The Eurozone’s economic recovery from Covid-19 has been anaemic compared with America’s, despite achieving a soft landing from double-digit inflation. Indeed, Europe’s relative underperformance stretches back even longer, perhaps 30 years, in terms of productivity and GDP growth. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, gives her assessment of the past few turbulent years of monetary policy and explains what she thinks Europe needs to do next if it is to close the gap with the US. She also gives her view on how the EU can negotiate its way out from between the rock of the incoming Trump administration and the hard place of another Chinese export glut.

Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. You can find his column here

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Mass immigration is demographically essential but politically impossible – so argues Lant Pritchett, development economist and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. As populations age in the rich developed countries, immigrant workers will be needed to help with the burden of providing for the elderly. Removing the barriers might also be the quickest way to raise living standards for people in the developing world. But doing so would require swimming against a rising tide of anti-immigrant populism. Pritchett thinks he has a solution – allowing immigrants to come and work temporarily on strictly time-limited contracts. But does his idea stand up to scrutiny?

Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. You can find his column here

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Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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The US has just overcome one abrupt spike in inflation, which may have cost Kamala Harris her bid for the presidency. But now President-elect Donald Trump’s policy agenda threatens to cause another one. That’s according to Larry Summers, the former US Treasury Secretary and President Emeritus of Harvard University. He speaks to the FT’s Martin Wolf – who is standing in for Soumaya Keynes while she is on maternity leave – about the risks to economic stability posed by Trump’s proposed tax cuts, trade tariffs and mass expulsion of illegal immigrants, as well as his threats to the rule of law.

Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. You can find his column here

Subscribe to The Economics Show on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.