Philippe Legrain

I debated the fiasco at the summit of EU leaders on 8-9 December on BBC Radio 4′s The World Tonight with Angela Knight, former Conservative minister and now lobbyist for the British Banking Association. Listen here

No. I won the debate against David Goodhart on The Economist’s website, by 51%-49%. Thank you to everyone who voted No.

I was interviewed on BBC World’s World News Today on 1 December 2010 about whether the EU’s border policy is working, whether Europe really can control its borders, and whether there might be a better approach to immigration instead.

I spent a fantastic weekend in Kilkenny, at Kilkenomics, Ireland’s first economics (and comedy) festival. Despite (and because of) the crisis, it was a sell-out. Congrats to Richard Cook and David McWilliams for putting on a superb event, hopefully the first of many. The Irish government now appears to be in talks with the EU [...]

Why the EU shouldn’t be spending nearly half its budget supporting agribusiness and landowners. Read my new e-brief for the Lisbon Council

1. No wonder France is deporting the Roma. How could a country of 60 million people possibly cope with 15,000 Roma migrants? Interesting article in the New York Times on how the Roma are testing the EU’s open borders policy. 2. Vince Cable says the UK government’s immigration cap is costing jobs and harming the [...]

Excellent piece by Peter Sutherland in today’s FT: An honourable tradition of the European Union is that of turning a crisis into an opportunity… The past three months have provided painful lessons to the leaders of the eurozone about the design flaws of the single European currency… Without the single currency, Europe would be an economic [...]

I debated the issue on BBC’s Hardtalk with Irwin Stelzer of the Hudson Institute and Italian politician Emma Bonino. Interview by Zeinab Badawi. Watch it on BBC iPlayer For those outside the UK who cannot access BBC iPlayer, watch it on YouTube. Part 2 Part 3

I debated the future of the euro with Josef Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit, on the Riz Khan show on Al Jazeera English on 20 May 2010.

“Fears grow about weaker euro” is the headline in today’s FT. But what’s to fear? For a start, the euro is hardly “weak”. It is back to where it was 18 months ago and is still much stronger than it was, for instance, in 2002, when it was worth less than 90 US cents. But [...]

Once-poor countries such as Greece and Ireland were long countries of emigration. Then came the long economic boom, and they became countries of immigration – spectacularly so in Ireland’s case. But now boom has turned to bust, and people are increasingly emigrating again, as a recent BBC documentary highlighted. As Emmet Oliver pointed out in [...]

Amid all the euro-phobes' schadenfreude about the euro-zone's travails, it is remarkable that the pound is plunging – not just against the US dollar, but also against the much-maligned euro.  If markets get panicky about the UK government's deficits, we may regret our not-so-splendid isolation from the euro-zone. 

By Tim Finch of IPPR. Excellent. Read it here.

Christopher Caldwell is an intelligent and educated man. His columns for the FT are often perceptive and original. But his views on immigration in Europe, presented in his new book, "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West", are paranoid and delusional. Caldwell's book is a cocktail of projected fears: Europe is [...]

Three, perhaps 4, boats laden with migrants people heading from Libya to Italy sink. As many as 300 people could be dead. Europe's border controls claim more lives. The official response? We need tougher controls.

After the Omnibus Appropriations Bill signed into law by President Obama scrapped a pilot programme that allowed a small number of Mexican trucking companies to carry cargoes north of the border – as NAFTA requires – Mexico has responded by slapping tariffs of up to 45% on 90 American agricultural and industrial imports. Renault is [...]

The Guardian, 4 February 2009. Free movement of labour makes economic and moral sense. Without it the EU would unravel

Free movement of labour makes economic and moral sense. Without it the EU would unravelRead my article in today's Guardian

The latest Transatlantic Trends survey of attitudes towards immigration in America and Europe finds that 47% of Europeans and 50% of Americans think immigration is more of a problem than an opportunity. But young Europeans (aged 18-34) are much more positive about immigration than older ones. In both the US and Europe, the better educated [...]