The financial crisis of 2007-2009 led to a renewed increase in government deficits and debts in many EU countries, causing a full-fledged fiscal crisis in Greece and severe fiscal pressures in other euro-area countries. This has prompted a series of proposals for improving the fiscal framework...

Contents: 1. Jürgen von Hagen, Jean Pisani-Ferry - Forum Economique Franco-Allemand /Deutsch-Französisches Wirtschaftspolitisches Forum .... 1 -- 2. Jürgen von Hagen - The First Year of EMU ... 3 -- 3. Dominique Guellec - Economic Growth in Europe: Entering a New Era? ... 17 -- 4. Jean-Louis...

A general feature of national fiscal systems is that they provide buffers against regional fluctuations in output and employment by redistributing income between the different regions of a country. Recent literature in connection with European monetary integration has stressed the insurance...

Against the commonly accepted view that in the run-up to EMU the Maastricht fiscal restraints were quite effective in re-aligning public finances in Member States that were showing large excessive deficits, Strauch and von Hagen stress that there are some objections concerning this initial sign...

The dispersion in current account balances among countries in the euro area has widened markedly over the past decade-and-a-half, and especially since 1999. We decompose current account positions for euro area countries into intra-euro-area balances and extra-euroarea balances and examine the...