European Failure - of knowledge management

I want to return to a theme which I have mentioned several times on the blog – the apparent absence in English-language texts (whether books, journals or blogs) of analysis of the many positive models of socio-economic practice which can be found in European countries such as France, Germany, Netherlands and Scandinavia. There are many academic texts on the history and politics of these countries – and many academic journals devoted to their literary or political aspects. But they are all academic in tone and style and highly specialised – although I seem to recollect from the 1990s a few academic journals which had more open content and style eg West European Politics; Journal of Democracy; Governance – an international journal of policy, administration and institutions; and Government and Opposition. However a quick look at the titles of their current issues suggests that they have, in the meantime, become very specialised and recondite.
Where, therefore, do you now turn if you want to learn on a regular basis (and in clear analytical text) either about success stories of, for example, organisational change or social policy in these countries or, even more interestingly, about how exactly that success was achieved ?

Few books are written about such matters written, at any rate, in a style calculated to appeal to the average activist or journalist. The book market caters for universities (a large niche market) - or for the general public. University course are specialised - so we get a lot of books and journals on public management reform - but almost nothing on comparative policy outputs (although a fair amount on the process of comparative policy-making - but very badly written). My fairly simple question and focus falls in the cracks and therefore gets no coverage. A good example of market-failure!
Eurozine is a rare website which does bring articles by thinkers of all European nations together in one place – sometimes under a thematic umbrella - and has received several honourable mentions on this blog. But the papers don’t deal with policy mechanics – but operate at a more rarified level of philosophical discourse.

Of course one of the roles played by many Think Tanks is to bring appropriate foreign experience to the notice of opinion-makers in their countries – but this is generally done in a partial and superficial way since most Think Tanks these days are associated with a political party and have an axe to grind. Experience is selected to fit an agenda – and the positive aspects are stressed.eg the one on Free Schools which came out in 2009. Those interested in the role of Think Tanks (and how they have become politicised) could usefully read the paper Scholars, Dollars and Policy Advice by James McGann (2004) the doyen of the field on the American side; Think Tanks in policy-making - do they matter ? from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (September 2011) which is a good and up-to-date European perspective; and Recycling Bins, Garbage Cans or Think Tanks ? Three Myths about policy analysis institutes by Diane Stone (2007) who is the European doyenne of the field.

Then there are, of course, the EC and OECD networks and exchanges which do go into depth on the whole range of concerns of governments – whether the policies and systems of health and education; systems of public management ; or « wicked » problems such as social exclusion. But the extensive results of their work are not easily available – OECD puts most of theirs behind a paywall and few of the EC network outputs are placed in the public domain.

It is here that the mainstream media fail us. Journalists can access the OECD material free-of-charge and specialist journalists equally would have no problems obtaining copies of the EC material.

If I am right about this gap (and I appeal to my readers to correct me), this is a devastating comment on the « European project ». Hundreds (if not thousands) of millions of euros have been spent on university and cultural exchanges, communications and research – and what is there which ca answer my basic need ??

The power of stories

In the past few weeks, I’ve been going through the 500 pages of text and pictures which the blogging of the past 2-3 years has produced – and asking myself where exactly I am (or should be) going with it. The daily process of thinking about a particular aspect of my life’s work of tinkering with government institutions is a useful discipline. Since an early age, I have had the habit of writing critical analyses of policy initiatives – in the naive belief that this was the route to improved performance (I had forgotten that this habit led to Socrates having to drink hemlock!). Many of my reflections about these various efforts – whether at community, municipal, regional or national levels - are available on my website 

And the daily copying of reading references – whether of journals or books – has also helped build up a useful virtual library. As, however, Umberto Eco has remarked – the beauty of a good library is that only a minority of the texts have actually been read!

