Increasing use of life insurance instruments and company-sponsored funds in France suggests that French households may be inclined to a greater reliance on financial savings as a source of retirement income. This paper examines the challenges imposed by an aging population on the pay-as-you-go...

The household saving ratio in France has undergone very sharp changes over the past two decades, falling dramatically in the first part of the 1980s before rising in more recent years. This paper emphasizes two factors in the evolution of private saving in France. The first relates to...

This paper analyses the process of disintermediation, the progress in consolidation, the impact of new technologies, and the role of ownership and control structures for the euro area banking sector. The impact of these trends on competition policy, "too big to fail" concerns, and financial...

This paper examines monetary transmission in France using the vector autoregression methodology. Interest rates are decomposed into external and domestic components, and a nonrecursive contemporaneous structure is used to identify the system. Innovations in the external component are found to...

The social security system in Spain has steadily expanded since the late 1970s. Currently, social security expenditure exceeds 15 percent of GDP, being a factor of fiscal imbalance. This paper reviews achievements and the current situation of the social security system, discusses changes in the...

The existence of a well-specified and stable relationship between money and prices has long been perceived as a prerequisite for the use of monetary aggregates in the conduct of monetary policy. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about the stability of euro area money demand by...

This study identifies differences in the monetary policy transmission mechanism across the countries in the euro area. It is argued that part of the differences in the response of economic activity to monetary policy during the pre-EMU period, found in other studies, reflected differences in...

This paper presents the first set of generational accounts prepared for France, illustrating the impact on different generations of current policy settings. It was developed using age profiles of taxes and transfers drawn from a 1990 survey and recent demographic projections. The results...