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This article offers an overview of the eurozone's economic development since the beginning of the crisis, highlighting the underlying deficiencies in the architecture of the EMU that the crisis revealed. It examines the political response to the challenges that the crisis has brought to the fore, showing that this political response has been substantial and has contributed to attenuating the immediate negative effects of the crisis and to reconstructing a more sustainable framework for the EMU. It offers an overall picture of the challenges that remain and, lastly, presents possible political avenues to be taken in the near future with the goal of moving towards a strong authentic EMU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyse the role allotted to the social economy in the latest EU initiative to be proposed since the crisis. After the launch of Strategy 2020, and in view of the difficulties in meeting its aims due to the crisis, we focus on the start-up of the new architecture of governance in the EU. Based initially on fiscal discipline, it progressively adds social goals, supervising and influencing their achievement, while control of public expenditure and the different recommendations for coordinating social and economic policies constitute a framework that concerns the social economy. In relation to this, we pay attention to the different initiatives connected with promoting social values in the market as well as to those that assign a specific function to the social economy in the search for answers to the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]