The question with which I am now wrestling is whether to continue with this process – a bit like the 5- minute Thought of the Day programme which the BBC has been running for decades – or to take time out to read more closely the material in the library and try to write something more focussed and coherent. My blogposts reflect the gadfly which is (and has been) an important part of me – alighting for some time on a flower and then moving on to another.
It is, however, the process of going over my blogs which has made me realise how much value I place on the ideas embodied in books. Most people are sceptical about the power of ideas and assume that baser motives make the world go round. John Maynard Keynes opposed this vew with great elegance in 1935 when he wrote

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas

But we all need to make sense of the world. Some do so with their own, home-built view of the world which, all too often, is two-dimensional if not demented. Most of us, however, seek some external guidance – but there are so many voices today that we require mediators and popularisers to help us make sense of things - whether committed journalists like Will Hutton, Paul Mason and George Monbiot; essayists such as Malcolm Gladwell and serious analytical blogs such as Daniel Little’s Understanding Society. Matthew Taylor is one of the few bloggers who, like me, has straddled the worlds of theory and practice and continues, in his role as Director of the UK Royal Society of Arts to reflect on his reading. He had a good post recently on a seminar which featured Nassim Taleb -

The event was packed out and the chairman was at pains to emphasise the powerful influence of Taleb’s ideas on Government thinking. In essence Taleb’s argument – based on a fascinating, but occasionally somewhat opaque, mixture of philosophy, statistics and metaphors – is that big systems are much more prone to catastrophic failure (or in some cases sensational success) than small devolved ones. From bankers to planners to politicians, a combination of ignorance, complacency and self-interest leads to a systematic underestimation of the inherent risk of large complex systems.

The British Prime Minister is clearly looking for a fig-leaf with which to clothe his moral nakedness and finds Taleb’s arguments a useful cover. The RSA site actually has a video of David Cameron in conversation in 2009 with Taleb when he was Opposition Leader. Taleb has many useful insights to offer. He questions our reliance on the "narrative fallacy", the way past information is used to analyse the causes of events when so much history is actually "silent". It is the silence - the gap - the missing energy in the historical system, which produces the black swan. Imagine, says Taleb, the problem of turkeys:

Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests', as a politician will say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief

Those wanting to find out more about Taleb’s arguments will find a useful paper from him on the Edge site I mentioned yesterday
Matthew Taylor then asks a powerful question on his post about the logic and consistency of the Coalition Government’s use of Taleb’s thinking -

why is a democratically accountable and relatively weak organisation like a local education authority portrayed by ministers as the kind of overbearing power that needs to be broken up while Tesco (to take just one example) is left free to grow even more powerful and major Academy chains, massive welfare to work providers and various other large scale private sector providers are encouraged?

Good writing websites

Regular readers will have noticed that I have added a cloud element to the Labels (keywords) which identifies the frequency with which I have blogged on a given subject (while keeping the alpabetical listings). I have done this mainly to give the new reader a quick idea of what this blog is about. Hence, also, the sentence I have added below the masthead – to let people know that this blog does not « do » instant opinions on current events. This is part of the New Year stock-taking I spoke about yesterday. Two other new features are a "share it" facility – part of a new marketing urge I have - and a small poll which I added for a couple of days – one question only about the length of time readers stay on the site. Sadly it attracted no feedback - and I am therefore discouraged from further experimentation of this sort.

In the last few days I’ve stumbled on some great websites which connect to challenging articles on global dilemmas.
A good newspaper article reminded me about the edge website and annual question which I had forgotten about –

it sprang from the thought that to arrive at a satisfactory plateau of knowledge it was pure folly to go to Harvard University library and read six million books. Better to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world in a room, lock them in and have them ask one another the questions they'd been asking themselves. The expected result – in theory – was to be a synthesis of all thought. But it didn't work out that way. 100 most brilliant minds were identified and phoned. The result: 70 hung up on him! Brockman persisted with his idea, or at any rate with the notion that it might be possible to do something analogous using the internet. And so Edge.org was born as a kind of high-octane online salon with Brockman as its editor and host. He describes it as "a conversation. We look for people whose creative work has expanded our notion of who and what we are. We encourage work on the cutting edge of the culture and the investigation of ideas that have not been generally exposed."
As of now, the roll call of current and deceased members of the Edge salon runs to 660. They include many of the usual suspects (Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Kahneman, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Richard Thaler, to name just a few.)

It's a good idea - but the results, clearly depend on those asked and those who respond. My immediate feeling from a quick scan of the recent questions is that the replies are dominated by the psychologists, IT people and physicists  and are skewed by the strange, highly specialiosed worls they inhabit. Why not more social scientists and management theorists??

