News Archive

What are the implications of Trump’s trade follies with tariffs for the rest of the world? EconPol network member Daniel Gros examines the nature of today’s trade wars by focusing on the high tech sector. He explains why differences in profit opportunities tend to escalate trade conflicts in a ‘winner takes all’ economy. Today, the US government is essentially lining up its diplomatic guns behind its internet giants, while Europe and China are baying for their monopoly profits. This is a zero-sum game, warns Gros, which can only turn negative sum through the collateral damage that it causes to the global trading system.

How does migration impact the labour market, public finance and the political landscape? In EconPol’s latest policy report network members Anthony Edo, Lionel Ragot, Hillel Rapoport, Sulin Sardoschau and Andreas Steinmayr, CEPII, show that immigration can create winners and losers in the host country’s native workforce by affecting the skill composition of receiving economies and changing wage dispersion. But cultural concerns emerge as the key driver of scepticism towards immigration. A deeper understanding of these concerns is a precondition for designing policies that foster a positive atmosphere and combat negative attitudes towards immigrants and extreme voting.

How can the European Union tackle its aging populations? Network member Thomas Davoine, IHS, investigates international spillovers due to capital market integration when populations age and the cross-country redistribution that this generates. Using a multi-country overlapping-generations model, he finds that labour supply drops more in rapidly aging countries, pushing up the capital-labour ratio, lowering returns on investment and generating capital flows towards countries with younger populations. The author looks at how governments can reform tax and pension policy to influence redistribution patterns and how rapidly aging countries can promote immigration to mitigate the negative redistributive effects of capital market integration.

The future of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is at the core of the reflection on the future of European integration. The debate about its architecture has accompanied the entire evolution of the EU and several proposals have been made in the past. This policy forum aims at an open, broad and deep discussion on the possible options for the future of the EMU, starting from the assessment of the existing proposals. We will try to investigate the economic, social and political implications of the EMU, to envisage the changes which may be necessary to move forward, and to assess the political feasibility.

What will be the impact of the latest US tax reform adopted on 1 January 2018? In this EconPol Working Paper Jack Mintz, President’s Fellow, School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, looks at the key features of the US Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, assesses its implications for global growth and speculates on how other countries are likely to respond to this ground-breaking reform.