Europe’s Looming Pension Crisis

Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash

Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash President Emmanuel Macron’s stand-off with France’s trade unions over his pension reform plans are widely reported as a peculiarly French issue. That should read ‘wrongly’ reported because pensions are a looming crisis of disastrous proportions for the whole of Europe, writes Giles Merrit. Most EU countries’ state pension schemes are unaffordable, private…

Croatia Adopts the Euro and Joins Schengen

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash Today, 1 January 2023 Croatia adopts the euro as its currency and fully joins the Schengen area. The EU said last Friday that this “marks an important milestone” in the history of Croatia, of the euro and Schengen areas and of the EU as a whole.  “It follows a period of intensive…

Russian Invasion of Ukraine Exacerbates World Food Prices

Photo by Simon Goetz on Unsplash

Photo by Simon Goetz on Unsplash The global food price crisis has only been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.  It is actually due to more structural and systemic problems in the commodities market, creating hunger and threatening people’s livelihoods, points out the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) in its own initiative opinion, adopted at the December plenary. Fuelled…

Conspiracy of Silence

Brexit Disaster

Last week UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt unveiled an emergency budget to plug the £55 billion black hole in the nation’s finances. He accepted that the last seven years of growth would be erased and that the country will remain in recession for up to two years., writes Philip Bushill-Matthews . In the circumstances he had little…

The Risks of a Digital Euro

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) says it supports the European Central Bank (ECB) in its assessment of the risks and benefits of introducing a digital euro. The EESC believes the adoption of a digital euro will benefit everyone in the euro area by making payment transactions quicker and more efficient, but financial and…

Women in the Labour Market

Women and Work

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has this week debated the way to improve women’s participation in the labour market with EP Vice-President Evelyn Regner.  Following the debate, the EESC plenary adopted two opinions with recommendations for making EU legislation more effective in promoting women’s empowerment and supporting the societal role of family caregivers. …

Has Putin Lost China as an Ally?

XI Jinping and Vladimir Putin

On 27 October, President Xi Jinping said that China should develop dialogue with the West on equal terms. By the word “West”, the Chinese Secretary General meant the United States, and in fact confirmed Beijing’s focus on the formation of a bipolar world in which China will become a superpower. Earlier, on 25 October, President…

CICA: Formation of the Asian Counterweight

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev

Asia is gaining momentum. The time has come to launch international mechanisms, which, before that, were created and regulated for almost 30 years, to turn them into a single structure. Clear, stable and running smoothly. Considering the fact that the world situation is now in dire need of this.     These meetings on the…