Paul Krugman had a strange piece in the New York Times yesterday. He said that many of Europe’s problems came from the “…disastrous decision, a generation ago, to adopt a single currency. …. And while countries like Iceland that retained their own money were able to quickly regain competitiveness by devaluing their currencies, eurozone nations were forced into a protracted depression.”
There are a lot of things wrong with this kind of thinking, and Krugman is not the first to come up with it. Many US and UK economists think the euro is a bad idea. But to point to Iceland, without ever considering the very specialised nature of its economy and resource endowment, makes little sense. And to talk about exchange rates as the key to competitiveness, without ever mentioning taxation, or skills, or education, or regulation, or infrastructure, or science and technology policy, or telecommunications, or connectivity, or language, or legal systems, or any other factor, is very odd.