Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession
![handle is hein.journals/fora73 and id is 226 raw text is: Competitiveness:
A Dangerous Obsession
Paul Krugman
THE HYPOTHESIS IS WRONG
IN JUNE 1993, Jacques Delors made a special presentation to the
leaders of the nations of the European Community, meeting in
Copenhagen, on the growing problem of European unemployment.
Economists who study the European situation were curious to see
what Delors, president of the EC Commission, would say. Most of
them share more or less the same diagnosis of the European prob-
lem: the taxes and regulations imposed by Europe's elaborate welfare
states have made employers reluctant to create new jobs, while the
relatively generous level of unemployment benefits has made work-
ers unwilling to accept the kinds of low-wage jobs that help keep
unemployment comparatively low in the United States. The mone-
tary difficulties associated with preserving the European Monetary
System in the face of the costs of German reunification have rein-
forced this structural problem.
It is a persuasive diagnosis, but a politically explosive one, and every-
one wanted to see how Delors would handle it. Would he dare tell
European leaders that their efforts to pursue economic justice have pro-
duced unemployment as an unintended by-product? Would he admit
that the EMS could be sustained only at the cost of a recession and face
the implications of that admission for European monetary union?
PAUL KRUGMAN is Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology. His most recent book is Peddling Prosperity: Economic
Sense andNonsense in theAge ofDiminishedExpectations (W. W. Norton).
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Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession
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