The following paper addresses the ongoing debate on the questions of the composition and financing of the European Union's common budget. The authors argue in favour of a significant enlargement of the budget, together with a profound reform of its composition and financing.

Within the debate that involves the application of a tax discipline in the EMU, some authors have questioned the adequacy of the use of the same tax rules for all the different member states, appealing to a more temporary tax flexibility for the small and less developed countries. For such...

Within the debate that involves the application of a tax discipline in the EMU, some authors have questioned the adequacy of the use of the same tax rules for all the different member states, appealing to a more temporary tax flexibility for the small and less developed countries. For such...

More than fifty years after the Schuman Declaration, Europe is still far from a real Political Union. In fact, Europe faces an important imbalance between the two sides of the integration process, appearing as an important actor in the international economic scenario, but as a minor actor in the...

In this paper, we investigate the issues regarding the stabilization of public debt and its decrease down to 60 per cent of GDP for selected European Union countries using the primary balance derived from the public debt dynamic model as a leading indicator. We find that there is a high...

Economic globalization puts businesses and countries facing new opportunities and challenges and engenders a high degree of uncertainty/risk. Portugal, facing this new global environment, has been experiencing poor economic performance, growing in the last decade at a rate lower than the...

As the euro is on its second decade, the European sovereign debt crisis and the ever more evident disparities in competitiveness among member states are prompting many to question whether monetary union is bringing more benefits than costs. The optimum currency area (OCA) theory provides a...

The public finance constraints introduced by the Maastricht Treaty have been subject to numerous debates among economists. Balassone and Franco (2000) pointed out, for instance, that the fulfillment of these constraints allows for fiscal discipline and flexibility and excludes any bias from an...

Since the beginning of the European single currency project, the adoption of fiscal binding rules, restraining the use of the single policy instrument left for national authorities, has been challenged by many authors and politicians. The discussion has been rekindled in recent years, following...