Ditchley Park Oxfordshire 3-4 October 2014
Conference report: Is Europe’s economic stagnation inevitable or policy driven? The European Union is caught in a profound economic malaise. Demand is chronically weak and on current trends unlikely to return to 2007 levels until 2020. Is this just temporary – the aftermath of a deep financial crisis and institutional-building in the eurozone – or is something bigger going on? The conference explored the extent to which economic stagnation in Europe was a cyclical phenomenon or a structural problem. If it was structural, why had it happened and what could governments do about it? To what extent could the growth slowdown be explained by developments over which governments have limited control, such as demographics and changes in the structure of the global economy? And to what extent was it the result of policy failures – macroeconomic, financial or structural?