Punteros a algunos de los artículos de análisis publicados últimamente sobre Europa, España y Grecia:

• Old Spanish practices (Economist 2010-01-07 Thu), sobre la presidencia Española:

Editorials across the EU have mocked the idea of Mr Zapatero advising Europe on economic recovery. (…) The European Union, a bunch of midsized powers with lots of ideas about how the world should run its affairs—notably over climate change and financial regulation—should ponder Spain’s lesson. If you want your advice to be heeded, you need something credible to say.

• The pain in Spain (Krugman 2010-01-19 Tue), sobre la pobre productividad del país:

So what can Spain do? It needs to become more competitive — but it can’t have a devaluation, because it’s a euro country. So the only alternative is wage cuts, which are desperately hard to achieve (and create big problems for debtors.)

• Fiscalizing Failure (Krugman 2010-02-02 Tue), argumenta que los problemas en España no son debidos a irresponsabilidad fiscal del gobierno:

If you read much of what’s being said these days by respectable people, you’d believe that deficits are always and everywhere the main source of economic problems. But, you know, that’s not really true. […] The biggest trouble spot isn’t Greece, it’s Spain — which was running budget surpluses just a few years ago. True, Spain is running big deficits now — but that’s because of its economic collapse. And underlying that collapse is the real problem with the euro: one-size-fits-all monetary policy, which offers no relief to countries that suffer adverse shocks.

• The Spanish Tragedy (Krugman 2010-02-05 Fri):

As Europe is roiled by sovereign debt fears, it’s important to realize that the crisis in the largest of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain) has nothing to do with fiscal irresponsibility. On the eve of the crisis, Spain was running a budget surplus; its debts, as you can see in the figure above, were low relative to GDP.

So what happened? Spain is an object lesson in the problems of having monetary union without fiscal and labor market integration. First, there was a huge boom in Spain, largely driven by a housing bubble — and financed by capital outflows from Germany. This boom pulled up Spanish wages. Then the bubble burst, leaving Spanish labor overpriced relative to Germany and France, and precipitating a surge in unemployment. It also led to large Spanish budget deficits, mainly because of collapsing revenue but also due to efforts to limit the rise in unemployment.

• Know your deficits (Krugman 2010-02-07 Sun):

Until the crisis hit, Spain to all appearances was highly responsible on the fiscal front — more so than Germany. The surge in deficits since then reflects the bursting real estate bubble and the lack, under the euro, of any way short of prolonged, grinding deflation for Spain to get its costs in line.

• Euro perspective (Krugman 2010-02-08 Mon), tamaño relativo de las economías de los países en problemas en la Unión Europea.

Spain’s story does not at all fit the story about sustained fiscal irresponsibility leading to inevitable crisis. The budget was in good shape until the crisis hit; the problem was rising costs in the face of huge capital inflows, and no easy way to adjust now given the common currency.

• Anatomy of a euromess (Krugman 2010-02-09 Tue) es un excelente resumen de cómo hemos llegado hasta aquí, explicado en castellano por un servidor:

So, whose fault is all this? Nobody’s, in one sense. In another sense, Europe’s policy elite bears the responsibility: it pushed hard for the single currency, brushing off warnings that exactly this sort of thing might happen (although, as I said, even euroskeptics never imagined it would be this bad).

Am I calling, then, for breakup of the euro. No: the costs of undoing the thing would be immense and hugely disruptive. I think Europe is now stuck with this creation, and needs to move as quickly as possible toward the kind of fiscal and labor market integration that would make it more workable.

• Greek troubles are more than fiscal (Krugman 2010-02-11 Thu):

Right now all the focus is on the budget, which is the action-forcing event. But Greece, like Spain, experienced a large real appreciation during the years of bubble finance — and now it faces a prolonged era of grinding deflation as it works its way back to competitive costs.