ZSOLT DARVAS,  NICOLAS MOËS, (2018), “How large is the proposed decline in EU agricultural and cohesion spending?”, Bruegel, 4 May While the European Commission’s main communication and the various accompanying factsheets clearly compare the current and the next MFF for many spending items – like research, investments, digital transformation, migration and border management, security, defence, and neighbourhood and the world – no document presents a comparison of current and future …Read More

ECB/Euro area bank interest rate statistics: March 2018 • The composite cost-of-borrowing indicator for new loans to corporations remained broadly unchanged at 1.73% in March 2018. • The composite cost-of-borrowing indicator for new loans to households1 for house purchase remained unchanged at 1.84% in March 2018. • In the same month, the euro area composite interest rate for new deposits from corporations remained broadly unchanged at 0.10%, while the one …Read More

Antonio Calcara, (2018), “Assessing the impact of new European defence initiatives on transatlantic relations”, Europp, LSE, 7 May The next few months will be crucial for the development of the new Permanent Structured Cooperation on security and defence (PESCO). After the European Council’s agreement on the first seventeen collaborative projects to develop in this framework, member states will have to agree on a common set of rules to develop these …Read More

Howard Davies, (2018), “Can a European Capital Market Survive Brexit?”, Project Syndicate, 2 May Almost 60 years of European construction had still not created anything approaching a single market for investment, and in many EU countries capital markets remained weak and underdeveloped. The worthy aim, Hill wrote, was “to identify the barriers to the cross-border flow of investment,” and “work out how to overcome them step by step.” There are …Read More

Jin Cao, Valeriya Dinger, (2018), “Financial globalisation and bank lending: The limits of domestic monetary policy”, VoxEU, 3 May It has been widely accepted that banks’ credit supply to the real economy is affected by monetary policy. The well-established ‘bank lending channel’ of monetary policy states that, once monetary policy is tightened, banks face a higher funding cost in the domestic money market so they have to cut back their …Read More

ECB (2018), “Euro area financial integration improves in 2017”, May Financial integration in the euro area resumed last year, the European Central Bank’s (ECB) annual report on Financial Integration in Europe shows. The report was published today at a joint conference with the European Commission in Frankfurt. The resumption of financial integration after the volatile year 2016 was pronounced in prices but not in quantities (see chart). The price-based integration …Read More

Ramon Marimon, Thomas Cooley, (2018), “The EMU after the euro crisis: Insights from a new eBook – Findings and proposals from the Horizon 2020 ADEMU project”, VoxEU, 1 May The euro crisis has been a major stress test for the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Among other things, the crisis turned into a recession for all the euro area ‘stressed countries’ (except for Ireland). In fact, for the EA15 (excluding …Read More

Zsolt Darvas, (2018), “European income inequality begins to fall once again”, Bruegel, 30 April Income inequality among European Union citizens has previously shown strikingly different developments compared with income inequality among United States citizens. The economic collapse of post-communist countries after 1989 led to a rapid increase in income inequality among the combined group of citizens of the current 28 EU members until 1993. But from then on, inequality in …Read More

Dani Rodrik, (2018), “Globalisation: New Deal On Labour Mobility”, Social Europe, 26 April The crisis is the result of a lot of people not being particularly happy about the way that globalisation has gone. I think it’s rooted in the highly asymmetric effects that globalisation has had in societies around the world – particularly the advanced democracies, which have seen their underlying social contracts dissolved. This is the result not …Read More