After a deep economic recession during the winter of 2008/2009, which was triggered by a US-led financial crisis, many countries went through a stabilisation period and now seem to have entered a recovery phase. Global monetary and fiscal policies have prevented a worse outcome and lie at the...

The US economy is arguably following an unsustainable trajectory. The main indicators of this are a large current account deficit, a large federal budget deficit and trend-wise increasing costs of Social Security and Medicare. In this chapter, we will discuss these observations and to what...

There are many important dimensions of the, hopefully overcome, financial crisis that have appeared in the vast debate that it has originated: its unprecedented size at least in the post World War II period; the fact that, contrary to many other financial crises (but similar to the 1929 collapse)...

This chapter discusses the current economic situation and the future outlook for Europe stressing the cause and implications of a strong euro as well as the need for a common fiscal framework through an improvement of the Stability and Growth Pact.

This chapter is devoted to the widely debated topic of outsourcing of production and jobs from the Western EU member countries to the new member countries and also to the rest of the world. This trend is clearly visible in the manufacturing sector in the European Union. Outsourcing is mainly a...

Authors of the Report on the European Economy 2009