Wickens, Mike, (2016), “Avoiding another Eurozone Crisis while avoiding the Five Presidents’ Report: Part I”, Voxeu, 7 Ιουνίου European Monetary Union was designed to promote economic growth, price stability, full employment, and political integration. It can be argued that so far, it has achieved none of these and has in fact made things worse.  The Five Presidents’ Report contained a set of proposals for making the single currency sustainable, based on …Read More

De Grauwe, Paul, Ji, Yuemei, (2016), “Synchronisation in business cycles: An endogenous explanation”, Voxeu, 7 Ιουνίου There is a high degree of correlation between the business cycles of different countries. This is particularly the case in the Eurozone, but also among industrialised countries outside of the Eurozone. Using a two-country behavioural macroeconomic model, this column shows that the main channel for the synchronisation of business cycles is the propagation of ‘animal …Read More

Alexander Bick, Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, David Lagakos, (2016), “How average hours worked varies with development: Cross-country evidence and implications”, Voxeu, 4 Ιουνίου The development accounting literature tries to account for cross-country output per worker differences by taking stock of inputs per worker. The data employed are often measured without great precision, however, making comparisons difficult. This column presents a new, internationally comparable dataset of average hours worked per adult across the world …Read More