Thursday, June 16, 2011

Why debt rescues will boost the scenario of a closer union by Wolfgang Münchau and the Globalization Paradox by Dani Rodrik

''..The changes I propose are all “within the treaty” because they interact with existing institutions and processes. For example, my plan for a eurozone treasury secretary would be to merge the jobs of Olli Rehn, the European economics commissioner, with that of Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the eurozone group of finance ministers. Such a merger has a precedent when the EU created the high representative for foreign affairs and security policy in the Lisbon treaty. A centralisation of bank resolution policies, and a eurozone bond would also require treaty change.
The good news is that the Lisbon treaty makes this relatively easy, procedurally. For the eurozone, the legal basis would be article 136 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It allows members of the monetary union to establish eurozone-specific institutions to improve the co-ordination of their policies while remaining under the legal umbrella of the EU. Only the member states of the eurozone themselves would take part in the vote, and they can do so by a qualified majority.
The miniature fiscal union I describe does not rid a member state of its economic sovereignty, but it will involve some loss of political control. You cannot have total control and total co-ordination at the same time. Dani Rodrik*, the political economist, describes this problem in his “impossibility theorem”: there is an inescapable trilemma between absolute control by the national state, deep cross-border economic integration and full democratic control. You have to choose, or compromise..'' F.T..

Dani Rodrik is one of the handful of heterodox heroes, prominent economists who took on the lazy thinking of the Washington Consensus Rodrikin its prime, and continue to dance productively on its grave. His latest book, The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States and Democracy Can’t Coexist, feels like a Big Book, one that may shape a new way of thinking about the global economy.
It draws together several strands of Rodrik’s previous work on the WTO, growth take-offs, and the origins of the Global Financial Crisis into a single coherent whole. The result is one of the best critiques I’ve seen of the Washington Consensus. As he points out, with a paralysed global trade round, the collapse in financial globalization, and the rise of un-liberal China, the ‘stabilize, liberalize, privatize’ mantra of the early 1990s is wracked by self-doubt and well past its sell by date. A paradigm shift would seem imminent, but the old ways linger on partly for lack of a clear alternative. In The Globalization Paradox, Rodrik tries to address that gap.

The Globalization Paradox, a great new book from Dani Rodrik

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rodrik56/English

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