Seán Ó Conláin and Caroline Whyte exchange some initial thoughts on the European Parliament’s recent conference, ‘Beyond Growth: Pathways Towards Sustainable Prosperity in the EU,” which they both attended from May 15-17. They considered it a seminal event and felt it was far too rich an experience to sum up in a half-hour podcast, and so they plan to discuss it further in future podcasts.

In this podcast they shared their overall impressions, placing the conference in the context of highly unbalanced world trade system that strongly favours the Global North, and of a potential and very worrying swing to the right in next year’s European elections. They also exchanged views on talks from the conference on economic models, the fiscal framework and the financial system, which were given in Plenaries 5 and 6 by Gael Giraud, Phillipa Sigl-Glöckner and Ann Pettifor.