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...

The German federal government's fiscal consolidation package, announced in June, is designed to permanently reduce the federal deficit to a new target level. This article uses a three-region version of the European Commission's QUEST model to gauge the impact of the package on Germany and the...

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...

This Forum aims to systematically describe and analyse the evolution of national financial systems within the EU over the past three decades. It analyses the processes of financialisation that have dominated this period as well as the causes and consequences of the financial crisis from the...