The Covid-19 pandemic hitting the world in 2020 also caused a high death toll in Germany and in the European Monetary Union (EMU) at large. The health crisis worldwide and the precautions against Covid-19 rapidly induced a demand and supply recession simultaneously. The Covid-19 crisis was...

The Euro area is currently going through its worst period of recession and economic stagnation since the Great Depression and World War II. The article tries to give an impression of the extraordinary degree of fiscal austerity and the devastating economic effects it has already had and must be...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a major global health crisis, the onset of which, and containment policies for, have also led to a global economic crisis. The effects of the pandemic on the economies of various countries depended on their position in the international economic hierarchy, and...

The economy of the European Union has not recovered from the impact of the economic and financial crisis. Growth rates remain low and investment activity is weak. This questions current economic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union, known as austerity. In opposition to fiscal contraction...

The COVID-19 crisis is unique in many respects and, as the IMF (2021, p. 43) puts it: "a crisis like no other". A global economic contraction occurred that was unprecedented in its speed and depth. Support packages were put together in some parts of the world that also dwarfed anything seen up...

The differences between mainstream and 'heterodox' theories and policies have become increasingly blurred, and this dynamic has also affected heterodox analyses of development. Being trapped by the primacy of the statistics-based methodological imperative, much heterodox thinking on development...

In order to assess the existence of expansionary fiscal consolidations in Europe, panel data models for private consumption are estimated for the EU15 countries, using annual data over the period 1970–2005. Three alternative approaches to determine fiscal episodes are used, and the level of...

In this paper, we examine the macroeconomic effects of alternative fiscal consolidation policies in the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM), a two-country open-economy model of the euro area developed at the European Central Bank (cf. Coenen et al., 2007). We model fiscal consolidation as a permanent...

The financial crisis of 2008/2009 has left European economies with a sizeable public debt stock bringing back the question what factors help to reduce these fiscal imbalances. Using data for the period 1985-2009 this paper identifies factors determining major public debt reductions. On average,...

This paper studies the effects of fiscal consolidation on the debt-to-GDP ratio of 11 Euro area countries. Using a quarterly fiscal Panel VAR allows us to trace out the dynamics of the debt-to-GDP ratio following a fiscal shock and to disentangle the main channels through which fiscal...