Originally, in 1997, balanced budget or surplus was set as medium-term objective (MTO) for government budgets under the European Union Stability and Growth Pact, while in 2005 the MTOs were made country-specific. They were agreed for a transitional period only, until the criteria for taking into...

This paper seeks to review a selection of ten salient critical claims about Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) that were heard in the 1990s in either the Political Science literature or the Economics literature or both. In this paper, the author focuses on five salient Political Science claims...

After the fuzziness in Europe that surrounded the implementation of the excessive deficit procedure foreseen by the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), the European Union had to restore the credibility of the weakened fiscal rule. The constraint was to keep alive the Treaty of Amsterdam. Indeed, an...