S9 Ep39: Europe in 2050

Recorded at the Paris School of Economics-CEPR Policy Forum 2026. Europe is under attack from the US, and under a different kind of attack from China.That is Olivier Blanchard's diagnosis. Blanchard (MIT, Paris School of Economics, Peterson Institute) is one of four economists leading Europe 2050, a new CEPR initiative asking where Europe wants to be in 25 years, and how it gets there. Blanchard's overriding principle: a vision without plumbing goes nowhere, and plumbing without vision is just reacting to the next tweet.Who can combine the vision and the plumbing, and produce ideas that we haven't seen before? Europe might be short of solutions to its current malaise, but it is not short of people with ideas: the project sent out 50 invitations for policy papers. Blanchard expected 30 replies. He got 48.The research behind this episode:Blanchard, Olivier, Pascal Lamy, Enrico Letta, and Beatrice Weder di Mauro. 2026. "Europe 2050: Geometries of Peace, Power, and Prosperity." VoxEU column, CEPR, 16 March 2026.The CEPR Europe 2050 initiative launched by Blanchard, Lamy, Letta and Weder di Mauro is generating a rolling series of commissioned policy papers and shorter open call submissions. The full set of contributions can be found at cepr.org/europe-2050-geometries-peace-power-and-prosperity.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Olivier Blanchard. 2026. "Europe in 2050." VoxTalks Economics (podcast). About the guestOlivier Blanchard is the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at MIT, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics, and Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He is a CEPR Distinguished Fellow. Blanchard's research spans macroeconomics, monetary and fiscal policy, and the economics of European integration; he was chief economist and director of research at the IMF from 2008 to 2015. Research cited in this episodeEurope 2050: Geometries of Peace, Power, and Prosperity is the CEPR initiative behind this episode, launched by Blanchard, Lamy, Letta and Weder di Mauro. It commissions longer policy papers and runs an open call for shorter pieces, five to fifteen pages, on what Europe should aspire to become by 2050. Blanchard describes it as a box of tools rather than a single blueprint, deliberately open to contributors who disagree on fundamentals, including whether Europe should become a federation.The Draghi report refers to Mario Draghi's 2024 report for the European Commission, The Future of European Competitiveness. It diagnosed Europe's weak productivity growth, fragmented capital markets and insufficient scale financing for innovative firms. Blanchard contrasts it with Europe 2050, which he says is not trying to produce a similarly prescriptive plan.The Letta report refers to Enrico Letta's 2024 report Much More Than a Market, commissioned by the European Council, which set out proposals for deepening the EU single market. Letta is one of the four leaders of Europe 2050."Getting to Denmark" is a concept popularised by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 2011 book The Origins of Political Order, describing the temptation to picture a distant, well governed destination without a plan for the institutional steps needed to reach it. Is this a risk for Europe 2050?Schengen is raised by Blanchard as a working example of a "coalition of the willing": a group of countries, not all of them EU members, that agreed to abolish border controls between themselves without waiting for unanimous agreement across the whole Union. He points to it as a template for how Europe might make progress on other issues where full consensus is unlikely.More VoxTalks Economics episodesThis episode was recorded at the Paris School of Economics-CEPR Policy Forum 2026, alongside a series of conversations with forum speakers.Europe in the Middle, the previous episode, features Pol Antràs and Beata Javorcik on how the US-China trade war is reshaping trade flows into Europe, and who wins and loses from it.Related reading on VoxEUEurope's challenge and opportunity: Building coalitions of the willing, a