European Commission, Quarterly Report on the Euro Area, Vol. 14, No. 1(2015), DG for Economic and Financial Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 1, April 2015. Marco Buti: Editorial According to the European Commission’s latest winter forecast published in February, the economies of all euro area Member States are expected to grow again for the first time since 2007. The aggregate real GDP growth rate of the euro area was revised …Read More
Carnot, N. & Evans, P. (2015) “Income insurance: a theoretical exercise with empirical application for the euro area“, European Commission, Economic and Financial Affairs, European Economy – Economic Papers 546, March. This paper examines whether hypothetical macroeconomic insurance schemes of various kinds could improve the degree of cyclical income stabilisation in the euro area. We review the potential issues, the underlying trade-offs and the necessary conditions for such schemes …Read More
Steinbach, A. (2015) “The Mutualization of Sovereign Debt: Comparing the American Past and the European Present“. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Gender, Work And Organization, 07 April. This study identifies commonalities between two historical incidents of debt assumption – in the United States in 1791 and in present-day Europe. By comparing the interests and behaviour of key players in these two incidents, we find three major parallels: first, …Read More
Högenauer, A. L. & Neuhold, C. (2015) “Parliamentary administrations are an important pillar in the parliamentary scrutiny of EU affairs“, LSE EUROPP, 03 April. National parliaments were given new powers to scrutinise EU legislation in the Treaty of Lisbon. As Anna-Lena Högenauer and Christine Neuhold write, the intention was to bring EU issues closer to European citizens, however one largely overlooked feature is the role of parliamentary bureaucracies in …Read More
Richard Barwell, A Eurozone Without Greece – It’s time to think more seriously about this possibility, Wall Street Journal, 01 April 2015. The 24-hour news cycle is causing a cacophony of speculation about Greece leaving the euro, the so-called Grexit. Amid all the arguments about whether Greece will or should exit, there has been a lot less thought given to what would happen if Greece does return to the …Read More
Fernández, Α., Klein, W. M., Rebucci, A., Schindler, M. & Uribe, M. (2015) “Capital control measures: A new dataset“, VoxEU Organisation, 02 April. A renewed interest in capital controls following the Great Recession requires a serious empirical reconsideration of their effectiveness as policy instruments. This column introduces a new dataset that features unprecedented levels of disaggregation between asset categories, and distinguishes transactions between residents and non-residents. The ensuing debate …Read More
Abbassi, P., Bräuning, F., Fecht, F. & Peydró, J. S. (2015) “Eurozone interbank lending market during the Global and EZ crises“, VoxEU Organisation, 02 April. The Global Crisis and subsequent sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone severely distressed wholesale funding markets. This column argues that in the Eurozone, interbank funding conditions tightened particularly for cross-border borrowing. Moreover, during the worst moments of the crisis, the same borrower bank could …Read More
Dr Richard M. Ebeling (2015) “A World Without The Welfare State“, The Cobden Centre – Politics, 29 March. We live in an era in which few can even conceive of a world without the welfare state. Who would care for the old? How would people provide for their medical needs? What would happen to the disadvantaged and needy that fell upon hard times? In fact, there were free market …Read More
Mitchell, B. (2015) “ECB should start funding government infrastructure and cash handouts“, Bill Mitchell Blog, 30 March. I was a signatory to a letter published in the Financial Times on Thursday (March 26, 2015) – Better ways to boost eurozone economy and employment – which called for a major fiscal stimulus from the European Central Bank (given it is the only body in the Eurozone that can introduce such …Read More
Gaspar, V. (2015) “Fiscal Policy And Structural Reform“, iMFdirect, 27 March. One of the big questions to emerge from the global financial crisis, especially in the euro area, is how to raise a country’s potential growth while restoring healthy public finances. For example, the euro area— despite some favorable news recently — faces marked-down growth prospects alongside high levels of public debt. The combination of high debt and tepid …Read More