When I was googling for critical reviews of a couple of books, I came across a serious book review site - bookforum - which offers, every few days, a collection of interesting links for selected themes - for example on a subject which greatly exercised me 20 years ago - postcommunism. This in turn led me to a useful post on the subject at another interesting site - the Monkey Cage. I’ve added the bookforum site to my list of favourite links (which I've also checked for connections). The Browser is another excellent resource which collects articles on specific themes.
Another site - Logos - is probably just a bit too academic for me and my readers.

Taking Stock

A new year is a  good time for taking stock of one’s life and work  – so I’ve been looking at the 2011 posts on this blog which has become a new focus of work in the last 3 years (since I’ve eased off on my foreign assignments). How do they compare with my original intentions ? And are these, in fact, still useful – for me and/or my readers ? Underneath Labels and Quotes on the right hand side you will find what I originally wrote About the blog -

My generation believed that political activity could improve things - but that belief is now dead and cynicism threatens civilisation. This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).
I also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time nor inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.
A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge – but cultural and everyday passions.

On this last, I remember the disappointment when I went through my father’s papers after his death. He was a very well-read and travelled man who composed his weekly sermons with care; gave his time unstintingly to people with problems – and gave illustrated lectures throughout the country on his travels in the 1970s to off-beat places in countries such as Spain, Austria and Greece. Surely he would have left some diaries or comments behind to give a sense of his inner thoughts? But there was little beyond his jottings about some books (for some lectures he gave) and a diary about a camping holiday in the 1930s with his father. The same silence when I looked at the papers of a charismatic political colleague who was struck down in his prime.
I couldn’t hold a candle to these two men – but we are all distinctive in our way. I have been very lucky in the positions I have occupied, the places I’ve been, the people met, the range and number of books read – and, not least, gifted with a reasonable facility with and love for words and language. The least I could do was try to mix together these ingredients of experiences and insights and create a new stew which might be attractive even to those not normally inclined to eat stew?

So has the blog - with its 500 posts - so far realised its threefold intention – lessons from 40 years’ of public management interventions; sharing of the insights of others; life’s meaning and passions? Let me look at each.

Lessons from my own institutional endeavours

The early part of the blog covered the Scottish policy initiatives with which I was associated between 1970-90 such as social dialogue, open-policy-making and social inclusion – which were excerpted from a long paper available on my website.

More recently, the blog has focussed on my concerns about the technical assistance and institutional building work I have been involved with in transition countries in the past 20 years – which are captured in the paper I gave at last year’s Varna Conference of NISPAcee.

In the autumn, I had a string of 15 or so posts trying to make sense of the training work which has been the focus of recent assignment.

However my more ambitious venture to bring all of this together in one paper is not yet realised. A very early draft can be seen on my website. 

  

Sharing the insights of others

In the din of communications, many sane voices are drowned out. And there are also a range of linguistic, professional, academic, commercial and technical filters which get in the way of even the most conscientious efforts to seek truth(s). We have slowly realised how the google search engine has an element of “mirror image” in its search – giving us more of what it thinks we want rather than what is actually available. And the specialisation of university and professional education also cuts us off from valuable sources. I’ve been lucky – in having had both the (academic) position and (political) incentive for more than 15 years to read across intellectual disciplines in the pursuit of tools to help the various ventures in which I’ve been engaged. I belong to a generation and time which valued sharing of knowledge – rather than secreting or mystifying it which has become the trend in recent decades. And I am lucky again in now having gained acess to the technical facility which allows sharing (with a copy and paste) the website references of useful papers.

Most of the blogposts contain several such links – in a single year probably 1,000 links. That’s not bad!

Indeed I have realised that this feature of my writing makes it more convenient to have my papers in electronic rather than paper form.

Life’s passions

Clearly the blog has shared several of my passions – eg painting, places, reading and wine – and has given a good sense of the enjoyment from simple activities such as wandering.

Originally the Carpathian reference in the title was to location only – it did not promise any particular insights into this part of the world. But, in the past year, my musings have broadened to give some insights into life in this part of the world…

So?
So far, so good. But perhaps the blog objectives are no longer relevant? Or a blog no longer the appropriate format? The first two blog objectives are rather altruistic – a reasonable question might be what I get out of the effort involved in drafting a significant post. The answer is – more than might think! Writing is (or should be) a great discipline. The recent Nobel prize-winner, Herta Mueller, expressed this very well in an encounter she had a year or so ago in Bucharest - It is only when I start a sentence that I find out what it has to say. I realise as I go along. So I have to somehow make words help me and I have to keep searching until I think I have found something acceptable. Writing has its own logic and it imposes the logic of language on you. There is no more "day" and "night", "outside" and "inside". There is subject, verb, metaphor, a certain way of constructing a phrase so as to give it rhythm – these are the laws that are imposed on you. On the one hand, language is something which tortures me, doesn't give me peace, forces me to rack my brains until I can't do it any longer; and on the other hand, when I do this, it actually helps me. It is an inexplicable vicious circle.

