EU recovery plans should fund the COVID-19 battles to come; not be used to nurse old wounds
EU countries are engaged in difficult negotiations over how to allocate a recovery package of some €750 billion to help countries and regions recover from the COVID-19 shock. This raises fundamental policy questions. Should the EU favour countries or regions most affected by the COVID-19 epidemic? Using which criteria: death toll, economic impact?
The COVID-19 epidemic had very different impacts on different EU countries and regions. Death rates ranged from more than 800 per million inhabitants in Belgium; 500 to 600 in Sweden, Italy and Spain; around 400 in France and the Netherlands, then down to some 100 in Germany, and fewer than 50 in many eastern European countries and Greece. These numbers mask even greater differences within countries. For example, 48% of all Italian deaths occurred in Lombardy, with a rate of 1,600 deaths per million inhabitants, while the south of the country recorded mortality rates similar to Greece's. The situation is comparable in France and Spain when we compare the Paris or...
The last Posts from Bruegel
- Coronavirus recovery: invest rainy day savings to boost Hong Kong's economy
- REOPENING EUROPE - Reopening Tourism?
- China Has an Unfair Advantage in the EU Market. What Can Be Done to Level the Playing Field?
- Can households in the European Union make ends meet?
- Having the cake, but slicing it differently: how is the grand EU recovery fund allocated?
- REOPENING EUROPE - Reopening Governance?
- The impact of the crisis on smaller companies and new mechanisms for non-performing loans
- New challenges to transfers of personal data from the EU to the United States
- China's targeted corporate shopping spree to continue, especially in Europe
- Boosting the resilience of Europe's financial system in the coronavirus crisis
- Can the global recovery be sustained even as the pandemic rages?
- The EU's Opportunity to Turn Its Markets Toward the Future
- Debt relief for Sub-Saharan Africa: what now?
- Ukraine: trade reorientation from Russia to the EU
- Apps without borders? How COVID-19 apps show the limits of the EU digital single market
- Greening the recovery by greening the fiscal consolidation
- The impact economy: balancing profit and impact
- Credible emerging market central banks could embrace quantitative easing to fight COVID-19
- The financial fragility of European households in the time of COVID-19
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