When did the austerity era of European crisis management end? On the failure of National competitiveness boards

Abstract

The National Competitiveness Boards were supposed to become a central building block in European crisis management and enable European steering of wage developments. However, they failed and were institutionalized under the name ‘National Productivity Boards’ as largely non-binding advisory bodies. This article examines the policy-making process of the National Competitiveness Boards against the background of the EU’s current social and labor policy initiatives and argues from the perspective of a critical theory of European integration that the failure of the National Competitiveness Boards represented an important breaking point with the austerity policy continuity in the EU.