Does Economic Crisis Promote Cooperation or Competition?

Hello everybody!

In this weeks’ presentation the topic is economic crisis, and one of the things we are going to talk about is if economic crisis promote cooperation or competition between countries.

It seems like countries tend to cooperate with each other in times of crisis, but none of these co-operations have lasted for a longer time. 

There are several examples of co-operations in the past, and the most recent one is called ‘European Financial Stability Facility’. This cooperation was invented in May 2009 during the Greek sovereign debt crisis and the aim was to promote financial stability in Europe.

We have two questions for you guys to think about before our presentation this week:

•   What do you think are the benefits with cooperation in times of crisis? 
• Why do you think there has not been a long-lasting cooperation between countries so far?

To prepare yourself you can have a look at this framework for international policy cooperation: 

http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/Research/International%20Economics/r0411_ipc.pdf

This will give you a greater knowledge about cooperation between countries in the past, and also why more cooperation would be a good way to, for instance, prepare for upcoming economic crisis.

You can also have a look at “United Nation Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development” from 2009 by this link: 

http://www.un.org/ga/econcrisissummit/statements/pga_opening_en.pdf

Hope we will see you all on Thursday!

Isabell and Rachel