Assessing The Sustainable Development Goals in the light of the COVID pandemic, Viveka Palm from Eurostat and Mayor of Braga Ricardo Rio told the Brussels Economic Forum that the EU should focus on UN targets as it seeks to rebuild economies.
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New Zealand and Europe can recover from the economic shocks of the Coronavirus pandemic together, New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern told the Brussels Economic Forum. “In New Zealand we have watched our friends and Europe deal with the situation with courage and compassion,” Ardern said. “My message is simple: we need to work together.”
Recovery from the COVID pandemic is not the only challenge facing the EU today, said Francesca Bria, President of the Italian National Innovation Fund. The extent to which citizens have switched to online activity since lockdowns began in 2020, for everything from work and school to food and medicine, gives an early glimpse of what a new, digital society could look like. Europe now has a chance to shape that new society with European values.
A debate on Strategic Autonomy vs Protectionism heard WTO Director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, discuss with European Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis the role of international trade in responding to the pandemic.
Can one judge a country’s success by the value of all goods and services it produces? The heated debate around this question was clearly demonstrated at a lively “Oxford-style” debate, in which two speakers argue opposite sides of a motion and attempt to win majority support from the audience.
The speed of change brought about by the COVID pandemic, as set out by European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, is unprecedented. “There are possibilities for our economy in 2022 which seemed at least a decade away in 2019,” Lagarde told the Brussels Economic Forum.
A green recovery can only go hand in hand with a fair recovery, panelists agreed at a debate on “A Green and Fair Recovery: When the Unprecedented Becomes the Precedent.”
“For one and a half years the Coronavirus pandemic has held the world in its grip,” German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Brussels Economic Forum. “We are facing unimaginable challenges.” Moving forward, we must now “not only make Europe more resilient to crises but also create more opportunities.”
"Europe’s economy is finally back on track," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the Brussels Economic Forum. "This is the result of the policy decisions we took since the very early days of the pandemic," the European Commission President said.
“There is now a good opportunity for the EU to become not only the queen of regulation but also strong in competitiveness,” Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said. “In the near future we could come to define this moment as the new economic paradigm.”
QREA Volume 20 N. 2 (2021) examines the macroeconomic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the euro area as a whole, as well cross-country macroeconomic divergences triggered by the pandemic.
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This paper presents a static model analysing COVID-19 lockdown measures in Member States in terms of their intensity and outcomes.
This paper looks at the issues with GDP as an indicator, why they have become more pressing recently, and how the EU and other countries are trying to address them.
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