The space is too short to list all the benefits and cost, let alone to quantify them them against each other. I agree especially with this being the right time, with the crisis behind, and European reform ahead, to have a serious reflexion and analysis of the benefits and costs of the euro today. We have data now, and understand better than 30 years ago what the more relevant issues. Expanding the euro by itself without thinking hard about the current flaws in the monetary union (noticeably, the lack of a safe European asset) might well make things worse in the future, even if overall the euro has had more benefits than costs on the past.
The economic argument for forcing an agent to join a group or a set of contracts typically has to do with extreme adverse selection and ex ante gains from pooling to all. I do not see these here.
Question 2: Do you agree that the different behaviour of UK real wages relative to Eurozone wages during the Great Recession is in large part due to the UK having different labour market policies?
I don't think it is a coincidence that unemployment is so much lower (and fell faster) in the UK than in most of continental Europe, and at the same time real wage growth has been so moderate. Moreover, there are very clear differences between UK and Eurozone labor policies.
It is difficult to answer the counterfactual "what if real wage growth was higher, then what would have employment been" because both are jointly determined and depend on other driving forces. Moreover, wage growth is definitely not a policy variable.
Question 2: Do you agree that quantitative well-being analysis should play an important role in guiding policy makers in determining macroeconomic policies?
This is a much higher bar than the previous question, since it suggest that quarter-to-quarter, or at least year-to-year, measures in happiness should guide the fine tuning of policies. (This is what I understood as macroeconomic policies, as opposed to long-run investments, which were covered in the previous question). For higher frequencies, I am not convinced that the signal-to-noise in the happiness measures is large enough to be a good indicator.
The CFM surveys informs the public about the views held by prominent economists based in Europe on important macroeconomic and public policy questions. Some surveys focus specifically on the UK economy (as the CFM is a UK research centre), but surveys can in principle focus on any macroeconomic question for any region. The surveys shed light on the extent to which there is agreement or disagreement among these experts. An important motivation for the survey is to give a more comprehensive overview of the beliefs held by economists and in particular to include the views of those economists whose opinions are not frequently heard in public debates.
Questions mainly focus on macroeconomic and public policy topics. Although there are some questions that focus specifically on the UK economy, the setup of the survey is much broader and considers questions related to other countries/regions and also considers questions not tied to a specific economy.
The surveys are done in collaboration with the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
Juncker's State of the Union Address
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Question 2: Do you agree that the euro has had more benefits than costs?
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Question 1; Do you agree that euro membership should be compulsory for all EU member states?
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Wages and economic recoveries
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Question 2: Do you agree that the different behaviour of UK real wages relative to Eurozone wages during the Great Recession is in large part due to the UK having different labour market policies?
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Question 1: Do you agree that lower real wage growth was beneficial for employment levels during the Great Recession?
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Happiness and well-being as objectives of macro policy
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Question 2: Do you agree that quantitative well-being analysis should play an important role in guiding policy makers in determining macroeconomic policies?
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