In a monetary union, macroeconomic policies are strongly associated with externalities that seem to imply the need for macroeconomic policy coordination. However, if coordination is not complete, partial coordination might be unable to cope with the negative externalities arising from a...

The recent economic literature shows a new interest in the links between politics and economics. In this paper, we join Hibbs’ partisanship theory with the literature of fiscal policies international co- ordination. Furthermore, by considering a monetary union context, we also open a new angle...

European countries have progressively integrated from the point of view of trade and investment and have a common currency now. However, labour market and fiscal institutions have largely retained their national status. The aim of this paper is to examine: a) the possibility for trade unions of...

The recession under way in the European Union and the threat of deflation have spawned increasing frequent calls for modification of the Stability and Growth Pact. The present article confirms the negative correlation of the rate of real output growth with that of increase in current public...

The Broad Economic Policy Guidelines contain the answers of the European Commission and the governments of the EU-member countries to the European growth and employment problems. These guidelines have been the major EU-economic policy concept for around ten years now. They can be seen as a...

Using panel data for a large number of countries, we find that economic contractions are not followed by offsetting fast recoveries. Trend output lost is not regained, on average. Wars, crises, and other negative shocks lead to absolute divergence and lower long-run growth, whereas we find...

This note looks ata the correlation of short-term business cycles in the euro area and the Eu accession countries. This issue is assessed with the help of vector autoregressive models. There are clear differences in the degree of correlation between acces-sion countries. For Hungary and...

This paper studies the transmission of common monetary shocks across European countries by using a dynamic factor model (Forni-Reichlin (1998)). This technique allows to extract the common European monetary shock and to compute country-specific responses. Our identification employs rotations of...

If, in international agreements, governments “link'' trade to environmental policy (or other issues with non-pecuniary externalities), will this promote more cooperation in both policies or will cooperation in one policy be strengthened at the expense of the other? We analyze this question in...