The output effects of 2009 fiscal expansions have been hotly debated. But the discussion of fiscal multipliers is even more relevant now that several European countries have had to quickly retract their stimulus measures in an effort to regain market confidence. Using regime-switching VARs we...

Germany and the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia (the CE4) have been in a process of deepening economic integration which has lead to the development of a dynamic supply chain within Europe — the Germany-Central European Supply Chain (GCESC). Model-based simulations suggest two...

This paper assesses how forecasting experts form their expectations about futuregovernment bond spreads. Using monthly survey forecasts for France, Italy and theUnited Kingdom between January 1993 and October 2014, we test whether respondentsconsider the expected evolution of the fiscal...

Equity and efficiency justifications are found for the Community`s Structural Funds which are discovered to be carefully targeted at depressed regions, albeit with some horizontal inequities. If Fund transfers displace national assistance, then they may be misallocated by being tied to regional...

The COVID-19 pandemic had posed a dramatic impact on labor markets across Europe. Forceful fiscal responses have prevented an otherwise sharper contraction. Many countries introduced or expanded job-retention schemes to preserve jobs and support households. This paper uses a microsimulation...

The EU Services Directive was adopted in 2006 to foster competition in services across Europe. However, progress in liberalizing services has fallen short of expectations due to the article 15 of the Directive, which allows countries to maintain pre-existing restrictions if judged necessary to...

We compute government spending multipliers for the Euro Area (EA) contingent on the interestgrowthdifferential, the so-called r-g. Whether the fiscal shock occurs when r-g is positive or negativematters for the size of the multiplier. Median estimates vary conditional on the specification, but...

European authorities introduced stringent lockdown measures in early 2020 to reduce the transmission of COVID-19. As the first wave of infection curves flattened and the outbreak appeared controlled, most countries started to reopen their economies albeit using diverse strategies. This paper...

This paper explains why EMU countries seem unable or unwilling to undertake structural reforms of public expenditure. One of the reasons is political. What public expenditure reforms might be pursued without changing the political system? Without political reforms, technical improvements made to...

This paper revisits the issue of cross-country spillovers from fiscal consolidations using an innovative empirical methodology. We find evidence in support of fiscal spillovers in 10 euro area countries. Fiscal consolidation in one country not only reduces domestic output (direct effect), but...