Special Issue: Challenges for Europe 2050: Selected papers of the EUROFRAME Conference 2015 and the WWWforEurope Project

[...]heterogeneity and imbalances across member states, as well as misperceptions about policy goals, are hindering successful reforms, resulting in low dynamics, high unemployment and a loss of leadership in sustainability. [...]Europe needs a new common vision of its position in the globalised world. In a comparative macroeconomic analysis the authors identify important political and economic characteristics which are able to explain the high degree of reform resistance observed in the Southern EU member states including e.g., low effectiveness in poverty reduction and high intertemporal discounting and uncertainty avoidance. Taking on a robust political economy perspective, the authors attribute to absence of positive long-run effects to the difculty of acquiring correct information about the benetting rms resulting in institutional problems for designing appropriate incentive mechanisms. [...]Thomas Leoni calls for a stronger anchoring of social investment strategies within the EU architecture and more coordinated actions and commitment from the member states in order to increase the effectiveness of social investment as policy paradigm.