ESRI Annual Geary Lecture: Fixing the Euro, Patches Won't Do

Venue: ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2

The ESRI's annual Geary Lecture will be held on Tuesday 24 January 2017 at 4pm at the ESRI. It will be delivered by Charles Wyplosz, Professor of Economics at The Graduate Institute, Geneva and Director at International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies.

Patches won’t do, fiscal federalism will

The EU is a spectacular achievement, which has raised standards of living across its member states. The current backlash, which is gathering strength in most member countries, is largely driven by dissatisfaction with a limited number of issues. The common underlying cause is that the EU wants to be neither a federation nor a collection of nation states. It works by assigning some tasks to the community level, others are left at the national level and yet others are shared responsibilities. The economic logic behind the existing allocation of tasks is not always apparent. Applying the principles of the theory of fiscal federalism suggests that an overhaul is needed. Some tasks ought to be centralized while others are decentralized.

Charles Wyplosz

Charles Wyplosz is Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva where he is Director of the International Centre for Money and Banking Studies. He currently serves as Policy Director of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). His main research areas include financial crises, European monetary integration, fiscal policy and regional monetary integration. He is the co-author of two leading textbooks and has published several books and many professional articles. He has served as consultant to many international organizations and governments and is a frequent contributor to public media. A French national, Charles Wyplosz holds a degree in Engineering from Ecole Centrale, Paris, and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.

ESRI Geary Lectures 

The Geary lecture is organised each year by the ESRI and honours Dr R. C. Geary (1896 –1983), the first Director of the Institute. Dr Geary is regarded as the most eminent Irish statistician of the twentieth century. Lectures have been given by some of the world’s foremost scholars in the fields of economics, statistics and sociology, including a number of Nobel Prize winners.