UE en dos patadas por Roger Bootle

Según Roger Bootle, la UE tiene dos fallas económicas. Una, su toma de desiciones son legislativas, con tendencia uniformadoras, no de crear incentivos económicos. La economía no puede funcionar sin incentivos económicos. Los,incentivos ex no micos son, además, inestables, sobre todo los Animal Spirits que dominan la inversión.

Moreover, the EU is an enterprise conceived by politicians and administered by lawyers. These two groups have a proven tendency to fall foul of the law of unintended consequences. They make rules which are supposed to bring benefit without taking due account of the effects. Their inclination is to believe that behaviour is driven by rules. By contrast, economists know that it is driven by incentives. Furthermore, France has had a disproportionate role in framing the EU. The French establishment is famously suspicious of markets and disdainful of competition. It is not surprising, therefore, that the EU has had an anti-market bias.

Dos, el Euro,

 

Even so, the most serious source of economic underperformance has been the euro. It isn’t only about the pain inflicted on the southern countries by uncompetitiveness and fiscal austerity, but also about the persistent tendency for Germany to run huge current account surpluses which drain demand from the other euro members – and countries outside the eurozone.

This tendency was there before the euro was formed, but it was kept in check by changes in exchange rates. Not any more. Out of this inflexible union has come economic misery – and not only for the eurozone. Its weak performance has been a leading factor restraining many other countries, including the UK.

Ironically, it was not necessary to form a monetary union. And if there was to be one, it wasn’t necessary to include countries such as Greece and Italy, with widely differing economic cultures as well as problems with competitiveness. If monetary union were to go ahead, the euro elites were warned by countless economists that this could not last without fiscal and political union. Monetary union was an integration too far and too fast.

La consecuencia es que, probablemente, si no se reforma, el futuro económico de la UE será raquítico.

 

So here’s the link with the ragbag of other, less serious, policy errors referred to above. The forging of the euro is simply the most egregious example yet of the EU’s tendency towards making appalling decisions that harm economic performance. This tendency is deep-rooted in the structure of the EU and its institutions.

This ought to give us pause for thought. Here’s an entity that dreamed up the euro and put it into practice in a half-baked way, wreaking havoc on the southern members, especially Greece. What decisions might it make in future? What are the chances of its governing elites taking initiatives that bring countries to prosperity, of the sort that have transformed the island state of Singapore? Or are they more likely to make more disastrous decisions, perhaps in tax harmonisation or labour market regulation? I know where I’d put my money.

The man from Mars would be bound to conclude that, unless it is fundamentally reformed, the EU will go on being an economic under-performer. Add this to its poor demographic outlook and you reach the conclusion that, over the coming decades, the EU’s share of the world economy, which has already fallen a long way, will plummet further.

Ejemplo de consecuencias del euro: Deuda/PIB y PIB en Grecia

 

Y lo mismo,para España. Un panorama bastante distinto.