Visiting scholar Xavier Debrun, and Bruegel director Jean Pisani-Ferry contribute to the emerging discussion on reform strategies in the euro area. An earlier version of this note was presented to the Eurogroup Working Group of the Economic Policy Committee of the EU.

The cyclical situation at the beginning of the European Monetary Union (EMU) is favorable: The upswing in Euroland has firmed, unemployment is going down, and inflation is low. However, economic growth outside the new currency area has weakened significantly during 1998, and fears are mounting...

Post Keynesian theory as opposed to Walrasian theory does not provide the foundations for a unique general equilibrium but claims the existence of multiple equilibrium positions. In this article, such a multiple of equilibrium positions is explained by different market constellations which are...

Event studies represent an increasingly popular method to evaluate the welfare effects of economic policy decisions. The basic idea is that stock market reactions to the announcement of policy decisions contain superior information about the welfare effects of these decisions. This paper...

By responding to the warning voices about the failure of mainstream economics to provide policy advice to seemingly well-known problems as manifest in the ongoing economic crises, we put forward the proposition that the majority of deficiencies in this discipline results from two self-imposed...

In this study we examine the impact on Hungary of a possible correction of global imbalances. We distinguished four different channels of the global adjustment process, which are widely referred to in the literature (fiscal tightening in the U.S.; housing price correction in the US; an increase...

The Independence of Namibia came about in 1990 as the result of a negotiated decolonisation process. The controlled change implied a perpetuation of the existing socio-economic inequalities under the former liberation movement as the new government. The country’s constitution endorsed the...

In the last years, a number of contributions has argued that monetary - and, more generally, economic - policy is finally becoming more of a science. According to these authors, policy rules implemented by central banks are nowadays well supported by a theoretical framework (the New Neoclassical...

This article analyzes the determinants of market income distribution and governmental redistribution. The dependent variables are LIS data on market income inequality (measured by the Gini index) for households with a head aged 25 to 59 and the percent reduction in the Gini index by taxes and...

We quantitatively assess the macroeconomic effects of country-specific supply-side reforms in the euro area by simulating EAGLE, a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model. We consider reforms in the labor and services markets of Germany (or, alternatively, Portugal) and the rest of the...