Cultura y Educación

Looking back on the long decade of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 health shock, it is undeniable that far from crowding out scarce resources, well-funded and active welfare states are a sine qua non to the resilience of liberal democracies, knowledge economies and aging societies. This policy brief intends to provide some useful insights for the important question of the future of the welfare state in the European Union from the perspective of my research at EUI. At the risk of being accused by my colleagues of engaging in a Whig history of our poly-crisis epoch, I will challenge the conjectures of a ‘big trade-off’ between equity and efficiency and the equally popular ‘trilemma’ between equality, employment, and fiscal balance, with ample empirical evidence. Drawing on four temporally ordered lessons from the recent past, I raise two supportive cheers for the welfare state, followed by praise for the European Central Bank, and then, last but not least, a compliment for the European Commission. I conclude by making a timely social investment fiscal policy proposal for the EU polity at large.

In 2022, we experienced an unprecedented energy crisis. At the start of the year, gas prices were already higher than in previous years mainly due to the post-Covid economic recovery, and they increased further after the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Prices peaked in the summer of 2022 when countries were filling their gas storage facilities to prepare for winter. Electricity prices also increased dramatically because we still use a lot of natural gas to generate electricity; and the electricity system was also tight due to issues with the nuclear fleet in France, and with hydro power due to the drought.

LUCAS survey provides harmonised statistics on Land Use and Land Cover across the European Union. The LUCAS survey is used to monitor the land cover, the social and economic use of land, the biodiversity and other environmental parameters. The 2018 survey is based on a sample of 336000 points selected from the LUCAS 2×2 km2 grid which is the list of geo-referenced of about one million points in the EU. The paper describes the calibration technique, the way it has been applied in LUCAS 2018 and the impact of calibration on the estimates.