Abstract

Speaker Yiannis Kitromilides is Associate Member of the Cambridge Centre of Economic and Public Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. He has previously taught at the University of Greenwich, University of Westminster, University of Middlesex and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has published in refereed journals and contributed chapters in books in the areas of public sector economics, the political economy of public policy making, nationalization of banking, economics of austerity, the euro area crisis and the economics of climate change.

Talk Overview: Yiannis Kitromilides will discuss the contention that events in Greece in 2010 not only sparked off the crisis in the euro area but also created the widespread impression that the crisis was a fiscal crisis. Yiannis Kitromilides will argue that the crisis was primarily due to the faulty architecture of the monetary union in Europe and that without appropriate political foundations the single currency will not survive. An urgent debate is needed about the kind of political foundations that are necessary in order to salvage the ‘European project’ of a politically united Europe. However utopian the prospect of a politically united Europe may sound it is not any more utopian than the belief that the current monetary union can survive without further political integration.