Putting the high public debt ratios on a downward path after the surge during the pandemic and allocating sufficient resources to deliver on the green and digital transition will be among the priorities confronting the EU institutions emerging from the June 2024 European elections. After a long...

We briefly review the theoretical and empirical consequences of discretionary fiscal policy changes, after which we provide our own estimates for the EU countries. A fiscal expansion raises output and consumption and reduces the trade balance. Moreover, the stimulating effect of higher...

It is widely argued that Europe's unified monetary policy calls for the international coordination at the fiscal level. We survey the issues involved with such coordination of fiscal policy as a demand management tool and we use a simple model to investigate the circumstances under which...

While the EU recovery plan provides a useful step in alleviating the economic effects of the coronavirus crisis and achieving further European integration, a permanent fiscal stabilization capacity dealing with major crises is still missing. Such a EU-wide stabilization function would be in...

Based on a conjoint survey experiment we explore the support among European citizens for a European Union (EU) budgetary assistance instrument to combat adverse temporary or permanent economic shocks hitting Member States. Suitably designed, there is quite substantial support for such an EU...

In this paper we confront the role the EU traditionally plays in the domain of health with the urgent need for collective action triggered by the corona virus pandemic. In the face of such a crisis, we argue that the joint procurement, stockpiling and allocation of medical countermeasures is a...

Because they exert cross-border spillover effects, fiscal policies of individual EU member states are a common concern for the entire EU.