IMF, World Bank, European Commission, University of Michigan, ETH, USC, Bonn, UCL and Stockholm.

Paul De Grauwe is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was a member of the Belgian parliament from 1991 to 2003. He is honorary doctor of the Universität St Gallen, Switzerland, the University of Turku, Finland, Università degli Studi di Genova, Universitat de València, and Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands. He has taught at the universities of Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Kiel, Milan, Pennsylvania and Michigan. He is a research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels and CEPR fellow in London. His research interests are in the economics of monetary unions and behavioural macroeconomics. He is the author of The Limits of the Market (2017), The Economics of Monetary Union, 11th Edition (2016) and Lectures on Behavioral Macroeconomics (2012).

Yuemei Ji is Associate Professor of Economics at University College London. She was a visiting fellow at the European Institute at LSE and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels. She gives lectures on European Macroeconomics and International Macroeconomics. Her research interests cover international macroeconomics in general and the European Monetary Union during the post-crisis period in particular, and she has done intensive research on the causes of Eurozone debt crisis and its impact on the austerity policies in the Eurozone.