Andrea L. P. Pirro, (2018), “Understanding populism: What role do crises play in the growth of Euroscepticism?”, EUROPP, LSE, 6 June Three distinct crises have hit the European Union in the last decade: the Great Recession, the migration crisis, and Brexit. As Andrea L. P. Pirro explains, there has been a widespread assumption that populist parties with Eurosceptic profiles have been the main political beneficiaries from these crises. But there …Read More

Andrea Lorenzo Capussela, (2018), “Italy’s crisis and the question of democracy”, EUROPP, LSE, 4 June The crisis exploded on the highest of Rome’s hills, between the evening of Sunday 28 May and the following afternoon. The trigger was a sequence of three discrete choices. First, the president of the republic refused to appoint as finance minister the person chosen by the two political parties that prepared to take office, the …Read More

Silvia Merler, Oliver Blanchard & Jeromin Zettelmeyer, (2018), “How worried should we be about an Italian debt crisis?”, Bruegel, 28 May Earlier PIIE research examined whether rising interest rates might unleash a debt crisis in Italy. The answer was “no,” under two conditions: First, that rising interest rates reflected economic recovery; and second, that the Italian government would be prepared to cooperate with European authorities—the European Union, the European Stability …Read More

Jeffry Frieden, (2018), “A plan to save the euro”, VoxEU, 23 May Even in the most heavily affected debtor nations, support for monetary union never fell below 50% of the population, and was typically closer to 70%. However, Europeans have little faith in the willingness or ability of existing political leaders to manage it fairly and efficiently: debtor-country citizens’ confidence in the institutions of the EU dropped from over 70% …Read More

Xavier Debrun, Luc Eyraud, Andrew Hodge, Victor Lledo, Catherine Pattillo, (2018), “‘Second-generation’ fiscal rules: From stupid to too smart”, VoxEU, 22 May The ongoing debate on fiscal governance in the euro area – and by implication on the implied degree of fiscal discipline – reminds us that four decades after Kydland and Prescott (1977), the debate on ‘rules versus discretion’ still rages on. The basic problem is that policymakers’ ability …Read More

Luigi Guiso, Helios Herrera, Massimo Morelli, Tommaso Sonno, (2018), “The populism backlash: An economically driven backlash”, VoxEU, 18 May The surge of populism in Europe and the US has often put at the centre stage three ideological actors of society: the people, the elite, and the ‘other’ (foreigners, immigrants) to whom, in the populist narrative, the elite has sold the people out. Populist policies have often picked convenient scapegoats for …Read More

Isabel Schnabel, Nicolas Véron, (2018), “Completing Europe’s Banking Union means breaking the bank-sovereign vicious circle”, VoxEU, 16 May Several euro area leaders, including the German chancellor, her finance minister, and the French president, have recently referred to the need to “complete the Banking Union”. These public calls echo those made in more formal settings, in intergovernmental meetings (European Council 2014) and in European Commission communications (European Commission 2015) over the …Read More