Thursday, June 27, 2013
5.59 (PC Hoofthuis)
Although Germany is expected to provide the largest net contribution to future “Euro-bond” funds shoring up Greece, Spain and other imperiled national economies, Angela Merkel has evinced the greatest resistance to this form of bail-out over the last three years. Back home she has often referred to die schwäbische Hausfrau as a model of fiscal responsibility whose historically stellar example was pushed aside in the bank-driven Finanzrausch of the last two decades, leading to debt crises across the continent. Although the EU adopted gender mainstreaming as a core operational principle in 1996, one finds very little evidence of its implementation when it comes to “money management,” either at the supranational or national levels. This paper will speculate on how the ongoing Euro-crisis might have been prevented, had leaders worked a lot harder to a) ensure “the balanced participation of women and men” in European Central Bank (ECB) decision-making, as well as in national bank boardrooms across the Union; and b) to follow the rules implicit in “gender budgeting,” both before the crisis began and in the pursuit of ever less effective “austerity” programs.
