What role can better quality of public finances play in supporting Europe's long-term economic growth prospects? This question was at the centre of the 2008 European Commission workshop on public finances. It was largely motivated by the pressures put on European economies and their budgets from...

This Country Focus shows that some simple reserve adequacy measures (particularly based on external debt indices) – although suffering from a number of drawbacks – seem to be sound indicators of the largest vulnerabilities within the CEE8 region. Nevertheless, the analysis of...