The reform of euro area governance has been chosen by the heads of state and government in the EU as a topic for immediate discussion and swift decisions. The European Council in Spring 2010 asked president Van Rompuy to chair a task force on euro area governance. The task force is due to...

Europe's banking system has been in a state of systemic fragility since 2007-08. The current phase is marked by a sequence of interactions between sovereign problems and banking problems, resulting in gradual contagion to more countriesand more asset classes. The banking and sovereign crises are...

The July 2013 European Council recommendations to the euro area recognise a number of fiscal and macrostructural challenges, but do not fully exploit the options made possible by the European economic governance framework. There are particular problems with the Council's suggestions for the euro...

Senior Non-Resident Fellow Jürgen von Hagen offers his recommendations for the proper monetary policy to lead the eurozone out of the crisis. He argues that the tentative recovery in the euro area indicates that both monetary and fiscal policy can be normalised soon. However, because delaying...

Five years after the first tremors in Europe's banking system, what makes the crisis unique is the absence of a democratically accountable decision-making framework; there is an 'executive deficit' that compounds Europe's democratic deficit. The author argues that the only way to resolve the...

The European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) and the proposed prevention and correction of macroeconomic imbalances regulation (EIP) are designed to avoid imbalances. However, these instruments overlap, and need clarification. Both the ESRB and the Commission, which is given certain powers by the...

The long-term decline in gross public investment in European Union countries mirrors the trend in other advanced economies, but recent developments have been different: public investment has increased elsewhere, but in the EU it has declined and even collapsed in the most vulnerable countries,...

Achieving the European Union's climate goals and decoupling from Russian energy will require a massive increase in green public spending, which will be difficult when EU fiscal rules requiring fiscal consolidation are reinstated. The two major proposals to address the conflicting goals of fiscal...

For Europe, the war in Ukraine is a first-order economic shock. While the direct fiscal implications of taking care of refugees, increasing military spending and strengthening energy autonomy remain limited, the impact of elevated energy and food prices on national income and its distribution is...

Resident Fellow Zsolt Darvas takes a look at the issue of the Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - and the challenges facing those three countries in the aftermath of the financial crisis. He argues that because it is in the broader European interest to prevent a collapse in the...