The onset of the financial crisis in 2008 has highlighted the problems of diverging external imbalances within Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the role of persistent losses in competitiveness. This paper starts by investigating some of the competitiveness factors which contributed to...

This paper – which takes into consideration overall experience with the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) as well as the improvements made to this measure of inflation since 2003 – finds that the HICP continues to fulfil the prerequisites for the index underlying the ECB’s...

This paper assesses how globalisation has shaped the economic environment in which the ECB operates and discusses whether this warrants adjustments to the monetary policy strategy. The paper first looks at how trade and financial integration have evolved since the last strategy review in 2003....

E-commerce has become more prevalent throughout Europe in the last decade. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic accelerated this trend, particularly in the retail sector. This paper focuses on the implications of increasing business-to-consumer e-commerce for prices and inflation in the euro...

In this paper we analyse the sensitivity of the macroeconomic outcomes under the Network for Greening the Financial System's (NGFS's) Phase III net-zero and delayed transition scenarios to different monetary and fiscal policy settings. In doing so, we provide a rare application of the NGFS...

After 2012, inflation has been unexpectedly low across much of the developed world and economists speak of a “missing inflation” puzzle, namely inflation was expected to be higher on the back of an ongoing recovery. This paper investigates the causes and consequences of low inflation in the...

From 2013 up to the launch of the ECB's strategy review in January 2020, inflation in the euro area was low and over-predicted. This low inflation during the years 2013-19 can be attributed to a combination of interconnected factors. Cyclical developments account for a substantial share of the...

E-commerce has become more prevalent throughout Europe in the last decade. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic accelerated this trend, particularly in the retail sector. This paper focuses on the implications of increasing business-to-consumer ecommerce for prices and inflation in the euro area....

This paper provides an extensive literature review and analyses some open issues in the measurement of inflation that can only be explored in depth using micro price data. It builds on the analysis done in the context of the ECB's strategy review, which pointed at directions for improvement of...

The studies summarised in this paper focus on the economic implications of euro area firms' participation in global value chains (GVCs). They show how, and to what extent, a large set of economic variables and inter-linkages have been affected by international production sharing. The core...