The recent revision (March 2005) of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has confirmed the 3% deficit/GDP ratio as the pillar of the excessive deficits procedure envisaged by the Maastricht Treaty for member countries of the EMU. Since the deficit/GDP ceiling is still in place, research on its...

Recent developments in macroeconomic policy, both in terms of theory and practice, have elevated monetary policy while fiscal policy has been downgraded. The latter is rarely mentioned in policy discussion, apart from arguing to place limits on budget deficits and fiscal variables. This paper...

We show analytically that the credibility problem which has affected the European Stability Pact originates from the insufficient distinction between two reasons for having binding fiscal constraints. The first reason deals with the governments’ tendency to neglect the effects of their fiscal...

This paper employs panel techniques to empirically examine the link between the competitiveness of the banking sector and real economic growth, using data from a sample of OECD economies during 1997-2010. We employ a dynamic GMM model to find that an increase in the efficiency of banks driven by...