The idea of a golden rule has recently been relaunched in the framework of the debate on the European Green Deal.

Vigorous debate over the effectiveness of the fiscal adjustment programmes for the crisis-stricken countries in the eurozone has grown quite polarised. In this Forum, several experts use analytical, evidence-based approaches to gauge the effectiveness of these programmes. The role played by the...

The Swiss National Bank's January 2015 decision to abandon the Swiss franc's peg to the euro led to short-term chaos in exchange markets and had a dampening effect on the Swiss economy. Some economists suggested Switzerland was poised to enter a sustained period of stagnation à la Japan. The...

Europeans have a tendency to call the financial crisis a US problem, or a crisis precipitated by the Anglo-Saxon model. The data suggest otherwise. Moreover, the corporate sector in Europe has a much lower capacity to finance investment from internal sources of funds, which implies that a...

The cost of the financial crisis to the real economy has so far remained underexamined,probably because of the difficulty in making such an assessment. The crisis was precipitatedby an unsustainable bubble that artificially inflated economic fi ures, so what should be used as a benchmark for...

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been equal across economic sectors, age groups, education levels and employment status.

The classic argument for a euro area “fiscal capacity”, understood in this contribution as a centralised fiscal stabiliser, revolves around the need to dampen the effects of asymmetric shocks. According to those preaching this conventional wisdom, a common fiscal stabiliser designed along...

Most of Southern Europe is only gradually emerging from the devastating effects of the eurozone crisis, with unemployment receding only gradually and a country as big as Italy seemingly stuck in a growth rate below one per cent even as risk premia have fallen dramatically. But Europe is more...