Prosperity

For Marc De Vos, it is “game over” with the preparation of ageing in Belgium. Our social security is not sustainable. The budgetary situation needs fixing, but only policy reform can save us. We urgently need a broad societal consensus on a new socioeconomic model.

Marc De Vos stresses that the harmonisation of dismissal law for blue collar and white collar workers has to serve two priorities: equal rights and labour market circulation. We need to combine income security with tailor made re-employment.

It is important for us to learn from the failure of the Japanese experience in the 90s. A first lesson is certainly that the bank system has to be seriously cleared up. The Japanese financial institutions are associated with the notion of zombie banks.

Marc De Vos underscores the perverse effects of temporary unemployment and proposes to reform it into an insurance system that internalizes the costs and pays more attention to activation.

Being clear now that we need to make a second round of recapitalization around the world, the concept of bad bank reappears. This is an institution where junk credits from big Belgian banks can be put.