The leadership of the European Union took a step Tuesday toward building consensus solutions to deal with the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic in Europe, hoping to put to one side the divisive debate over whether or not to jointly issue mutually amortized “coronabond” debt instruments, as proposed last week by Spain, Italy and Portugal.
In a video-conference call Tuesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and other EU leaders discussed putting together an economic recovery stimulus package, modifying the EU budget in order to boost investments and alleviate short-term unemployment problems across the community.
Among measures reportedly being considered is a proposal for an EU-wide unemployment reinsurance fund of around 100 billion euros to support national mechanisms that subsidize temporary layoffs of workers by employers, such as Spain’s ERTE temporary unemployment filings.
? News Sources: la Vanguardia, El País and El Diario …
Last week, the conservative governments of Germany, the Netherlands and Austria blocked a joint and ambitious proposal made by Spain, Italy, Portugal and others to issue the so-called “coronabonds” that would collectively finance the debt taken on by individual countries to face the crisis of the pandemic.
Inside those northern EU countries, however, the position of the governments against the “coronabonds” scheme has by no mean universal support. Pressure from national Social Democrat and Green opposition parties is building to either support the collective euro-bonds proposal or come up with another jointly financed solution to alleviate EU-wide unemployment and economic dislocation caused by the pandemic. While some people are trying to make their own solutions to unemployment (such as working from home as Freelance Book Editors, for example), it is obvious that without widescale intervention many people will suffer.
Von der Leyen is reportedly pushing to make the modification of the EU budget the focus of the economic recovery plan, with the proposal to alleviate temporary unemployment in European countries forming part of package of measures the EU leadership hopes to put forward as an alternative to the “coronabonds” proposal.
? Click to read more news about Spain’s Coronavirus crisis …
Check out more news from Spain about:
? Animal Welfare ? Corruption/Transparency ? Discrimination ? Education ? Elections ? Environment & Sustainability ? Fair Trade & Development Aid ? Healthcare ? Historical Memory ? Housing & Homelessness ? Human Rights ? Labour & Unemployment ? LGBT+ ? Politics ? Poverty ? Refugees & Migration ? Technology & Social Enterprise ? War & Peace ? Women’s Rights
All images at ProgressiveSpain.com are the copyright of their respective authors/owners and are reproduced here for non-commercial, journalistic purposes in accordance with Fair Use doctrine. All other content is Copyright © 2015-2020 ProgressiveSpain.com and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.