Luigi Zingales: belief

Transcript context

…Frank Manheim, School of Government Policy and International Affairs right here. I wonder if you have taken a look or compared the environmental regulatory policies in Europe with those in the United States, which are in quite a bit of debate right now, and what your thoughts about the comparisons might be. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I haven’t looked at that. I think that your idea is extremely good to make the comparison, to see also which lobbies are winning the game. My bet is that the differences in regulation are driven entirely by who are the most influential groups across the board. I was talking to some farmer in Italy who was saying in regulation of how much . . . what it’s called. Not copper. You give on the vineyard to — they use a copper‑based stuff that you put on the vineyard to prevent some diseases. There is some regulation. There is only one exemption in Europe, and it is for the plant, now it escapes the name, that you make beer. Because the Germans wanted to make sure that you could produce enough of that to produce beer. Regulation, unfortunately, not just in the United States but also in Europe, is driven by the special interests. I think it would be a very nice comparison to do. My name is Alexander Skouras, from the Atlas Network. I’m from Greece, so that’s what I’m about to ask you about. Please don’t laugh. I know that you have been following what’s going on in Greece and in other European countries very closely. The question is very simple. Given the new agreement that the European Union signed with Greece, is there anything, under any conditions, you would see something good coming out of it? The second part, what Greece can do in order to get out of the crisis, if we forget about the debt negotiation, which we must assume that is going to take place some time soon?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.