Europe Lags Behind

Since many of the politicians want America to be more like Europe (including full government-run healthcare), it's worth contemplating what that would mean for the economy. America today is richer than Western Europe. Indeed, per-capita living standards are about 30 percent higher in the United States - and that's according to the statists at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (see page 6 of this report). And we have been growing faster, which presumably should not be the case according to convergence theory (see Annex Table No. 1 of this OECD database). It also seems that Europe's economy is more likely to endure a double-dip recession. Bloomberg reports:

Europe’s economy may be coming unstuck from the global recovery as governments to the south of the region struggle to reverse budget deficits and consumers in the north pull back spending. After the 16-nation euro economy almost stagnated in the fourth quarter, data this week showed the weakness reaching into 2010. ...“Europe is where we see the biggest risk of a double dip at the global level,” said Julian Callow, chief European economist at Barclays Capital in London. “Europe has been lagging and we’ve continued to see better numbers in Asia and now the U.S.” ...“There are tentative signs that the U.S. economy may be pulling ahead from Europe,” Nelson said in a Feb. 23 report... “The sovereign debt crisis in Europe’s periphery reinforces drags on euro-area growth,” said Michael Saunders, an economist at Citigroup in London.

Irwin Stelzer, meanwhile, writes in the Washington Examiner about the same topic:

Europeans are comparing their close-to-zero growth rate in the last quarter of 2009 with our almost-6 percent growth. ...We are growing and they are not. ...Large numbers of shops in London are shuttered, students see no prospect of work when they graduate, and businessmen are groaning under rising tax burdens.