This paper compares financial assistance programmes of four euro-area countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Cyprus) and three non-euro-area countries (Hungary, Latvia, and Romania) of the European Union in the aftermath of the 2007/08 global financial and economic crisis-which were supported...

The European Central Bank's Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme was a politically-pragmatic tool to diffuse the euro-area crisis. But it did not deal with the fundamental incompleteness of the European monetary union. As such, it blurred the boundary between monetary and fiscal...

Standard simple-sum monetary aggregates, like M3, sum up monetary assets that are imperfect substitutes and provide different transaction and investment services. Divisia monetary aggregates, originated from Barnett (1980), are derived from economic aggregation and index number theory and aim to...

We study the vulnerability of 130 banks directly supervised by the European Central Bank's Single Supervisory Mechanism. Illustrative stress tests using banks' balance sheet data reveal that significant stress prevails in the euro area's smaller and medium-sized banks, many of them located in...

To compensate for the inflexibility of fixed exchange rates, the euro area needs flexibility through a system of orderly debt restructuring. With virtually no room for macroeconomic manoeuvring since the crisis onset, fiscal austerity has been the main instrument for achieving reductions in...

The euro-area sovereign debt crisis is receding. Europe is on a recovery path, growth is broad-based and unemployment is falling. One after the other, countries hit hardest by the crisis are exiting their adjustment programmes. However, debt remains high in most countries and future debt crises...

Different jurisdictions have set out different reasons for creating central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Some countries, particularly those with already-operational CBDCs for retail purposes, aim to to promote financial inclusion. But in countries where most citizens have access to financial...

In the new European Union fiscal framework proposed by the European Commission in April 2023, medium-term fiscal adjustment requirements would be determined by country-by-country debt sustainability analysis (DSA), the 3 percent deficit ceiling and simple rules requiring minimum deficit and debt...

In the last five years, the European Union managed to find its way through a series of major shocks, including the pandemic and the 2022 surge in energy prices. The response was in many ways remarkable, including unprecedented EU borrowing to fund the NextGenerationEU economic recovery programme...