A daily blog makes you focus more. I’ve made the point several times that the absence of newspapers cluttering the house and (for the most part) of television over the past 20 years has been a great boon for me. It has created the quiet and space for reflection. And the requirement to put a thought or two in writing on the blog makes me think more clearly.
A second benefit is archival – I can retrieve thoughts and references so easily. I just have to punch a key word into the search engine on the blog and I retrieve everything.
But there’s the rub! That you have to use the search engine – and be confident that you know the correct word to punch. I haven’t been using the “label” feature properly in my blogs. I’ve gone over some of them and then created a cloud label, as you will have noticed, which I find has interesting results.

I have perhaps reached the point of needing to put the more worthwhile blogs in a book format? I suspect that most readers are like me – and are more drawn to text which is personal rather than abstract.
But published autobiographies are, by definition, by famous people – and highly suspect for that very reason. Eric Hobsbawn’s was deeply disappointing. The various books published by Arthur Koestler were vastly more satisfying.

Biographies, although more objective, are also about famous people; focus on their achievements; and rarely, for me, give insights into the doubts, confusions and uncertainties ordinary people have.

I know, on the other hand, of only three highly personal life accounts from un-famous people – and they all made a big impact on me. First a fairly short series of snapshots of a political activist’s life . Then a deeply moving book written by a Scottish writer and poet in the weeks before he carried out his planned suicide. Finally a much longer (875 pages !) and more rigorous set of musings from an ex-academic 

And few books do proper justice to the aesthetics of publishing - whether font, format, spacing, diagrams, pictures and poems. There, then, is a possible project for the future?

One of the appropriate pieces BBC's Through the Night programmes offered me as I was writing this was Shostakovitch's chamber symphony 110

The East-West schism

Some strange scenes on television yesterday - believers singing and dancing in the river Tundzha, as they celebrate Epiphany day in the town of Kalofer, Bulgaria. Inspired by the music of a folk orchestra and by homemade plum brandy, they danced a slow “mazhko horo,” or men’s dance, stomping on the rocky riverbed. Led by the town’s mayor, a bass drummer and several bagpipers, the men danced for nearly an hour, up to their waists in the cold water, pushing away chunks of ice floating on the river.Traditionally, an Eastern Orthodox priest throws a cross in the river and it is believed that the one who retrieves it will be freed from evil spirits that might have troubled him. Across Bulgaria, young men also jumped into rivers and lakes to recover crucifixes cast by priests in an old ritual marking the feast of Epiphany and the baptism by John the Baptist of Jesus Christ when the latter was 30 years old.

The great It’s about Time painting blog gives us some historical and aesthetic background on how the schism between the Eastern and Western parts of Christianity have affected the celebrations at this time of year -

in Western Christianity, the arrival of the Magi at the site of Jesus' birth is called the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrated on January 6. The Orthodox Church commemorates the Adoration of the Magi on the Feast of the Nativity on December 25 – and January 6th apparently marks the baptism by John the Baptist of Christ when the latter was 30 years old.
Western paintings of the Journey and the Adoration of the Magi usually depict 3 Magi, represented as kings, travelling to find the newborn Jesus in a stable by following a star; laying before him gifts of gold, frankincense, & myrrh; & lingering to worship him. Christian iconography has considerably expanded the simple biblical account of the Magi given in Matthew (2:1-11). The early church used the story to emphasize the point that Jesus was recognized, from his earliest infancy, as king of the earth and therefore showed the Magi with eastern garb.

The Its about Time blog shows how the early renaissance versions showed the garb of the Magi with Eastern traces - which vanished in the later versions. An early example of people being whitewashed out of history.

