The Euro: and its threat to Europe

In his new book The Euro: And its Threat to Europe, Nobel Prize-winning economist and bestselling author Joseph Stiglitz argues that saving Europe may mean abandoning the Euro.

Stiglitz dismantles the prevailing consensus around what ails Europe and dismisses the champions of austerity. Instead, Stiglitz will show that Europe’s stagnation and bleak outlook are a direct result of the fundamental flaws in the euro project – economic integration outpacing political integration with a structure that actively promotes divergence rather than convergence. Money relentlessly leaves the weaker member states and goes to the strong, with debt accumulating in a few ill-favoured countries.

The question now is: can the euro be saved?

Joseph Stiglitz (@JosephEStiglitz) was Chief Economist at the World Bank until January 2000. He is currently University Professor of the Columbia Business School and Chair of the Management Board and Director of Graduate Summer Programs, Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 and is the best-selling author of Globalization and Its Discontents, The Roaring Nineties, Making Globalization Work, Freefall, The Price of Inequality and The Great Divide, all published by Penguin.

Waltraud Schelkle is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the European Institute and has been at LSE since autumn 2001, teaching courses on the political economy of European integration at MSc and PhD level.

The LSE European Institute (@LSEEI) is celebrating its Twenty Fifth Anniversary in 2016. It is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe. In the most recent national Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector.