Jean Pisani-Ferry is the Director of Bruegel, the Brussels-based economic think tank, and professor of economics with Université Paris-Dauphine. He was previously Executive President of the French PM’s Council of Economic Analysis (2001-2002), Senior Economic Adviser to the French Minister of Finance (1997-2000), Director of CEPII, the French institute for international economics (1992-1997), and Economic Adviser with the European Commission (1989-92). His current research focus is economic policy in Europe. He has a regular column in Le Monde and Handelsblatt.
After months where the main concern was to deal with the possibility of an outright collapse of the world economy, there are indications that we are approaching the bottom. The emerging debate between economists about the shape of the recovery is therefore timely. There are reasons for optimism – inventories are low and the resumption of world trade can act as a powerful accelerator - but experience with financial crises leads to circumspection: recent by BIS and IMF economists suggests that credit crunches and house price busts are linked to deeper and longer recessions, and that on average countries… Read more
At the world economic conference of 1933 in London, it was with a killer telegram about the [monetary] ‘fetishes of so-called international bankers’ that Roosevelt put paid to already very wobbly international cooperation. Given a Barack Obama determined to break with the unilateralism of George Bush, the London summit did not have any such risk to contend with. But a limp compromise would have been sufficient to ignite economic nationalism. The summit of 2 April clearly sought to project the opposite image. So what actually came out of it? On coordination of national stimulus packages, the divergent views were well… Read more
According to the latest International Monetary Fund forecasts, economic contraction in 2009 is going to be somewhat sharper than in the US. Private forecasters do not disagree. Yet in proportion of GDP, the size of the stimulus packages put in place in Europe are at best half the size of the US recently enacted ARRA stimulus, and unlike it several of them are rear-, rather than front-loaded . Calculations by David Saha and Jakob von Weizsäcker of Bruegel assess the 2009 fiscal impulse in the EU is going to be 0.9% of GDP against 2% in the US. So Europe… Read more
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