The German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Washington organised an event on TTIP with the President of the German trade union confederation DGB, Reiner Hoffmann, and his US counterpart, Richard Trumka, the President of the AFL-CIO. The event was moderated by Shawn Donnan, the World Trade Editor of the Financial Times.

With TTIP controversies frequently in the news there is an urgent need to better understand the issues at hand. You can watch the full discussion below.

http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/04/reiner-hoffmann-and-richard-trumpka-on-ttip/

The focus of this year’s Benchmarking report is on the lessons learned – or not learned – from eight years of economic crisis and austerity policy. The findings point to policy failures and to the need to redefine alternatives in order to get Europe back on a sustainable growth path. The deterioration of the labour market and social situation in the EU, along with the appointment of a new Commission last autumn, have led to some renewed policy initiatives that seek to restore growth as a means of addressing the situation. The most notable of these initiatives is the Annual Growth Survey with its three pillars: the Investment Plan, fiscal responsibility and structural reforms.
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Unlocking the potential of Europe’s Young Entrepreneurs

The level of youth unemployment is alarmingly high in several EU Member States, with rates of over 50% recorded in Spain and Greece in 2013. In light of the potential of entrepreneurs to create employment and sustainable growth, promoting youth entrepreneurship and making Europe more entrepreneur‑friendly has recently become a priority on the EU policy agenda.

This report investigates successful initiatives that have been implemented in five countries in the following areas: fostering an entrepreneurial mindset and culture; removing perceived practical and logistical barriers; and providing information, advice, coaching and mentoring to young would‑be entrepreneurs.
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The Costs Of Greece's Fiscal Consolidation
This policy brief reexamines the effects of the Greek austerity experiment on its economy via a counterfactual analysis. Our results suggest that the period 2010-2014 was the wrong time to implement frontloaded spending cuts due to their strong multipliers in downturns. Implementing only the revenue components of the Greek fiscal consolidation would have strongly reduced the output contraction as compared to the actual path of GDP, but would have been much more effective at lowering the debt-to-GDP ratio than the actual fiscal consolidation.
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Risks and Opportunities for Consumer Welfare Arising from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)
The aim of this study is to analyse and evaluate the current state of the negotiations and the public debate on TTIP with regard to its consumer-policy implications. To this end the authors develop an evaluatory framework that enables us to measure the effects of the relevant instruments for removing non-tariff trade barriers on the individual dimensions of consumer welfare.