This Policy Contribution assesses whether European competition law could be applied more directly to state-owned enterprises that create an unlevel playing field in Europe because of the support they receive from their home governments. This issue has become a priority for many European Union...

Europeans like to believe the European Union has the collective economic size and capacity to determine its own economic destiny. But the behaviour of others global powers is increasingly calling this ability into question. China and the United States, especially, do not separate economic...

The academic literature on the effectiveness of the European Union’s cohesion policy is inconclusive: some studies find positive long-term impacts, others find positive but only short-term impacts, while others find no or even negative impacts. This range of results arises from major...

The European Union can look ahead at the next five years from a good economic position. Employment is comparatively high, the recovery has been uninterrupted for several years and income inequality remains less pronounced than elsewhere in the world. But the EU faces nevertheless formidable...

Crowdfunding markets around the world have experienced significant growth rates in recent years. With an aggregate amount of almost €50 billion raised worldwide between 2010 and 2017, crowdfunding has attracted increasing economic, political and regulatory attention on the international level....

The global trading system, a source of prosperity, is under attack on various fronts. The causes run deep and require a strategic response from the European Union and from the main trading nations. The future of the system hinges on the answer to three questions, and the scenarios associated...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) played a ground-breaking role in understanding the financial-sector dynamics of the euro-area crisis. It was the first public authority, and one of the first more generally, to acknowledge the role of the bank-sovereign vicious circle as the central driver...

European policymakers are struggling to identify economic policies that can create new jobs and return their economies to a stable growth path. The aim of this report is to examine how Europe can gain a competitive edge in new products and services with higher value added that can form the basis...

Brexit means that the United Kingdom could be able to run its own trade policy, which opens the door for the potential negotiation of a free trade agreement between the UK and China. Alicia Garcia-Herrero and Hianwei Xu show that a UK-China FTA will be neither easy nor clearly advantageous for...

Quantitative easing (QE) affects banks’ profitability in three main ways. First, as QE drives up bond prices, banks holding such bonds see their balance sheets strengthened. Second, QE reduces long-term yields and thereby reduces term spreads. With this, the lending-deposit ratio spread falls,...