The recovery and reconstruction of the European economy after the COVID-19 pandemic will be a huge, challenging task for the European Union, a task that will require hard decisions and difficult choices. To avoid disappointment and to escape a new lost decade (as happened after the 2008 financial crisis), it will be crucial not to fall into the trap of easy and misleading solutions and recipes, such as to think that with a small amount of new public money it will be possible, though “leverage” and “frontloading”, to mobilize a 2 trillion-euro plan to exit the crisis. To reconstruct the European economy, it will be necessary to raise between 7 and 10% of GDP in real money, an amount between 1 and 1.5 trillion euros. Only such an effort would be truly able to reactivate the European economy. We believe it is possible to do this without asking for any new contributions from Member States.
