Maurice Obstfeld, (2017), “Global Economic Upswing Creates a Window of Opportunity”, IMF Blog, 10 October The global recovery is continuing, and at a faster pace. The picture is very different from early last year, when the world economy faced faltering growth and financial market turbulence. We see an accelerating cyclical upswing boosting Europe, China, Japan, and the United States, as well as emerging Asia. Relevant Posts OECD, (2017), «OECD sees …Read More

OECD, (2017), “Education at a Glance 2017”, OECD Indicators, October Education at a Glance addresses the needs of a range of users, from governments seeking to learn policy lessons to academics requiring data for further analysis to the general public wanting to monitor how its country’s schools are progressing in producing world-class students. The publication examines the quality of learning outcomes, the policy levers and contextual factors that shape these …Read More

Gros, Daniel, (2017), “The Single Monetary Policy and Its Decentralised Implementation: An assessment”, CEPS Policy Insights No 2017/36, September The statutes of the European Central Bank (ECB) stipulate that it should have recourse to national central banks (NCBs) to carry out monetary policy operations. Such a structure would not be a problem if these operations were all identical across member states and if the resulting profits and losses were shared. But this is …Read More

Myachenkova, Yana, (2017), “Catalonia and the Spanish banking system“, Bruegel, 6 October As tensions rise around Catalonia’s independence movement, there are worries about the impact on the Spanish banking sector. Banks based in Catalonia account for around 14% of total assets. Some major institutions are already moving their headquarters to other parts of Spain. However, most Spanish banks have significant exposure to the Catalan market, and all could be caught …Read More

Roth, Alexander, Wolff, Guntram B., (2017), “What has driven the votes for Germany’s right-wing Alternative für Deutschland?”, Bruegel, 5 October Last Sunday’s federal election in Germany gave unprecedented strength to the right wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD is the third-largest party, with 12.6% of the votes and 94 of the 709 seats in the Bundestag (since the election, two members have left the AfD parliamentary group). Much …Read More

Darvas, Zsolt, Pichler, David, (2017), “Employment in Europe and the US: the EU’s remarkable strength”, Bruegel, 28 September The common narrative that the US labour market outperforms the EU is not as trustworthy as overall unemployment figures imply. There is a complex interaction between job creation, labour force participation and unemployment. Jobseekers leaving the labour market altogether was an important factor behind the reduction in US unemployment, while Europe’s job …Read More