The pre-crisis paradigm focused exclusively on the positive role of finance. The new paradigm takes the other side of finance seriously and arrives at distinctly different trade-offs and regulatory approaches.

As the flow of financial aid from the industrial countries may be expected to shrink rapidly as a consequence of their economic difficulties, the developing countries will have to find out possibilities of using their own financial resources more effectively. In this connection the task of...

Demands for control of the expanding Euromarkets have been voiced for some time. On what grounds are they based? What form could this control take? These issues are discussed by Manfred Lahnstein. Further comments on these problems can be found in the following article by Wilfried Guth.

Digital technologies have the potential to modernise the economy. But digital innovations are disruptive. Therefore, policies need to be comprehensive and go beyond the support of the ICT sector as well as address a variety of issues: increasing returns to the use of data, heterogeneity of the...

The current sovereign debt crisis is widely believed to have been caused by insufficient budget discipline. However, the financial sector accounts reveal that public as well as private borrowing in the euro area was dwarfed by the synchronised explosion of assets and liabilities of financial...

In the last issue of Intereconomics, a first article by the present authors looked into the measures that central banks have taken in support of the financial sector in an effort to mitigate the effects of the financial crisis. This second article describes the measures taken by governments to...