From the summer, I've been referring to the disturbing events taking place in Hungary. They are well summarised in the EuroTribune website and in this Eurozine piece.
Eurozine is a network of European cultural magazines - sometimes a bit pretentious but always with a distinctive voice. The latest issue has a series of articles on the European crisis and also an article which promised to be an overdue critique of the role which EU Structural Funds have played in developing and sustaining the clientilism and corruption of souther europe but which, sadly deteriorated into a rather incoherent, if still interesting, perspective on modern Greece.

aesthetic pleasures

This blog is a celebration of good writing and living – and the town of Sofia (nestling in the Balkans) and the village of Sirnea (nestling in the Carpathians) take central place in that celebration. Each has its own incredible beauty – for the most part ignored and undervalued by those who live there but so much appreciated by nomads like me. In the last days of 2011, we had the pleasure of discovering yet more Old Masters’ paintings in The recently re-opened Bulgary gallery – associated with the Bulgary restaurant www.restaurant.bulgary.bg  - which has lovingly recreating the ambiance of old Bulgaria. Two of the paintings I had admired in the last Viktoria Gallery auction – Dmitrov Nikola’s 'River' (1955) and Olga Shishokova’s 'Coffee in Karlovo' (1940) were there (as well as most of the Trtitchovs) and were suitably negotiated into my collection.  The Shishkova heads todays’ post and Dmitrov’s below.   

Today’s wanderings unearthed a small, new gallery on Sulunska St with old masters such as Boris Mitov and Stanio Stomatev.

And also a glorious book celebrating, in poetic black and white pictures, the beauty which can be found adorning the older Sofia buildings – if only you look behind the peeling walls and high enough ! It’s called 'Sofia Enigma-Stigma' by Milchev and is available (in Bulgarian and English text) from http://www.enthusiast.bg/ for only 7 euros.

The loneliness of the long-distance runner

I have been, almost literally, struck dumb these last few weeks of 2011 as I have contemplated the intellectual and ethical poverty of our ruling clasess. One financial blog’s reflections on the year and what the future holds caught my mood perfectly

1. Wall Street dropped some of its pretence to fairness and softer forms of fraud and resorted to overt theft as MF Global stole significant sums of money, bonds, and bullion assets directly from customer accounts, under the eyes of the regulators, and transferred the money to its global bankers who refused to give it back.
Trend: Theft by the financiers will continue and intensify. The victims will be vilified to blunt public reaction.

2. The Eurozone came under unremitting assault by the ratings agencies and their associated banks and hedge funds. The Euro is an inherently 'difficult' currency to manage and has always been more susceptible to broad swings in value. This is because it is an economic union without a comprehensive political and financial union. It more closely resembles the original thirteen states of the US under the Articles of Confederation than it does a comprehensive Republic.
Trend: The Eurozone will continue to struggle to find a balance between political and financial factors, and will evolve into a stronger union of fewer members. Germany and France will continue to emerge as the great Western European power. The UK will be preoccupied by its own set of severe internal problems and regional unrest as austerity bites deeply. The UK will begin to act as more of an Anglo-American agent in the Eurozone. It may take on more of the character of an Orwellian state.

Some people might (and do very persuasively) argue that it is time for a new hegemony. It would be nice, certainly, for more respect to be shown to Scandinavian values. Even the heavy-handed Catholic church has managed to sustain its critical attitude to greed and, over the decades, seems to have pursued a much more positive attitude to community enterprise. The success of the Mondragon model of cooperative industrial activity is one which deserves much wider celebration – although it does worry me that I cannot find a proper treatment in the English language of the story of how this small venture by a catholic priest in the 1940s in a remote Spanish village led to such a commercial success (giving now employment to 30,000 and weathering, so far, all economic storms). There are, however, vidoes on its inspiring story here; here; here; and here. Think Ronnie Lessem’s Managing in four worlds. However strong my affections are for such models, my own feeling is that the better approach is that of the sceptic, agnostic or, indeed, anarchist – ie a “plague on all your houses”.

This is a time of year for thinking about one's life and making resolutions. A few years ago, I discovered a list of 40 tips for living a more balanced life. I've reduced it to 30 tips

A friend has noticed some of the references I've made in this blog to the benefits of rural life for us over-connected zombies - and sent me a recent Pico Iyer article on the joys of solitude

We have more and more ways to communicate but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And so rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

And a blogpost from an ex-banker has made the same point.

