From the very beginning of the European Monetary Union the crucial institutions, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, led by mainstream economic thinking, were not up to their task of controlling the core of the system effectively. A huge gap in competitiveness among the member...

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...

In order to capture the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labour market, several aspects need to be taken into account. First, containment measures put in place in member states at different times and with different levels of severity determined the interruption of several economic...