The European semester in the North and in the South
Macro-economic policy coordination remains a challenge in the EU. The European Semester was designed to help facilitate more coordination. In the area of wage policies, it encourages Germany and the Netherlands to support stronger wage growth, while Italy and Portugal have been told to exercise wage restraint. This paper analyses how domestic interest group politics influence how EU recommendations are received. Reflecting on the different growth models that underpin these four countries, we find that country-specific recommendations meet country-specific obstacles – independent of whether recommendations aim at increasing or reducing wages. Specifically, we observe that domestic actors suc…
Economic and fiscal policy coordination after the crisis: is the European Semester promoting more or less state intervention?
The European Union (EU) – and its Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in particular – is often criticized as a predominantly marketoriented project. We analyse to what extent such claims can be substantiated by focusing on one key aspect of the EU’s post-crisis framework for economic governance: the country-specific recom- 15 mendations (CSRs) that the EU has been issuing annually since 2011. Based on an original dataset, we analyse more than 1300 CSRs, which show that the EU does not push uniformly for less state intervention. Rather, the CSRs tend to suggest fiscal restraint and less protection for labour market insiders, while simultaneously 20 promoting measures that benefit vulnerable gr…