The euro area is currently going through its worst period of recession and economic stagnation since the Great Depression and World War II. The article tries to give an impression of the extraordinary degree of fiscal austerity and the devastating economic effects it has already had and must be...

The implementation of a golden rule of public investment as a necessary institutional reform and an important step aimed at overcoming the constraints imposed by the new European Economic Governance are proposed. The rule is widely accepted in traditional public finance and can deliver both...

The euro crisis remains unresolved and the euro currency union incomplete and extraordinarily vulnerable. The euro regime's essential flaw and ultimate source of vulnerability is the decoupling of central bank and treasury institutions in the euro currency union. We propose a Euro Treasury...

The ongoing crisis in the eurozone, together with growing evidence of structural imbalances, points to a role for new institutions to support a more stable European Monetary Union (EMU) structure. As is well established in the context of monetary union when business cycles are not synchronized,...

We revisit the theoretical underpinnings of the monetary policy consensus before the Great Recession. We highlight how they resulted from New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that (i) neglected the actual process of coordination in markets, (ii) saw price rigidity...

This contribution assesses the functioning of Europe's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) during the first 20 years of the euro's existence. It argues that two formative intellectual currents converged at Maastricht to shape the design and reception of the euro regime: ordoliberalism and...

Happiness is increasingly named as a target of policy measures. Apart from the confusing fact that the attention-grabbing catchword 'happiness' refers to 'life satisfaction' in most cases, this approach appears preferable to alternatives as utility functions, magic polygons or to the opaque...

Based on the hypothesis that states that the underlying cause of the crisis in the euro area is a combination of exchange-rate misalignments with uncoordinated wage policies, we explore different exchange-rate arrangements that may help to reduce imbalances between surplus and deficit countries....

This paper's goal is to analyse economic development in Latvia using the concept of a macroeconomic policy regime (MPR). An MPR consists of foreign economic policy, industrial policy, the financial system, wage policy, monetary policy and fiscal policy. This paper, furthermore, aims to explore...

The international financial crisis of 2007/2008 and the 'Great Recession' that followed, along with the euro crisis, have highlighted a range of problems and difficulties that are related to some fundamental weaknesses of the euro. There are the well-known difficulties of macroeconomic policies...