IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eps/cepswp/10709.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Puerto Rico and Greece: A tale of two defaults in a monetary union

Author

Listed:
  • Gros, Daniel

Abstract

By the end of June, both Greece and Puerto Rico seem to have arrived at the end of the road. The governor of the Commonwealth has announced that the public debt needs to be restructured (although there are no legal provisions to do so). In Greece, the government is organising a referendum, calling on the people of Greece to reject the latest proposal of its official creditors (the Troika, composed of the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission) for a further adjustment programme. This coincidence illustrates that the difference between the two cases is not the underlying economic problems, but the political context: in Greece, both the liquidity provision to banks and the debt problems are politically charged because both are in the hands of official institutions. In Puerto Rico, by contrast, both of these issues are determined by the market. In Greece, the government and the Greek people feel that they have to battle �foreigners�, i.e. other political institutions. In Puerto Rico, the government (and the banks) has a problem with anonymous market forces and investors. This is why nobody argues that the �dollar� has failed when Puerto Rico fails, but many argue that the �euro� fails if Greece fails.

Suggested Citation

  • Gros, Daniel, 2015. "Puerto Rico and Greece: A tale of two defaults in a monetary union," CEPS Papers 10709, Centre for European Policy Studies.
  • Handle: RePEc:eps:cepswp:10709
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ceps.eu/system/files/HLB5_DG_PuertoRico_0.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Paul De Grauwe, 2014. "The Governance of a Fragile Eurozone," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Exchange Rates and Global Financial Policies, chapter 12, pages 297-320, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    2. Gros, Daniel & Alcidi, Cinzia, 2011. "Adjustment Difficulties and Debt Overhangs in the Eurozone Periphery," CEPS Papers 5525, Centre for European Policy Studies.
    3. Alida Castillo Freeman & Richard B. Freeman, 1991. "Minimum Wages in Puerto Rico: Textbook Case of a Wage Floor?," NBER Working Papers 3759, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Alcidi, Cinzia & Giovannini, Alessandro & Gros, Daniel, 2011. "History repeating itself: From the Argentine default to the Greek tragedy?," CEPS Papers 5836, Centre for European Policy Studies.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gros Daniel, 2018. "An Evolutionary Path Towards a European Monetary Fund," The Economists' Voice, De Gruyter, vol. 15(1), pages 1-15, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Eleonora Cutrini & Giorgio Galeazzi, 2017. "External Public Debt, Trade Linkages and Contagion During the Eurozone Crisis," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(9), pages 1718-1749, September.
    2. Collignon, Stefan & Esposito, Piero, 2021. "Macroeconomic imbalances in Europe: How to overcome the fallacy of unit labour costs," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 673-691.
    3. Roberto Tamborini, 2012. "Market opinions, fundamentals and the euro-sovereign debt crisis," Department of Economics Working Papers 1210, Department of Economics, University of Trento, Italia.
    4. Eleonora Cutrini and Giorgio Galeazzi, 2014. "Contagion in the Euro crisis: capital flows and trade linkages," Working Papers 44-2014, Macerata University, Department of Studies on Economic Development (DiSSE), revised Nov 2014.
    5. Roberto Tamborini & Matteo Tomaselli, 2020. "When does public debt impair economic growth? A literature review in search of a theory," DEM Working Papers 2020/7, Department of Economics and Management.
    6. Gros, Daniel, 2011. "External versus Domestic Debt in the Euro Crisis," CEPS Papers 5677, Centre for European Policy Studies.
    7. Oren M. Levin-Waldman, 1998. "Exploring the Politics of the Minimum Wage," Macroeconomics 9805010, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Cornand, Camille & Gandré, Pauline & Gimet, Céline, 2016. "Increase in home bias in the Eurozone debt crisis: The role of domestic shocks," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 445-469.
    9. Catherine Mathieu & Henri Sterdyniak, 2012. "Faut-il des règles de politique budgétaire ?," Revue de l'OFCE, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(7), pages 299-346.
    10. Christophe Blot & Jérôme Creel & Paul Hubert & Fabien Labondance, 2015. "The QE experience : Worth a try ?," Post-Print hal-03459951, HAL.
    11. Stavros E. Arvanitis & Theodoros V. Stamatopoulos & Dimitris Terzakis, 2018. "Is There a Non-linear Relationship of Market Value with Cash and Ownership?," SPOUDAI Journal of Economics and Business, SPOUDAI Journal of Economics and Business, University of Piraeus, vol. 68(1), pages 3-25, January-M.
    12. Derk Bienen, 2002. "Mindestlohnreformen in Südamerika – ökonomische Rechtfertigung und praktische Umsetzung," Ibero America Institute for Econ. Research (IAI) Discussion Papers 090, Ibero-America Institute for Economic Research.
    13. Marco Bassetto & Carlo Galli, 2019. "Is Inflation Default? The Role of Information in Debt Crises," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 109(10), pages 3556-3584, October.
    14. Hubert Gabrisch & Karsten Staehr, 2015. "The Euro Plus Pact: Competitiveness and External Capital Flows in the EU Countries," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(3), pages 558-576, May.
    15. Christian Schoder, 2014. "The fundamentals of sovereign debt sustainability: evidence from 15 OECD countries," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 41(2), pages 247-271, May.
    16. Catherine Mathieu & Henri Sterdyniak, 2014. "Redemption?," Revue de l'OFCE, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(1), pages 51-91.
    17. Anke Hassel, 2014. "Adjustments in the Eurozone: Varieties of Capitalism and the Crisis in Southern Europe," Europe in Question Discussion Paper Series of the London School of Economics (LEQs) 6, London School of Economics / European Institute.
    18. Christophe Blot & Jérôme Creel & Paul Hubert & Fabien Labondance, 2015. "Que peut-on attendre de l’assouplissement quantitatif de la BCE ?," Revue de l'OFCE, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(2), pages 265-290.
    19. Paul de Grauwe, 2013. "Design Failures in the Eurozone: Can they be fixed?," Europe in Question Discussion Paper Series of the London School of Economics (LEQs) 7, London School of Economics / European Institute.
    20. Schelkle, Waltraud, 2017. "Hamilton�s Paradox Revisited: Alternative lessons from US history," CEPS Papers 12963, Centre for European Policy Studies.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eps:cepswp:10709. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Margarita Minkova (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cepssbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.