I've been trying to read over my blogposts of the past year (all 250 plus of them) - and feel that I have been too much of the gadfly. Skating lightly over profound issues. My feeling is that I should return in the posts to come to the issues they raise - read more closely the large number of links I've given - and offer rather deepr thoughts........

Reverse technology transfer

Brits of my generation are proud of the BBC and its reputation. The political and economic hits, however, it has taken from successive recent governments means that if now lags behind the quality programmes I can access here from French and German stations. TV5 is our default programme - with the MEZZO music programme not far behind. With some anticipation, we have been waiting for Jérusalem, la ville des deux paix to start - "un Voyage magique et hors du temps, des musiques soufies aux lamentations hébraïques". It has now got underway – under the direction of Jordi Savall with Armenian, Israaeli, Palestine and Morrocan players on such instruments as the kamancha, oud, schofar, santur, morisca and qanun. You can see and hear an excerpt here. I find such sharing of music from different religious cultures much more appropriate for this time of the year than the Christian stuff we are exposed to.

One of our leading development experts has posed an interesting question on his blog - what can development thinking and experience contribute to the solution of Europe’s present crises?

Reading about Greece or Italy or Spain or Ireland today reminds me strongly of reading about and working in African countries in the mid-1980s - similarly crippled by debt crises, and similarly subject to external monitoring and interference. Rigorous monetarist discipline not only stopped growth in its tracks, but also undermined human welfare and, in many cases, destroyed the social contract. Progressive economists in the 1980s coalesced around the idea of Adjustment With a Human Face - accepting the need for macro-economic stabilisation and structural reform, but also insisting on the need to protect the welfare of the poorest and the provision of basic social services. Arguably, the re-evaluation of structural adjustment underpinned both UNDP's work on human development, launched in the Human Development Report of 1990, and the World Bank's re-discovery of poverty, in the World Development Report of 1990. In turn, these contributed to poverty-focused debt relief initiatives in the 1990s, and to the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals.
I don't work on domestic European policy, but it does seem to me that there are some lessons here, at least some general principles. Structural adjustment is a necessary process but has a high human cost. Poor people need to be supported as consumers, but also as producers. A high level of participation is required, to underpin ownership and legitimacy. The international community has to cohere around high-level human development goals. And financing is key, including if appropriate in the form of debt relief. There is, it goes without saying, a great deal of international analysis of how to manage the fall-out from the 2008 financial crisis, making similar points. I've written about this elsewhere, originally for the Commonwealth Secretariat.
On financing, I can't resist making a point which is not exactly taken from development studies, but which draws on my very limited reading in the area of currency unions and fiscal transfers - namely that they don't often work unless there are substantial transfers between regions or jurisdictions, to manage asymmetric shocks, but also to redistribute between rich and poor regions. The German constitution, for example, guarantees equal standards of service provision between the various Lander - and allocates tax revenue accordingly. The euro-zone has no such ambition, or rule.
The OECD also has an interesting paper on fiscal equalisation, reviewing the experience of countries as varied as Australia, Canada and Germany. On average, these countries assign 2% of GNP to transfers, to manage asymmetric shocks and redistribute from rich to poor.
The GDP of the euro area is currently about 9 trn euros, so 2% would amount to about 180 bn euros. By contrast, current stuctural funds amount to about 30bn euros, some of which goes to the poorest regions in the poorest countries, but some of which goes to poor regions in richer countries. Further, structural funds support production, not consumption. Thus, the gap between what is needed and available is at least 150 bn euros per year.
Does it not follow that attempts to save the euro need to focus not just on the need for fiscal discipline and structural reform (= structural adjustment), but also on the essential role of large-scale transfers? An extra 150bn euros a year is not trivial in the context of an EU budget of some 140 bn euro, but that is only because the EU budget is so small in relation to EU GDP (capped at 1%) and to Government spending. Tax-payers in richer euro countries, please take note.

This is an interesting point - but the new member states have difficulty enough absorbing the Structural Funds they have been allocated - and the existence and scale of these funds (relative to those, for example, of the mainline Bulgarian and Romanian budgets) has arguably made an important contribution to the systemic corruption which is endemic in these countries' political and administrative elites. And the basic question is a useful reminder of the need for more European humility......

Finally, an interesting new website for me - the Bureau for Investigative Journalism which tries to resurrect that tradition from within a teaching institute.