The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area is a symptom of policy failures and deficiencies in – among other things – fiscal policy coordination. The first nine years of the euro were not used effectively in order to improve public finances, while the Stability and Growth Pact was watered...

This paper uses micro data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) to generate structural information for the euro area on the incidence of household indebtedness and the debt service burden. It breaks down incidence by characteristics such as income, age and...

This Occasional Paper examines how and why the institutional framework governing EMU has evolved since the creation of the euro. Building on theories of institutionalism, the paper in particular investigates to what extent functional spillovers from the single currency into other policy domains,...

This paper analyses the impact of the global financial crisis on euro area cross-border financial flows by comparing recent developments with the main pre-crisis trends. Two prominent features of the period of turmoil were (i) the sizeable deleveraging of external financial exposures by the...

This paper provides an assessment of the impact of the covered bond purchase programme (hereafter referred to as the CBPP) relative to its policy objectives. The analysis presented on the impact of the CBPP on both the primary and secondary bond markets indicates that the Programme has been an...

World trade contracted sharply in late 2008 and early 2009 following the deepening of the financial crisis in September 2008. This paper discusses the main mechanisms behind the global downturn in trade and its impact on euro area exports and competitiveness. It finds that the euro area was hit...

This paper describes in detail the methodology currently used by the European Central Bank (ECB) to determine the nominal and real effective exchange rate indices of the euro. Building on the work of Buldorini et al. (2002), it shows how the ECB's techniques for calculating effective exchange...

Shadow banking, as one of the main sources of financial stability concerns, is the subject of much international debate. In broad terms, shadow banking refers to activities related to credit intermediation and liquidity and maturity transformation that take place outside the regulated banking...

This paper explains the various concepts of government debt in the euro area with particular emphasis on its size and composition. In terms of size, the paper focuses on different definitions that are in use, in particular the concept of gross general government debt used in the surveillance of...

Between the start of the economic and financial crisis in 2008, and early 2010, almost four million jobs were lost in the euro area. Employment began to rise again in the first half of 2011, but declined once more at the end of that year and remains at around three million workers below the...