Much of the discussion about how to impose more convergence among member states of the eurozone has focused on what national governments should do to avoid divergent developments in a number of macroeconomic variables, e.g. competitiveness or current account imbalances. Without denying that...

The analysis in this Commentary provides strong evidence showing that the burden of the adjustments to the imbalances in the eurozone between the surplus and the deficit countries is borne almost exclusively by the deficit countries in the periphery. And although the European Commission has now...

Several proposals have been made on how sovereign risk premia in the euro area should be brought down, namely i) permanent pooling of funding through joint bond issuance, ii) temporary liquidity assistance through multilateral funds, iii) debt buybacks using multilateral funds, and iv) debt...