Negotiations on the Economic Partnership Agreements between African, Caribbean and Pacific countries and the European Union have not been making much progress recently. How should the Partnership Agreements be structured to ensure a pro-development outcome and how could the negotiations gain...

Over the last twenty years, the process of European integration, and improvements in the processing and transmission of information, have meant that the European financial system has become less bank-based and more market-based. This trend has been reinforced by the transition to a single...

With the 2005 reform of the Stability and Growth Pact, a commitment was made to actively consolidate public finances in good times and to use unexpected extra revenues for deficit and debt reduction and not for additional expenditure. Against this background this study provides evidence of a lax...

This paper highlights that the EMU transition process itself can pose challenges to individual accession countries and draws policy implications for ERM II. Differences in financial market development and international liabilities underscore the risks and benefits of ERM II, and may lead to...

This paper contributes to the discussion on the European current account imbalances by analysing the intra-European trends since 1990 based on the theory of optimum currency areas. The authors show that German unification was the origin of not only the 1992-93 EMS crisis but also rising...

The extraordinary measures taken by the ECB to combat the financial crisis have led many observers to question whether the bank has put its independence at risk. The bank’s vow to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro has added a second (and potentially contradictory) goal alongside its...