Governments in Europe responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by expanding their welfare systems to protect health, jobs, and incomes. The varied initiatives embody the principle of solidarity and demonstrate how welfare programs serve as a form of collective insurance against risk. But the twin health and economic crises also exposed gaps in coverage for many, including migrants and gig economy workers. Fiscal austerity, enforced by the European Union, has long constrained efforts to close those gaps.

Hurricane Maria laid bare the painful reality that Puerto Rico is an inconsequential American territory inhabited by second-class US citizens.

[T]he financial crisis can be best understood as the final catastrophic stage of a process of dismantling the protective institutions that made Western European capitalism politically sustainable …

[S]hort-term policy changes can have long-term effects on the health and well-being of the population.

It is [the] two-track labor market, rather than austerity, that is the biggest threat to the persistence of the European social model.

[O]rdinary Greeks intuitively understood better than many outsiders that the country had little future cut off from Europe.

[T]he deeper problem is that European policy makers emphasize consensus over solidarity, pay more attention to principle than to interdependence, and weaken common institutions. …

There are dangerous sparks and embers of national, ethnic, and cultural conflict throughout the continent, capable of causing new conflicts and reanimating old ones, but they are mostly subdued by historical standards.

The failure of public institutions to rise to the occasion by preventing the economic crisis from mutating into social disaster has bred disillusionment with parliamentary democracy and brought the far right and extreme left into the political mainstream.

The EU is a powerful model for the rest of the world: Most neighboring countries wish to join it rather than balance it or resist it, and other regional groupings around the world seek to emulate it.

It almost seems as if the European economic model is continuously experiencing an existential crisis.

Italy may reluctantly accept being ‘saved by Europe’ once again. But…[if] the country turns back to populism, there will be dramatic consequences for the governance of the European economy.

The EU ought to…take a more pragmatic approach toward both the country's finances and the euro zone's economic future.

Why have the fiscal paths of the United Kingdom (radical budget cuts) and the United States (extended tax cuts) diverged so dramatically?

Global economic trends at the start of the new year suggest fundamentally diverging prospects for rich nations (not promising) and developing countries (considerably better).