The new policy environment of EMU affects economic, political, and social cohesion in different ways: the policy mix and menu will be reconfigured; it will provide for more macroeconomic stability in cohesion countries; economic competition will intensify and change patterns of specialisation; and...

Structural vector autoregressions are used to analyse the relationship between real output and relative prices within the European Union (EU) and the United States. Relative price variability appears to be more important for adjustment within the EU than the United States, reflecting the lower...

The view is widespread that there are just two options for the future of the Eurozone – either it is complemented by a fiscal union, or it will fall apart. In this paper, we discuss five possible elements of a fiscal union, of which three are in the centre of the current debate on fiscal union...

It is widely argued that Europe's unified monetary policy calls for international coordination at the fiscal level. We survey the issues involved with such coordination of fiscal policy as a demand management tool and we use a simple model to investigate the circumstances under which...

Ever since its inception EMU has been subject to controversy. The fiscal policy rules embedded in the Treaty on European Union, and clarified in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), are probably the most contentious. The SGP is being accused of being too rigid and of forcing pro-cyclicality in...

The paper emphasizes the distinction between the purely fiscal reasons for fiscal policy coordination under EMU (given a credible low-inflation policy by the ECB), and the spillover effects of an uncoordinated fiscal policy on monetary policy. The worst scenario is where an independent ECB sets...

This paper studies the strategic interaction of Euroland's national macroeconomic players and the ECB council under two alternative assumptions on central bank behavior: (i) all members of the ECB council are concerned about Euroland's macroeconomic aggregates and (ii) the ECB council is...