Inflation, corona crisis, climate change: the economic policy of the next federal government must face a number of challenges.

Nobel laureates in economics can provide food for thought on how the crises can be overcome without triggering the next one.

Four of them came to a panel discussion at Frankfurt's Goethe University on Tuesday.

Othmara glass

Volunteer

  • Follow I follow

The Corona crisis, said Michael Spence, is still easy to solve compared to climate change.

One must finally make vaccines available to the developing countries.

While booster vaccinations are already being administered in the EU, America or Canada, many people in poorer countries would not have even received the first dose.

The richer countries should "buy as much vaccine as possible" and then make it available to the global vaccination initiative COVAX.

"We have to get the pandemic under control, otherwise social cohesion threatens to disappear."

Support developing countries

Spence had received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2001 together with George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz for their work on the relationship between information and markets. Stiglitz was also in Frankfurt and asked the pharmaceutical manufacturers to suspend the patent rights to the corona vaccines. Germany in particular, insisting on patent protection for vaccines, is one of the biggest obstacles to a global vaccination campaign. He disagreed with the argument that developing countries had no means of producing vaccines. These possibilities can be created. Stiglitz called on the industrialized countries: "Pave the way for it!"

The former chief economist of the World Bank sees the creation of a uniform tax rate in the European Union as one of the most important tasks for the German government.

After all, you need tax revenue to combat social inequality.

And if the EU does not speak with one voice in negotiating a global minimum tax, it will not be able to raise it either.

EU as the center of the free market

Christopher Pissarides, who comes from Cyprus, also emphasized that the next phase of EU integration would be the alignment of taxes. He called the economic development of the Union a "great success". Brexit, on the other hand, is a "disaster" for the professor at the London School of Economics. He warned against burdening the sectors of the economy, which had been hit by the corona pandemic, with tax increases. Pissarides received the 2010 Nobel Prize for Economics. He examines the interaction between the labor market and macroeconomics and warned that labor markets must adapt to digitization. Germany is still too attached to its previous economic system.

The American Robert F. Engle III found words of praise for the EU.

The reactions to crises are more extensive and sustainable than in the USA, and there is a strong financial system.

The EU could replace America as the “center of the free market”.

The panel discussion was part of the “Nobel Perspectives Live” series, for which Bank UBS is organizing meetings with Nobel Prize winners around the world, but so far mainly in Southeast Asia.

It should be about the exchange between young and old.

All Nobel Prize winners represented in Frankfurt are older than 70 years.

In the audience, however, there were also many young economists who wanted to know: How can the economy become more sustainable?

How can it help with climate protection?

These are more of the questions to which the younger generation of economists in Frankfurt is still looking for answers.